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

Avoiding the Gray Areas

I just caught the last of Shawn Henry’s SXSW panel. Key take­way– there are white areas of things that are good to do for acces­si­bil­ity and black areas of things that are bad for acces­si­bil­ity– avoid wor­ry­ing about the gray area in the mid­dle. She men­tioned the abil­ity of web acces­si­bil­ity experts to end­lessly debate the ins and outs of alt text. For example:

• 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.

Online Video Captions

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have announced their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Inter­net Cap­tion­ing Forum (ICF) estab­lished to pro­mote the use of cap­tion­ing for online video. They will be work­ing with the National Cen­ter for Acces­si­ble Media (NCAM) at WGBH Boston. You can read quotes from Vint Cerf and other rep­re­sen­ta­tives from each of the big four at the National Cen­ter for Tech­nol­ogy Inno­va­tion regard­ing the effort.

I am nei­ther deaf or hard or hear­ing, but the cap­tions are almost always on when the tele­vi­sion is on in our home. I enjoy the view­ing expe­ri­ence and miss fewer words mum­bled here and there when I can look down and glance at the words when needed.

Google video cur­rently pro­vides detailed instruc­tions on adding cap­tion­ing to videos. Addi­tion­ally, in the Google Video Help Cen­ter, this ques­tions is asked, “Do you gen­er­ate captions/subtitles for my video?” and the answer they pro­vide is a promis­ing “Not at this time.” They also have a sec­tion where you can view exam­ples of cap­tioned videos.

NCAM Press Release

(hat tip: The Assis­tive Tech­nol­ogy Blog)

Using Symbols to Access the Web

From the AT Tech­NET @ VCU: Assis­tive Tech­nol­ogy Blog, a link to Com­mu­ni­cate: Web­wide, the first symbol-supported web browser. Every­thing hap­pens in the browser where you can view pages in nor­mal view, with plain text or using sym­bols. Their icon library con­tains over 29,000 words. It also reads any text that you highlight.

Is this type of tech­nol­ogy the answer for some users with cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties? What about a poten­tial user who can’t access your mate­r­ial even when you have gone great lengths to sim­plify your writ­ing. Also, while indi­vid­ual sites may pro­vide their own visual ele­ments to rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent ideas, is their value is hav­ing a stan­dard set of icons? Per­haps the ideas would be to allow users to asso­ciate sym­bols with the words them­selves, or at least have the option to over­ride the default icon.

Com­mu­ni­cate: Web­wide is pro­vided on a sub­scrip­tion model and is PC-only (30-day demo available).

Does it work with any site? Prob­a­bly not, from their guidelines:

While Web­wide inter­prets clear, well-written HTML; some lay­outs and styles will be more effec­tive than oth­ers. To this end, we will be pro­duc­ing guide­lines for web design­ers who would like to make their infor­ma­tion acces­si­ble through Webwide.

Hope­fully their guide­lines are in line with already estab­lished web stan­dards and guidelines.

Read Speaker

A server-based prod­uct that reads the text on a web­site and requires no plu­gin. It also reads Word, RTF and PDF doc­u­ments. You can try the ser­vice out by click­ing on the ‘SayIt’ bot­ton on the Read­Speaker site. From their website:

The Mis­sion of Read­Speaker is to make the “mir­a­cle of the Inter­net” acces­si­ble for dyslex­ics, peo­ple with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties, low lit­er­acy level, peo­ple with Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage, elderly with impaired vision and oth­ers that like to lis­ten as well as read.

I’m not quite sold on their claim that “Read­Speaker will make your web­site acces­si­ble for more peo­ple than any other acces­si­bil­ity mea­sure­ment that you put in place,” but I don’t sup­pose it could hurt. For­tu­nately they do rec­om­mend that you fol­low the W3C/WAI guide­lines as well. I couldn’t find any pric­ing infor­ma­tion, but you can con­tact them for a free trial and price quote

Read­Speaker

Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility from A List Apart 4.0

As men­tioned all around the horn tonight A List Apart is back with a new design and a great new arti­cle from Joe Clark appro­pri­ately called Facts and Opin­ions About PDF Acces­si­bil­ity.

Towards the begin­ning of the arti­cle he sets the first point of his summary:

Most PDFs on the web should be HTML

How­ever, he then lists 14 instances where PDF may well be the appro­pri­ate file for­mat. The arti­cle also goes on to debunk some pop­u­lar myths sur­round­ing PDF, explains how they can be made more acces­si­ble and an infor­ma­tive overview of how PDF files are han­dled by three pop­u­lar screen read­ers (JAWS, Window-Eyes and Home Page Reader). Also, don’t miss out on the dis­cus­sion.

Text to Speech Software and Voices

I’m try­ing under­stand a lit­tle more about Text to Speech tech­nolo­gies, and and came across a cou­ple of help­ful links: a Speech syn­the­sis page from Wikipedia and a Text-to-Speech page at SNOW. It appears there are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent text to speech soft­ware pack­ages avail­able.

The issue seems to be fur­ther com­pli­cated in that at least some of the software/voice pack­ages appear to require a license based on how many times a user dis­trib­utes a voice recording.

My last con­cern is how to select a voice to use– it looks like a num­ber of dif­fer­ent options avail­able. To save you some time, if you are look­ing for IBM’s nat­ural voices the first page I came across was their AT&T Text to Speech Research Lab which took me to their offi­cial AT&T Nat­ural Voices page and from there to Wiz­zard Soft­ware where you can actu­ally pur­chase a prod­uct– although I still wasn’t sure exactly what…

Any­ways, I am look­ing for some help on this one– does any­one know of any good resources, have a favorite piece of soft­ware of favorite voice? If not, I don’t know how updated this is, but it looks like a good place to start.

As a side­note, I wasn’t even aware of the W3C Speech Syn­the­sis Markup Lan­guage (SSML) — looks really interesting.

Accessible Multimedia — Skills for Access

Skills for Access bills itself as The Com­pre­hen­sive Guide to Cre­at­ing Acces­si­ble Mul­ti­me­dia for e-learning. I haven’t had time to go all the way through the site, but it looks like it deliv­ers with a lot of sub­stan­tive con­tent, com­plete with great case stud­ies as well as in-depth instruc­tions on how to cre­ate acces­si­ble mul­ti­me­dia using a vari­ety of tech­nolo­gies. (via splin­tered)

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Speakwire — Online RSS Reader

Done by the same folks who are behind Spee­gle, the talk­ing search engine, Speak­wire is a free online tool that reads aloud a rss feed. From their press release:

Most peo­ple asso­ciate com­puter speech with visu­ally impaired users. I think that is miss­ing the point and we set out to demon­strate just how uni­ver­sal speech is. It’s the near­est eqi­va­lent to a com­mon cur­rency and can be exchanged and under­sood as eas­ily. Speech is might­ier than the pen.

(via Robin Good)

PDFs Redux

arti­cle from ear­lier this year on acces­si­ble pdf.

adobe just announced acro­bat 7.0 with “advanced acces­si­bil­ity fea­tures”– see bot­tom of page 2 here. inter­est­ing stuff on canada’s acces­si­bil­ity requirements.