Accessible Synchronous Communication: Reloaded

One of the more inter­est­ing occur­rences at SxSW04 was the use of Ren­dezVous enabled iChat­ting dur­ing panel dis­cus­sions. For those of you poor souls on PCs, Ren­dezVous iChat (~AIM) lets you open up your app and see all the other peo­ple on your net­work (wire­less or oth­er­wise) that are using Ren­dezVous. So when I fired up iChat while sit­ting in the crowd, I could see about 25 or so peo­ple in the room with me, or in nearby rooms, and chat with them. It got really inter­est­ing when Jeff Veen, a pan­elist, opened up his iChat, which was dis­played on the big screen. What hap­pened is the peo­ple, rather than stand­ing up and ask­ing their ques­tions, sent them over iChat. Good ques­tions were read aloud by Jeff.

Now this seemed to be a dou­ble edged sword. It got dis­cus­sion going faster, and peo­ple who may have been too timid to stand up and ask ques­tions, were able to ask ques­tions. But it also was slightly dis­tract­ing to other pre­sen­ters to have iChat win­dow fly­ing open on the screen when they were try­ing to address ques­tions. A big­ger con­cern for the acces­si­bil­ity com­mu­nity was that one of the pan­elist, Dr. John Slatin, was unable to fully par­tic­i­pate in all aspects of the dis­cus­sion because they were hap­pen­ing silently behind him.

There is a small debate about this on Veen’s per­sonal site, but I would love to get one going here. Keep it polite, but lets debate for a while on this.

Accessible hi-fi designs

Hav­ing just sat through an amaz­ing panel here at SXSW on hi-fi css designs, I struck me that the for-profit world is now ahead of the non-profit/educational world in acces­si­ble design. Sites like Wired, For­tune, and Espn are way more acces­si­ble and standards-based than 99 per­cent of the government/non-profit/education world. I think they main cause of this is sim­ply money. Good design­ers demand the kind of money only the busi­ness world can afford; busi­nesses can afford to do com­plete redesigns; busi­nesses react to its mar­ket faster than gov­ern­ment ser­vices because it means more money for them.

I do think that the same shift will hap­pen in the do-gooder world, but it may be dri­ven by dif­fer­ent forces. Hope­fully not user out­cry or law­suits, hope­fully a desire to pro­vide a bet­ter expe­ri­ence will drive it

Hello, live from SXSW

Hello true believ­ers. It’s Jeff, the guy who never posts to this blog. I fig­ured that since my employer was so kind as to send me to the South by South West Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence, I would pro­duce a lit­tle content.

This year’s line-up seems to have a lot to do with acces­si­bil­ity, which is great, because it means that the big cre­ative forces dri­ving the indus­try are start­ing to think about acces­si­bil­ity first. There is a hand­ful of pan­els involv­ing acces­si­bil­ity, and big names like Veen, Zeld­man and Bow­man are all speak­ing on the sub­ject. Since they have wire­less access all over this place, I will try to post my thoughts every once in a while.

Accessible Online Math Resources

I pro­fess in no way to be an expert on the topic, but recently pro­vided these resources to some­one and thought I would pass them on:

As far as I can tell, one of the most excit­ing ini­tia­tives in this area is the
NIDE MathML project avail­able at the MathML Acces­si­bil­ity Project Page or the W3C Math Homepage

The Pro­gram Access Project is geared toward engi­neer­ing and sci­ence, but the Prin­ci­pal Inves­ti­ga­tor is a Math pro­fes­sor, so it may take a math­e­mat­i­cal slant.

Norm Coombs, noted acces­si­bil­ity expert has also done some work in
this area as well. He is involved with a
Reach­ing New Audi­ences with New Media: Open­ing the Door to Sci­ence and Math­e­mat­ics Project and has a list of resources on the topic.

This Math­e­mat­ics Acces­si­ble to Visu­ally Impaired Stu­dents project has fin­ished, but they still have some good resources listed at
their site. They have a page with cur­rent con­tact infor­ma­tion That links to to their old main page

Lastly, the Regional Alliance for Sci­ence, Engi­neer­ing, and Math­e­mat­ics — Squared has a num­ber of great resources as well– Enjoy!