Accessible Synchronous Communication

Does it exist? I sup­pose that depends on who you ask– many ven­dors are quick to tout the acces­si­bil­ity of their syn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools, but in real­ity it seems that most have a ways to go. In the past cou­ple of weeks I have looked at the fol­low­ing tools:

Hori­zon­Live claims it is acces­si­ble to per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties and even has an acces­si­bil­ity page with an archived acces­si­ble pre­sen­ta­tion that you can try out and some acces­si­bil­ity tips for screen reader use. It looks like there are quite a few frames in the pre­sen­ta­tion win­dow, but there are short­cut keys set for most of them, although I’m sure they would take some get­ting used to. Also, this app is plat­form inde­pen­dent– avail­able on a Mac, PC or Unix sys­tem. I have taken part in a cou­ple of these pre­sen­ta­tions that I enjoyed.

I have heard some good things about Cen­tra, but from the get go I was out as a Mac user, it is PC only. Fur­ther, the only thing I could find about acces­si­bil­ity on their web­site was an obscure ref­er­ence in the descrip­tion of a white paper. I have put in a request for more infor­ma­tion on acces­si­bil­ity of their prod­uct, I’ll post their response as soon as it comes in.

iVo­cal­ize Inter­net Con­fer­ence is another option. It is used by EASI for their online work­shops. iVo­cal­ize gives no men­tion of acces­si­bil­ity on their web­site besides a list of short­cut keys. How­ever, Talk­ing Com­mu­ni­ties, which uses iVo­cal­ize, does men­tion its acces­si­bil­ity fea­tures- iVo­cal­ize is PC only as well.

Some other sys­tems that I haven’t had time to look at include Net­Meet­ing, WebEx, Inter­wise and I’m sure there are a host of oth­ers out there as well. Does any­one out there have expe­ri­ence with these or any oth­ers? If so, I’d love to hear from you, please leave a com­ment so oth­ers can see what you have to say as well.

Lastly, an brief arti­cle titled Online Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tems: Acces­si­bil­ity of Tools for Syn­chro­nous Com­mu­ni­ca­tion for the 2003 CSUN con­fer­ence (cour­tesy of Online Learn­ing Update).