Accessibility Fail, Fail, Fail, Fail and a Win

After see­ing a num­ber of acces­si­bil­ity fails posted on the Fail Blog:

It was great to see this one on their com­pan­ion blog, Epic Win:

Open Education and Accessibility

The Open Edu­ca­tion Con­fer­ence is hap­pen­ing right now in Van­cou­ver, but is also offer­ing a num­ber of ways to par­tic­i­pate remotely, includ­ing live and archived streams of the event, or sim­ply fol­low the tag opened09 just about any­where (Twit­ter opened09, Flickr opened09, Deli­cious opened09, Blogsearch opened09, etc…)

The theme of this year’s con­fer­ence is “Cross­ing the Chasm” and while I was dis­ap­pointed that there weren’t more ses­sions address­ing dis­abil­ity acces­si­bil­ity directly, there is a tremen­dous amount of value in almost every ses­sion I have watched to any­one inter­ested in any kind of acces­si­bil­ity. Through the con­fer­ence web­site I was able to find a cou­ple of good resources on the acces­si­bil­ity of open edu­ca­tional resources for peo­ple with disabilities:

• Open Source Acces­si­bil­ity Meet­ing (Check out the draft doc­u­ments and presentations)
• The Open Course­ware Con­sor­tium Acces­si­bil­ity Work­ing Group

One of the resources I learned about today is folk­se­man­tic, a ser­vice and set of tools to help iden­tify open edu­ca­tional resources. A quick search for acces­si­bil­ity resources yielded the fol­low­ing share­able learn­ing resources:

• Acces­si­bil­ity of eLearning
• Acces­si­bil­ity in inter­ac­tion design
• Access E-Learning
• Acces­si­bil­ity in Dis­tance Education

If you do join in the con­ver­sa­tion, be sure to add your­self to the vir­tual attendee list!

Game On

Dallin Paul Look­ing Good

Con­grat­u­la­tions to my youngest brother Dallin Paul who grad­u­ates from high school today. After high school, many stu­dents with dis­abil­i­ties are offered the oppor­tu­nity to to par­tic­i­pate in some type of post-high edu­ca­tion pro­gram. Dallin Paul is grad­u­at­ing with an excep­tion­ally large cohort of peers in spe­cial edu­ca­tion and because of poor plan­ning on the part of the school dis­trict his options for a post high edu­ca­tion have been severely limited.

Long story short, the school dis­trict picked the wrong fam­ily to try and place a stu­dent in a con­verted gym for a class­room with lit­tle oppor­tu­nity for com­mu­nity involve­ment or inter­ac­tion with any nondis­abled peers. If any­one from the school dis­trict is read­ing this, did you not real­ize that the Phillips fam­ily has mul­ti­ple Spe­cial Edu­ca­tion degrees, a Master’s degree in Reha­bil­i­ta­tion Coun­sel­ing, Part of a Doc­toral degree in Reha­bil­i­ta­tion Coun­sel­ing and a Juris Doc­tor­ate? On top of that we have a com­bined lot of years as teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors in spe­cial edu­ca­tion and direct care of per­son with dis­abil­i­ties. Game on.

Mad Pride

Newsweek tagline: “Why some men­tally ill patients are reject­ing their med­ica­tion and mak­ing the case for ‘mad pride.’”

From The Grow­ing Push for “Mad Pride”.

I am famil­iar with var­i­ous move­ments that cel­e­brate the pos­i­tive aspects of dif­fer­ence such as Dis­abil­ity Pride, Deaf Pride and Crip Pride, but only recently came across the idea of Mad Pride, a move­ment that cel­e­brates the pos­i­tive aspects of men­tal health diag­noses. The move­ment has been around for awhile, but a recent Newsweek arti­cle was the first I learned of it, at least that I remem­ber since I received my own men­tal health diagnoses.

There is much good that comes from accept­ing a men­tal health diag­noses and “com­ing out” to friends and fam­ily. Ben­e­fits include an increased under­stand­ing, a sense of com­mu­nity with oth­ers with like expe­ri­ences and a greater open­ness to receiv­ing help and man­ag­ing lifestyle. Of course there can also be neg­a­tive con­se­quences, but I believe that the per­cep­tion of those is gen­er­ally greater than the reality.

On the other end of the spec­trum from “mad pride” there are many who suf­fer from the debil­i­tat­ing effects of “mad shame”- an unwill­ing­ness to acknowl­edge a men­tal health diag­noses in ones self. In between those two extremes are the masses of peo­ple who have a men­tal health diag­noses that treat it as an ill­ness man­aged through some com­bi­na­tion of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, self-medication or other treat­ment options.

When first diag­nosed with a men­tal ill­ness, I found myself some­where in the mid­dle– never ashamed, but nei­ther was I anx­ious to shout it from the rooftop. Since that first diag­noses there have been long peri­ods of dark­ness and frus­tra­tion, I’m in a good place now with a com­pletely dif­fer­ent diag­noses (ADHD). I now freely share my diag­noses and am feel­ing suc­cess­ful in work and fam­ily life and my ADHD is a an impor­tant part of that success.

Addi­tional Resources

• ‘Mad Pride’ Fights a Stigma (New York Times article)
• Mind­Free­dom (non-profit orga­ni­za­tion focused on human rights and alter­na­tives for peo­ple labeled with psy­chi­atric disabilities)
• Mad Pride Wikipedia Entry

Accessibility Blog and Twitter Roundup from WebAIM

Jared Smith has posted an updated list of the list of acces­si­bil­ity blogs that he fol­lows. In addi­tion, he has added a list of Twit­ter users “that post fre­quent and insight­ful mes­sages on web accessibility”.

• Acces­si­bil­ity Blog Roundup II
• Twit­ter Acces­si­bil­ity Roundup
• Twit­ter mes­sages tagged with #accessibility
• Twit­ter Acces­si­bil­ity Search

Disability Perspective

A “man on crutches” is shar­ing the expe­ri­ence of just one small part of his day affected by his dis­abil­ity, get­ting a seat on the bus in the seats reserved for rid­ers with dis­abil­i­ties. He has done an excel­lent job of con­vey­ing his expe­ri­ence and per­spec­tive through images:

Peo­ple Who Sit In The Dis­abil­ity Seats When I’m Stand­ing On My Crutches

The Promise of Accessible Readability

Guide­line 3.1 of the WCAG 2.0 states “Make text con­tent read­able and under­stand­able.”. There are lots of ways to mea­sure read­abil­ity, but today I came across an exam­ple (Thanks Jeff) of what might be referred to as ‘extreme readability’.

Tar Heel Reader is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the Cen­ter for Lit­er­acy and Dis­abil­ity Stud­ies and the Com­puter Sci­ence Depart­ment at Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina at Chapel Hill. It is a col­lec­tion of over 3000 online books in an extremely online read­able for­mat. From the site:

Each book can be speech enabled and accessed using mul­ti­ple inter­faces (i.e. switches, alter­na­tive key­boards, touch screens, and ded­i­cated AAC devices). The books may be down­loaded as slide shows in Pow­er­Point, Impress, or Flash format.

A high school stu­dent with an intel­lec­tual dis­abil­ity may have dif­fi­culty find­ing age-appropriate read­ing mate­r­ial if he reads at 1st grade read­ing level. Enter Tar Heal Reader, not only is the text extremely read­able, but it is also acces­si­ble in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways.

Go check out some of the books or even write your own.

Each of the books listed on the Tar Heels site was cre­ated one at a time, a model that doesn’t scale very well. At the other end of the spec­trum is Read­able (or Read­abil­ity). Read­able allows a user to take one aspect of read­abil­ity (for­mat­ting of text) and apply it to any website.

Imag­ine now a tool that could take any para­graph (Like Read­able) and con­verts that para­graph into some type of text or mul­ti­me­dia that is under­stand­able to any user, at what­ever level of under­stand­ing that user spec­i­fies. Cool.

What other projects or efforts are lay­ing the ground­work for this type of acces­si­bil­ity to exist one day?

Addi­tional resources on mak­ing your con­tent more acces­si­ble to users with disabilities

• Improve the read­abil­ity of your web page (7 tips from Webcredible)
• Meth­ods for mea­sur­ing text read­abil­ity (resources and links from Stan­dards Schmandards)
• Juicy Stu­dio Read­abil­ity Test (read­abil­ity test and overview of those tests from Gez Lemon)

See the Person, Not the Disability

Great video I came across at walk­ing . is . over­rated:

In his post titled, Some Sweet Dis­abil­ity Think­ing, Red ref­er­ences a post from Mark Smith:

If you told me of all of the com­pli­ca­tions of your dis­abil­ity – phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally, men­tally, socially, eco­nom­i­cally – and I sim­ply replied, “So what?” would you be offended?

In fact, I give this very response to my friends – and, more impor­tantly, myself – every day when it comes to the chal­lenges of liv­ing with dis­abil­ity: You and I have dis­abil­ity hard­ships, so what?

Read the rest from Mark Smith’s post titled Three Pages in the Trash.

“So what?”

Never Leave Home Without a Spider-Man Costume

This is a great story from Thai­land where a stu­dent with autism had a panic attack and climbed onto the ledge out­side of his third floor class­room. It was the student’s first day at a new school and no one was able to con­vince him to come back inside, so the local fire depart­ment was called.

Fire­man Som­chai Yoos­abai shows up and hears that the stu­dent loves comic book heroes. It just so hap­pens that Som­chai hasa Spider-Man cos­tume that he keeps in his locker. He puts cos­tume on and quickly and safely con­vinces the stu­dent to come back inside.

More at:

• Spider-Man Saves Autis­tic Boy in Thailand
• Fire­man dresses as Spider-Man to res­cue boy

Access Means Different Things to Different People

“‘Access’ isn’t just yes or no, but really shades of acces­si­bil­ity, and has dif­fer­ent dime­sions.” (Access to Open Edu­ca­tional Resources Wiki)

The def­i­n­i­tion of access from Merriam-Webster:

a: per­mis­sion, lib­erty, or abil­ity to enter, approach, or pass to and from a place or to approach or com­mu­ni­cate with a per­son or thing b: free­dom or abil­ity to obtain or make use of some­thing c: a way or means of access d: the act or an instance of accessing

Depend­ing on who you are or where you are at in life, the word access has dif­fer­ent mean­ings. UNESCO has a fan­tas­tic wiki page on Access to Open Edu­ca­tional Resources where they define a num­ber of dif­fer­ent types of access. Although writ­ten for a spe­cific type of con­tent (open edu­ca­tional resources), the types of access they have iden­ti­fied can be applied generally :

• Aware­ness, Pol­icy, Atti­tude, Cultural:
  • Access in terms of awareness.
  • Access in terms of local policy/attitude.
  • Access in terms of languages.
• Legal
  • Access in terms of licensing.
• Tech­ni­cal (Deliv­ery Method)
  • Access in terms of file formats.
  • Access in terms of disability.
• Tech­ni­cal (Receiving)
  • Access in terms of infrastructure.
  • Access in terms of inter­net connectivity/bandwidth.
  • Access in terms of discovery.
  • Access in terms of abil­ity and skills.

Read­ing through the com­ments on the page, it is evi­dent that in many parts of the world, access for users with dis­abil­i­ties is a sec­ondary con­cern (at best). With­out power, band­width or an even an Inter­net connnec­tion no con­tent can­not be accessed, so who care if is it acces­si­ble to users with disabilities?

When con­sid­er­ing all of the dif­fer­ent bar­ri­ers that keep peo­ple from access­ing con­tent on the Inter­net, all of the sud­den adding alter­na­tive text to an image doesn’t feel like such a big deal. Let’s keep work­ing on an acces­si­ble web, but in the mean­time let’s not for­get that lots of peo­ple don’t have access to that con­tent whether it is “acces­si­ble” or not.

Via Stephen Downes

Also of Interest

• Acces­si­bil­ity, Avail­abil­ity and Affordability
• Access to the Web for Peo­ple with Intel­lec­tual Disabilities