Accessible Web Browsers

I have men­tioned a symbol-based browser before, but here is a list of three dif­fer­ent acces­si­ble browsers:

Free Acces­si­ble Web Browsers for Learn­ers with Mul­ti­ple Disabilities

Accessible Pen and Paper?

I first heard of Live­scribe from an announce­ment of their upcom­ing ‘smart­pen’ and noted that a for­mer pro­fes­sor, Andy Van Schaack, PhD was involved in the project. A few weeks ago, I was able to attend a pre­sen­ta­tion from Dr. Van Schaack and learned a lit­tle more about the project. I was espe­cially inter­ested in the note on the pre­sen­ta­tion flyer that said he would “present his cur­rent NSF–funded study on the use of the smart­pen to sup­port blind col­lege stu­dents in sci­ence, engi­neer­ing and math.”

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

(Update) Andy sent me a cou­ple of addi­tional links to share:

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:

Does your mail client support email standards?

Email Stan­dards Project

The Email Stan­dards Project works with email client devel­op­ers and the design com­mu­nity to improve web stan­dards sup­port and acces­si­bil­ity in email.

Tactile Video Displays

a tactile graphic display device

The National Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­ogy has licensed a tech­nol­ogy for the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of a tac­tile graphic dis­play device. The device promises users who are blind the abil­ity to feel images from any num­ber of sources on a refre­sh­able braille dis­play. The tech­nol­ogy has been in devel­op­ment for awhile, but com­mer­cial­iza­tion is a sig­nif­i­cant step forward.

From the press release:

ELIA Life Tech­nol­ogy Inc. of New York, N.Y., licensed for com­mer­cial­iza­tion both the tac­tile graphic dis­play device and fin­ger­tip graphic reader devel­oped by NIST researchers. The for­mer, first intro­duced as a pro­to­type in 2002, allows a per­son to feel a suc­ces­sion of images on a reusable sur­face by rais­ing some 3,600 small pins (actu­a­tor points) into a pat­tern that can be locked in place, read by touch and then reset to dis­play the next graphic in line. Each image—from scanned illus­tra­tions, Web pages, elec­tronic books or other sources—is sent elec­tron­i­cally to the reader where spe­cial soft­ware deter­mines how to cre­ate a match­ing tac­tile display.

From the ELIA Life Tech­nol­ogy About Us page:

The ELIA Life team strives to improve the qual­ity of life of visu­ally impaired per­sons and their fam­ily mem­bers by enabling the visu­ally impaired to live, work, learn, and com­mu­ni­cate with greater inde­pen­dence and dignity.

It appears that they mar­ket the tac­tile alpha­bet as an alter­na­tive to braille and claim that, “only three per­cent of legally blind Amer­i­cans can read Braille”

I don’t know how long before this tech­nol­ogy will be made widely avail­able, but it raises a cou­ple of inter­est­ing questions:

  1. Would you pre­fer effec­tive alt text to a tac­tile graphic dis­play device that worked?
  2. Will this type of tech­nol­ogy one day be used as an excuse for peo­ple not do use alt tags?

More on the tech­nol­ogy: NIST ‘Pins’ Down Imag­ing Sys­tem for the Blind

(via Web­bAlert)

Using Symbols to Access the Web

Picture of the Webwide Browser

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.

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.

Evaluating Websites for Accessibility with Firefox

From the intro to the arti­cle:

Patrick H. Lauke out­lines how Mozilla Fire­fox can be used in con­junc­tion with the Web Devel­oper Tool­bar to carry out a pre­lim­i­nary acces­si­bil­ity review

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)

Accessible Online Slide Presentation Tool

Or per­haps bet­ter stated by the author of the tool, A Sim­ple Standards-Based Seman­tic Slide Show Sys­tem or S5. In Eric’s own words:

With one file, you can run a com­plete slide show and have a printer-friendly ver­sion as well. The markup used for the slides is very sim­ple, highly seman­tic, and com­pletely acces­si­ble… It’s totally sim­ple, and it’s totally standards-driven.

You really should at least check out the demo to under­stand how cool this is.

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