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open and accessible

Aaron Cannon at NorthTemple shares an accessibility list he created in a post titled The Accessibility Checklist I Vowed I’d Never Write.

From Aaron:

When I wrote the below checklist, I attempted to answer the question, “What concise pieces of advice can I give to designers that will have the greatest impact on accessibility in the majority of cases?”

Other Checklists

• Principles of Accessible Design from the National Center on Disability and Access to Education
• Web accessibility: The basics from Trenton Moss at Webcredible
• Evaluating website accessibility part 2, Basic Checkpoints by Roger Johansson at 456 Berea Street

Continue reading “The Necessity of an Accessibility Checklist?” »

I just caught the last of Shawn Henry’s SXSW panel. Key takeway- there are white areas of things that are good to do for accessibility and black areas of things that are bad for accessibility- avoid worrying about the gray area in the middle. She mentioned the ability of web accessibility experts to endlessly debate the ins and outs of alt text. For example:

• Should alt text be used to paint a thousand words?
• Mini-FAQ about the alternate text of images
• Alt Text, Less Can be More
• “Alt Text” search on WebAIM Discussion List
• Search fo “alt text” on The Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group (WAI IG) mailing list

These discussions are helpful and essential for establishing best practices. However, these discussions are harmful to the extent that a developer becomes tied up arguing about “gray areas” instead of building accessible content.

Continue reading “Avoiding the Gray Areas” »

I’m headed to Austin tomorrow, here is a list of some of the presentations specifically on accessibility:

• Catching up with Accessibility: The Basics QuicklyShawn Henry.
• Accessible Rich Media by Sharron Rush, Susan Gerhart, Becky Gibson and Lisa Pappas
• Everything I Know About Accessibility I Learned From Star Wars by Derek Featherstone
• Cooking up Accessible Video for the Web by Pat Ramsey
• Core Conversation: How Accessible Should Your Site Be? by Jeff Beckham
• Targeting Your Web Site: Accessibility Litigation Update by Anitra Pavka and Michael Wasylik

In addition there are sessions on internationalization, web standards and the ongoing browser wars. Audio from each of the sessions will be recorded and at some point made available on the website.

Any sessions that I missed? I hope to see some of you there, you can get in touch with me here.

Continue reading “SXSW Accessibility Panels” »

Via Accesssites.org, a summary of a 21 page report on the accessibility of social networks from AbilityNet. The report analyzes Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo and Bebo and reports that they all stink. Of those 5 sites, Yahoo was the only was to receive a two-star rating- that’s two starts out of five. The other four all received one star indicating they are ‘very inaccessible’.

The Dataportability.org group has been in the news of late as a number of major social networks have become involved. While their stated mission is not to make social networks accessible for users with disabilities, the goal that they are working towards should have that overall effect over time. They are working to promote the use of existing open standards to facilitate the sharing of social network user content outside of that network. Over time this will open the door to the creation of more accessible interfaces to access at least some of the data that is currently available only through proprietary, inaccessible systems.

Hopefully, the process of making user content more readily available will also lead to improvements in accessibility along the way. In the meantime, are users with disabilities being left out of the social networking revolution? Is anyone doing this right?

Continue reading “Social Networking Accessibility” »

I have mentioned a symbol-based browser before, but here is a list of three different accessible browsers:

Free Accessible Web Browsers for Learners with Multiple Disabilities

Continue reading “Accessible Web Browsers” »

I first heard of Livescribe from an announcement of their upcoming ’smartpen’ and noted that a former professor, Andy Van Schaack, PhD was involved in the project. A few weeks ago, I was able to attend a presentation from Dr. Van Schaack and learned a little more about the project. I was especially interested in the note on the presentation flyer that said he would “present his current NSF-funded study on the use of the smartpen to support blind college students in science, engineering and math.”

He started off with promotional information about how the Livescribe system is a new computing platform with a great team behind it. By all accounts it appears to be a laudable effort in the arena of comparable smart pen technologies. It works by recording audio while using the pen on special paper. You can then go back to any point in your notes, tap on the page and listen to the corresponding audio. Your notes also become searchable and shareable.

Then he addressed how the project would help make content accessible for students who are blind. Currently, a student who is blind studying in a field that requires the use of graphs or diagrams would need a technology toolkit such as a laptop paired with a not inexpensive tactile talking tablet. The price point lowers significantly as students are able to use the Livescribe pen with the more affordable Sewell raised-line drawing kit. This combination of technology allows the students to draw and annotate a graph with the ability to reference the graphic later and access whatever audio was recorded at the time.

Additional Resources

• Livescribe site
• Smartpen aids blind engineering students
• New Smartpen and Paper to Help Teach Blind College Students
• NSF Grant Information- Award Abstract #0726403 and Award Abstract #0726424
• LiveScribe Smartpen Demo With Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher
• Additional Tactile Graphics Resources
• NCDAE Webcast on Electronic Accessibility in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

(Update) Andy sent me a couple of additional links to share:

• Article on the smartpen from Vanderbilt’s Online Research Magazine
• Vanderbilt Press Release

Continue reading “Accessible Pen and Paper?” »

Hopefully, anyone subscribed to this blog also follows 456 Berea Street. If not, you missed a great post from Roger Johansson titled Overdoing Accessibility. Go read the article and then subscribe to his feed.

Mike Cherim tackled the same subject awhile back on Avoiding Extreme Accessibility.

Bim Egan ran a whole series of articles titled Too much accessibility - TITLE attributes.

The two attributes that were on all three lists were tabindex and accesskeys. The lesson? Take the time to understand your users, then evaluate the work that you are doing to make sure it is actually helping those you are trying to help.

Continue reading “Too Much Accessibility” »

Day 13 of 24 Ways brings us CSS for Accessibility by Ann McMeekin. Ann discusses the proper use of line-height for users with dyslexia and how to use the :focus pseudo class to let keyboard users (even those using Internet Explorer) know when they are focused on a link.

Continue reading “CSS for Accessibility by Ann McMeekin” »

I recently presented on disability awareness in building accessible websites to a group of interaction designers. At the end, I was asked about examples of a specific person with a disabilities as well as design considerations for that person. This is what I found:

Personas of Persons with Disabilities and Recommended Design Considerations

• Fluid, a user experience project for open source projects, created the persona of Sara Windsor, a faculty member who is blind and outlines some considerations in designing an accessible user experience for her.
• Living with Disabilities, profiles for a blind person, low vision, hearing impaired, motor control impaired, and cognitively challenged, with design considerations for each- from the University of Michigan.

Personas of Persons with Disabilities

• Two personas- Roger Retiree and Kim, College-Student
• Examples for Personas from a Web Accessibility Project (PDF) , featuring Tracy Young representing young people with visual impairments and Gerald Oldman representing old people with disabilities.
• Disabled Personas from JA-SIG including Brent Blindman, Melissa Motorimpaired and Clark Colorblind.
• Unified Modeling Language Actors: “Personas with Disabilities”, I’m not sure what the title means, but this article contains a list of personas and a description of how they were created.
• The WAI has a draft of the personas that they used in their redesign, including a person with a disability

Regardless of whether or not you use personas, the examples are helpful to go through to better understand accessibility from a different perspective, even though that perspective is that of a make believe person.

If the personas aren’t doing it for you, take a gander at some of these videos and experiences to get a better feel for how persons with disabilities access the web:

• AssistiveWare videos on computer accessibility, don’t miss the user profiles of the people in the videos (via Roger Johansson).
• WebAIM Disability Simulations
• Screen reader and screen magnification videos

Additional Resources

• Including Accessibility Considerations in Personas
• Usability: more than skin deep from Lisa Herrod (audio available here)
• How many users with disabilities should you include when conducting a usability test for accessibility?
• Personas on Wikipedia
• From Where I Sit” Video Series, eight students from the California State University discuss their experiences in the college classroom as students with disabilities (via Do-IT Videos page)

Continue reading “Personas of Persons with Disabilities” »

Guideline 1.3 Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example spoken aloud, simpler layout, etc.) without losing information or structure

Draft Guideline 1.3 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 discusses the importance of making information available in a form that can be perceived by the user- either directly or through an assistive technology. For example, if a site uses an image to convey meaning, then the alt text should be present so that it can be seen (in a text-only environment), heard (by a screen reader) or even felt (through a refreshable braille display). This pertains to both presentation and structure.

The technologies mentioned above- text-only browsers, screen readers and electronic braille- all do a good job at presenting information to the appropriate audience. However, what about users with cognitive disabilities? Text read aloud may be helpful in some situations, but what about a graphical representation of content? There are already some efforts in this area with the Communicate: Webwide symbol supported browser that claims to be able to represent over 29,000 words with symbols and while I applaud their efforts, with a Windows-only, proprietary, subscription-based product, I doubt there will be any widespread adoption in the near future.

Perhaps one day there will be an open system that will facilitate the collection and use of symbols in everyday tools. Until then, here are some other project/ideas that are exploring the use of symbols:

• Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary
  Over 6,000 images organized hierarchically under 15 major themes
  
• Zlango Over 200 icons divided into 8 major categories developed for use on mobile devices. Read Romeo and Juliet in Zlango speak.
  
• sosymbol There isn’t a lot of information on this site, but they do have a collection of standardized icons and you can contribute your own using their online symbol creator after you have logged in.
  
• Iconfinder Icon search engine
• Symbol Signs from the AIGA 50 freely available passenger/pedestrian symbols.
• Symbols.com Simple symbols for a number of words.

Continue reading “Icons, Symbols and Cognitive Disabilities” »