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!