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.

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.

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)

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?

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?

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.

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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.

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.

As consumers, we would not tolerate a different size and thickness CD for every recording label that required a physically different CD player to pay it, so why would we tolerate the equivalent in our courseware?

This article on the accessibility of online learning materials written by Peter Paolucci for the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society makes a strong case for consumers to demand better adherence to open standards. He states:

…vendor-created dependency on its own proprietary platform will inevitably interfere with institutional and designer freedom to migrate to other platforms that are more compliant or less expensive to adopt.

The conflict between the interests of vendors to use proprietary standards versus the adoption of open standards has thus far been won by the vendors because the educational community has been a complacent consumer. The fact that the current state of affairs excludes learners from inaccessible content baffles me– I’ve wondered to myself, “Do people just not understand?!” I then realize they don’t. Hopefully as people and institutions better understand the issues we’ll start to see real changes happen.

This article was a discussion starter for the IFETS listserv, the discussion is formally over, but you can read the archives here