• The Benefits of Captioning (sidebar)
• Benefits of Closed Captioning
• Benefits of Captioning
• Who Benefits from Captions
• Benefits of Closed Captioning & Transcription
• Ten Reasons to Caption Your Web Videos

Even if you are a callous jerk who doesn’t care about the 3.5% of the general population who are deaf or hard of hearing, there are other benefits commonly cited in the above lists:

• Increased usability for everyone.
• Education and literacy benefits.
• Increased search engine traffic.
• Search captioned video to find specific video segments.
• Access to audio information in a noisy environment.
• Helpful in learning a second language.

Those all make a lot of sense, but I wanted to find some specific examples and research to back up those assertions. Here is what I found:

Increased Usability for Everyone

I don’t have hearing loss, but I always turn on captions when they are available and apparently I’m not along. In 2006, Ofcom (the regularity authority for the UK communications industries) published a report with the following blurb on the number of people who use subtitles:

In the UK adult population as a whole, over 7.5 million people (18%) are estimated to have used subtitling at least once, of whom over 6 million people would have no hearing impairment. 39% of those with a hearing impairment say that they have used it, equating to just over 1.4 million people. Amongst case study respondents with a hearing impairment, 49% said that they used it to watch all, most or some programmes, a figure that rose to 76% for those with a severe or profound hearing loss. (Section 2.20)

Muffled audio, thick accents or whatever– captions make audio easier to understand.

See Also: The hearing majority of captioning viewers from Joe Clark and WETA’s Captions Increase & Sustain Their Video Viewership from Peter Crosby at DotSUB.

Education and Literacy Benefits

I also try to turn captions on for my kids:

• Captions for Literacy is a website promoting the literacy benefits of captioning, include this page of relevant research on the topic.
• Same Language Subtitling A non-profit organization that promotes literacy through same-language subtitles (check out their research page).

Increased search engine traffic

While these benefits may occasionally be overstated as not all captioned video is indexed by all search engines, there are definite SEO benefits from captioned video for at least some services/search engines. If nothing else, posting the video transcript with the video will ensure that your video content can be indexed by search engines.

• In-Depth Look At YouTube Closed Captions – YouTube SEO and More
• Google Video Test Results: Captions Vs Description Vs Speech Recognition
• YouTube Captions Boost SEO

We can only hope that as search engines take advantage of captions to deliver more relevant video content to users I hope it doesn’t lead to a rash of captioned videos of video spammers yelling about cheap online pharmaceuticals and work from home opportunities.

Search Captioned Video to Find Specific Video Segments

This video from Hulu demonstrates this idea very well (ironically, it’s uncaptioned):

You can try it out for yourself by doing to the Hulu Captions Search page.

On a completely unrelated sidenote, there is a great story of how the husband of a Deaf woman had a brother with a friend who was a programmer at Hulu helped to get captions rolling at Hulu.

You can also see this functionality at the DO-IT Video collection., CaptionBox is a jQuery plugin that allows you do add some of this functionality to videos on your site.

Access to the audio information in a noisy environment.

I wish I could find some more validation of this oft-cited statistic that the number one use of captions is actually gyms, bars, language learning, etc… I don’t doubt that captions are useful in noisy environments, but after emailing a number of people who have cited one use or another as the top use of captioning I’ve yet to find any hard data on this. If you know of any research that validates this, I would love to hear about it.

Access to Audio Information in a Noisy Environment

I’ve often heard the face that the most common use of captions is when they are turned on for televisions in a restaurant or gym. I looked pretty hard and can’t find any hard data to verify that assertion, but I know that I appreciate caption being turned on when I eat out. Unfortunately it’s been awhile since I’ve been to a gym so I can’t speak to that. Also, those children I mentioned earlier who I turn on captions for the educational benefits? There are four of them and they can be noisy– captions are a godsend when my wife and I are watching a show with the kiddos in the room.

Helpful in Learning a Second Language

Here are a few academic articles on this topic with fancy words, complicated charts, the works:

• The Effects Of Captioning Videos Used For Foreign Language Listening Activities (PDF)
• Captions and Subtitles in EFL Learning: an investigative study in a comprehensive computer environment (PDF)
• Captioning and Subtitling: Undervalued Language Learning Strategies (PDF)

That’s It

What did I miss?

Tonight the keynote panel that was moderated by Mike Paciello and included Paul P. Schafer, Mohammed Al-Tarawneh and Axel Leblois. You can read the full bios for Paul, Mohammed and Axel on the conference website. The theme of the panel was an international perspective on closing the gap between assistive technology and information and communication technologies (ICT).

The State of International Accessibility and ICT

To start the discussion, Axel responded to Mike’s question on the state of international accessibility by stating that we are in an unprecended period of growth of technology and devices, citing statistics that there 5 billion mobile phones, 2.5 billion televisions, 1.2 billion personal computers and 1.6 billion Internet users.

Axel then discussed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and mentioned that 99 countries have already ratified it. Mohammed expressed a hope that the United States will soon become the 100th to ratify the treaty and Paul reported from conversation with Judy Huemann that the treaty would soon be going to the US senate.

International Accessibility and ICT Challenges

Mohammed discussed the challenges of the CRPD and how those challenges affect ICT. He said that there is a gap between developed and developing countries. He hopes that countries with the resources and expertise will offer needed financial, technical, education assistance to developing countries.

Axel discussed the problem that although there is much research happening in the area of assitive technology, little of the research done at universities actually makes it to market. Lots of money is being spent on that research that never ends up benefitting end users.

Paul mentioned another issue is that the cost of assistive technology in 3rd world countries is still to expensive, but expressed hope that as mainstream products such as Android devices become accessible they will eventually help assistive technology become more affordable.

Solutions to International ICT Accessibility Problems

Looking forward, Paul felt that some solutions to increasing access to ICT might be the mass market utilization of technologies such as text-to-speech (TTS), speech recognition and brain-computer interfaces (BCI). He also sees potential for assistive technology cloud services. Paul also emphasized the importance of sharing best practices– both in technology and business processes. He discussed the importance sucessfull businesses mentoring others with the goal of getting more accessible practices into off-the-shelf products to replae more expensive, proprietary solutions.

Mohammed said that the CRPD is a powerful legal instrument that binds member states to abide by every single article, but that some member states are unaware of all obligations that signing the treaty brings. He is hopeful that academic institutions, the private sector, civil society organizations and governments will work together to help those in developing countries who lack resources.

One of the areas where Axel has seen success is working on the “low hanging fruit” of accessibility of telephones and televison broadcasting in developing countries. Often there is an FCC–like organization that simply needs training of what they need to do to be more accessible. He also discussed the business value of assitive technologies in expanding markets such as mobile and cloud-based solutions.

Other Keynote Business

After the panel, Alan D. Muir received the the Fred Strache Leadership Award and Klaus Miesenberer received 2011 Trace Center’s Harry J. Murphy Catalyst Award. In his acceptance speech Klaus shared a chinese proverb that went something like this:

“If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk.
If you want to be happy for a month, slaughter a pig
If you want to be happy for a year, get married
If you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden“

If you have an additions or corrections to the above, please let me know!

The old UX catch call is never truer here – we are not the users. The disparity between us and the people we are really working for, with accessibility, is sometimes just too great for us to even get a idea of what it is like, no matter how many videos of people using assistive technology we see.

And this zinger:

In reality there is no socially inspired public relations value in accessibility. A business can be seen to get more value out of sponsoring a guide dog than making their web site accessible.

The rest of the article is well worth the read. (via @scenariogirl)

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!

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)

“‘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

That said, I care very much about disability issues. Curb Cut has been an accessibility blog written primarily for readers already interested in accessibility issues. However, depending on your past experience you may or may not give a crap about disability issues.

My interest in web accessibility originated from my relationships with two of my brothers who were born with Down syndrome. Like a good brother should, I wanted to make the web a friendlier place for them. Well, it turns out that Patrick has no use for the Internet. Dallin Paul is a heavy Internet user, but thus far has been able to find every America’s Funniest Home Video People Getting Hurt Collection and Power Ranger video on YouTube without any problem. If my goal is really to make the world a better place for them then it is time to refocus my efforts. There is little I could to for the Internet that would make it more useful to Patrick or Dallin Paul, but consider the following:

• Patrick has worked for over 10 years at a University food court. He works hard, is dependable and well-liked by colleagues and customers. Nevertheless, there is very little chance that he will be offered a full-time position or any kind of benefits.
• Dallin Paul still has a fear of attending church with my family because of some very unfortunate experiences he had with Sunday school teachers growing up. When he does attend, he is welcomed by some, tolerated by others and ignored by everyone else.

I have spent a number of years as a teacher in special ed classrooms, traveling with Special Olympics teams and volunteering with various disability organizations. You wouldn’t know any of that from reading Curb Cut in the past. My disability experience is the only real value I have to offer and I purposefully kept it out of my writing on web accessibility. Shame on me.

Here’s to a more authentic Curb Cut.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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?

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

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.

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)

Update:

• List of 15 personas of persons with disabilities in different categories (cognitive impairment, hearing impairment, etc…) for the AEGIS Project.