Too Much Accessibility

Hope­fully, any­one sub­scribed to this blog also fol­lows 456 Berea Street. If not, you missed a great post from Roger Johans­son titled Over­do­ing Acces­si­bil­ity. Go read the arti­cle and then sub­scribe to his feed.

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.

Icons, Symbols and Cognitive Disabilities

Guide­line 1.3 Cre­ate con­tent that can be pre­sented in dif­fer­ent ways (for exam­ple spo­ken aloud, sim­pler lay­out, etc.) with­out los­ing infor­ma­tion or structure

Draft Guide­line 1.3 of the Web Con­tent Acces­si­bil­ity Guide­lines 2.0 dis­cusses the impor­tance of mak­ing infor­ma­tion avail­able in a form that can be per­ceived by the user– either directly or through an assis­tive tech­nol­ogy. For exam­ple, if a site uses an image to con­vey mean­ing, then the alt text should be present so that it can be seen (in a text-only envi­ron­ment), heard (by a screen reader) or even felt (through a refre­sh­able braille dis­play). This per­tains to both pre­sen­ta­tion and structure.

The tech­nolo­gies men­tioned above– text-only browsers, screen read­ers and elec­tronic braille– all do a good job at pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion to the appro­pri­ate audi­ence. How­ever, what about users with cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties? Text read aloud may be help­ful in some sit­u­a­tions, but what about a graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of con­tent? There are already some efforts in this area with the Com­mu­ni­cate: Web­wide sym­bol sup­ported browser that claims to be able to rep­re­sent over 29,000 words with sym­bols and while I applaud their efforts, with a Windows-only, pro­pri­etary, subscription-based prod­uct, I doubt there will be any wide­spread adop­tion in the near future.

Per­haps one day there will be an open sys­tem that will facil­i­tate the col­lec­tion and use of sym­bols in every­day tools. Until then, here are some other project/ideas that are explor­ing the use of symbols:

• Merriam-Webster Visual Dic­tio­nary
  Over 6,000 images orga­nized hier­ar­chi­cally under 15 major themes
  
• Zlango Over 200 icons divided into 8 major cat­e­gories devel­oped for use on mobile devices. Read Romeo and Juliet in Zlango speak.
  
• sosym­bol There isn’t a lot of infor­ma­tion on this site, but they do have a col­lec­tion of stan­dard­ized icons and you can con­tribute your own using their online sym­bol cre­ator after you have logged in.
  
• Icon­finder Icon search engine
• Sym­bol Signs from the AIGA 50 freely avail­able passenger/pedestrian symbols.
• Symbols.com Sim­ple sym­bols for a num­ber of words.

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)

Alt Text, Less Can be More

Aaron Can­non at NorthTemple.com offers insight from the per­spec­tive of a blind user on the impor­tance of alt text. First from Aaron, as quoted by Ted Boren:

For some rea­son, some folks get it into their heads that being blind is really ter­ri­ble and the only way our lives can be whole is for us to have all the pretty pic­tures in the world described to us. Where, in actu­al­ity, most blind folks couldn’t care less about most of it.

Aaron then expounds:

…if there was a pic­ture of a man using a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct, I’m really not inter­ested in hear­ing “pic­ture of a man look­ing pleased as punch to be using the new ultra-lite USB hair drier,” or worse, “pic­ture of a man.” I really don’t care about what image the design­ers chose to use as eye-candy. I can’t see them, and descrip­tions of mean­ing­less images just waste my time and delay my get­ting to the infor­ma­tion I’m really inter­ested in.

Read the entire post for an apt com­par­i­son of web acces­si­bil­ity to bread mak­ing. Thanks Aaron, I’ll think twice the next time I feel an urge to wax poetic in my alt text.

Acces­si­bil­ity guide­lines make clear that null alt text should be used for images that do not con­vey mean­ing, dec­o­ra­tive images. Is the point at which an image goes from mean­ing­ful to mean­ing­less unclear to any­one else?

10 Reasons People Care About Accessibility

I don’t know why you are read­ing this blog, but I there are a num­ber of rea­sons that peo­ple become inter­ested in acces­si­bil­ity issues. Do any of the below cat­e­gories sound famil­iar to you or maybe some­one you have worked with? Pre­sented with no author­ity and in no par­tic­u­lar order:

Why do you care about accessibility?

1. Fol­low­ing the Crowd. My favorite A-list blog­ger keeps talk­ing about acces­si­bil­ity and I don’t want to be left behind.
2. Curios­ity Killed the Cat. Enough about alt tags already, what’s the big deal with accessibility?
3. Work­ing for a Liv­ing. My boss cares and there­fore so do I.
4. The Plain­tiff will now Approach the Bench. The lawyer guy keeps telling me that I need to care about accessibility.
5. Me, Myself and I. I have a dis­abil­ity– I cre­ate acces­si­ble sites so that I can use them.
6. We are Fam­ily. I have a fam­ily member/friend with a disability.
7. We are the World. You know, “It’s true we’ll make a bet­ter day. Just you and me”.
8. Pow­er­ful Mar­ket Forces. Why on earth would I make my site harder for cus­tomers to use?
9. Pride cometh Before the Fall Of course my site is acces­si­ble, it also val­i­dates as XHTML Strict, I have never used a table in my life and I read W3C meet­ing min­utes for fun.
10. I don’t. Oh, okay– fine. (there– that makes 10).

Any oth­ers you would add to the list?

As long as a web devel­oper is moti­vated to cre­ate an acces­si­ble site, does it mat­ter what their moti­va­tion is?

Web Accessibility Initiative

The Web Acces­si­bil­ity Ini­tia­tive has released their new web­site for pub­lic con­sump­tion. It’s a cleaner, more pro­fes­sional look that facil­i­tates eas­ier loca­tion of the help­ful resources avail­able there such as an Intro­d­u­ca­tion to Acces­si­bil­ity, Cur­ricu­lum on Web Con­tent Acces­si­bil­ity Guide­lines and a handy tem­plate for Acces­si­bil­ity Eval­u­a­tion Reports. If you haven’t before, take some time to look around, there are lots more good­ies where those came from!

WaSP Forms Accessibility Task Force

This is excit­ing news from the Web Stan­dards Project– a grass­roots task force from a well estab­lished orga­ni­za­tion pro­mot­ing web acces­si­bil­ity and it looks like they have a crack team of experts assem­bled to tackle the job. It will be inter­est­ing to see what comes out of this effort, it should do a lot to encour­age aware­ness of acces­si­bil­ity issues.

There is lots of com­men­tary going on around the horn on this with a good set of links to some of the dis­cus­sions from Eric Meyer, includ­ing a some sug­gested places to start from Joe Clark.

Firefox is here!

I’ve used Fire­fox as my pri­mary browser for devel­op­ment for the past year and it has per­formed great. I highly rec­om­mend it for you and your orga­ni­za­tion. From mozilla.org:

The wait is over. Fire­fox 1.0 empow­ers you to browse faster, more safely and more effi­ciently than with any other browser. Join more than 8 mil­lion oth­ers and make the switch today � Fire­fox imports your Favorites, set­tings and other infor­ma­tion, so you have noth­ing to lose.

Accessibility, the Good News

The gen­eral aware­ness of online acces­si­bil­ity issues has come along way in the past decade– from the iso­lated protests of a small group of zealots to an almost essen­tial aspect of good web design. Why the change? It wasn’t the legal require­ments of ADA or Sec­tion 508, nor the wealth of resources on the topic spewed forth by a vari­ety of orga­ni­za­tions. No doubt these voices have been influ­en­tial, but acces­si­bil­ity is where it is today pri­mar­ily because of:

1. Evolv­ing stan­dards and tech­nolo­gies that require a return to the sep­a­ra­tion of con­tent from pre­sen­ta­tion and
2. An explo­sion of con­sumer devices with the same require­ments for infor­ma­tion access as many assis­tive technologies

While a few devel­op­ers were able to see the advan­tages to mak­ing their con­tent acces­si­ble to every­one early on, the major­ity will only to do so under finan­cial, tech­nol­ogy and peer pres­sure. Already, there are many lead­ers in the web design com­mu­nity who are cham­pi­oning the ben­e­fits of design­ing con­tent that is acces­si­ble to everyone.

Will these pres­sures even­tu­ally solve all access prob­lems? No, but they have us headed in the right direc­tion faster than ever before, and that is good news for accessibility.

IMS Guidelines for Developing Accessible Learning Applications

This set of guide­lines is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the IMS Global Learn­ing Con­sor­tium and Project SALT at WGBH’s NCAM. The guide­lines out­line the respon­si­bil­i­ties of every­one involved in the devel­op­ment and uti­liza­tion of acces­si­ble online con­tent, from cre­ators of author­ing envi­ron­ments to students.

The white paper presents guide­lines for author­ing (using XML, CSS and SVG), mul­ti­me­dia and almost any tech­nol­ogy used in an online course (white­board, doc­u­ment repos­i­to­ries, dis­cus­sion board…). There is also a help­ful appen­dix with links to help­ful sites on legal issues in regards to acce­si­ble dis­tance edu­ca­tion for a num­ber of countries.

The Full Table of Con­tents is use­ful for nav­i­gat­ing to spe­cific parts of the document.