Free Accessible Web Browsers for Learners with Multiple Disabilities

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

All of these are for Firefox, of course. Go nuts with these and let us all know what works and what doesn’t.

Crawford Killian’s “Writing for the Web” blog — Discussion and resources from someone who stays informed.

The Poynter online-writing listserv — Low-traffic list for the web-writing community. A couple of people post writing seminar announcements.

Readability.info — Analyzes web text for reading level, like the function on Microsoft Word. The site won’t write good web content for you, but it might be a useful tool.

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