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

Web Accessibility vs Life Accessibility

After lack­ing the moti­va­tion to write a post for almost a year, I was finally able to admit that I don’t care about web acces­si­bil­ity as much as I thought I did. If you are look­ing for good, cur­rent infor­ma­tion on web acces­si­bil­ity issues there is a long list of peo­ple who you should fol­low before Curb Cut.

That said, I care very much about dis­abil­ity issues. Curb Cut has been an acces­si­bil­ity blog writ­ten pri­mar­ily for read­ers already inter­ested in acces­si­bil­ity issues. How­ever, depend­ing on your past expe­ri­ence you may or may not give a crap about dis­abil­ity issues.

My inter­est in web acces­si­bil­ity orig­i­nated from my rela­tion­ships with two of my broth­ers who were born with Down syn­drome. Like a good brother should, I wanted to make the web a friend­lier place for them. Well, it turns out that Patrick has no use for the Inter­net. Dallin Paul is a heavy Inter­net user, but thus far has been able to find every America’s Fun­ni­est Home Video Peo­ple Get­ting Hurt Col­lec­tion and Power Ranger video on YouTube with­out any prob­lem. If my goal is really to make the world a bet­ter place for them then it is time to refo­cus my efforts. There is lit­tle I could to for the Inter­net that would make it more use­ful to Patrick or Dallin Paul, but con­sider the following:

• Patrick has worked for over 10 years at a Uni­ver­sity food court. He works hard, is depend­able and well-liked by col­leagues and cus­tomers. Nev­er­the­less, there is very lit­tle chance that he will be offered a full-time posi­tion or any kind of benefits.
• Dallin Paul still has a fear of attend­ing church with my fam­ily because of some very unfor­tu­nate expe­ri­ences he had with Sun­day school teach­ers grow­ing up. When he does attend, he is wel­comed by some, tol­er­ated by oth­ers and ignored by every­one else.

I have spent a num­ber of years as a teacher in spe­cial ed class­rooms, trav­el­ing with Spe­cial Olympics teams and vol­un­teer­ing with var­i­ous dis­abil­ity orga­ni­za­tions. You wouldn’t know any of that from read­ing Curb Cut in the past. My dis­abil­ity expe­ri­ence is the only real value I have to offer and I pur­pose­fully kept it out of my writ­ing on web acces­si­bil­ity. Shame on me.

Here’s to a more authen­tic Curb Cut.

The Necessity of an Accessibility Checklist?

Aaron Can­non at NorthTem­ple shares an acces­si­bil­ity list he cre­ated in a post titled The Acces­si­bil­ity Check­list I Vowed I’d Never Write.

From Aaron:

When I wrote the below check­list, I attempted to answer the ques­tion, “What con­cise pieces of advice can I give to design­ers that will have the great­est impact on acces­si­bil­ity in the major­ity of cases?”

Other Check­lists

• Prin­ci­ples of Acces­si­ble Design from the National Cen­ter on Dis­abil­ity and Access to Education
• Web acces­si­bil­ity: The basics from Tren­ton Moss at Webcredible
• Eval­u­at­ing web­site acces­si­bil­ity part 2, Basic Check­points by Roger Johans­son at 456 Berea Street

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.

SXSW Accessibility Panels

I’m headed to Austin tomor­row, here is a list of some of the pre­sen­ta­tions specif­i­cally on accessibility:

• Catch­ing up with Acces­si­bil­ity: The Basics QuicklyShawn Henry.
• Acces­si­ble Rich Media by Shar­ron Rush, Susan Ger­hart, Becky Gib­son and Lisa Pap­pas
• Every­thing I Know About Acces­si­bil­ity I Learned From Star Wars by Derek Feath­er­stone
• Cook­ing up Acces­si­ble Video for the Web by Pat Ram­sey
• Core Con­ver­sa­tion: How Acces­si­ble Should Your Site Be? by Jeff Beck­ham
• Tar­get­ing Your Web Site: Acces­si­bil­ity Lit­i­ga­tion Update by Ani­tra Pavka and Michael Wasy­lik

In addi­tion there are ses­sions on inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion, web stan­dards and the ongo­ing browser wars. Audio from each of the ses­sions will be recorded and at some point made avail­able on the website.

Any ses­sions that I missed? I hope to see some of you there, you can get in touch with me here.

Social Networking Accessibility

Via Accesssites.org, a sum­mary of a 21 page report on the acces­si­bil­ity of social net­works from Abil­i­tyNet. The report ana­lyzes Face­book, MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo and Bebo and reports that they all stink. Of those 5 sites, Yahoo was the only was to receive a two-star rat­ing– that’s two starts out of five. The other four all received one star indi­cat­ing they are ‘very inaccessible’.

The Dataportability.org group has been in the news of late as a num­ber of major social net­works have become involved. While their stated mis­sion is not to make social net­works acces­si­ble for users with dis­abil­i­ties, the goal that they are work­ing towards should have that over­all effect over time. They are work­ing to pro­mote the use of exist­ing open stan­dards to facil­i­tate the shar­ing of social net­work user con­tent out­side of that net­work. Over time this will open the door to the cre­ation of more acces­si­ble inter­faces to access at least some of the data that is cur­rently avail­able only through pro­pri­etary, inac­ces­si­ble systems.

Hope­fully, the process of mak­ing user con­tent more read­ily avail­able will also lead to improve­ments in acces­si­bil­ity along the way. In the mean­time, are users with dis­abil­i­ties being left out of the social net­work­ing rev­o­lu­tion? Is any­one doing this right?

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

• 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

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.

CSS for Accessibility by Ann McMeekin

Day 13 of 24 Ways brings us CSS for Acces­si­bil­ity by Ann McMeekin. Ann dis­cusses the proper use of line-height for users with dyslexia and how to use the :focus pseudo class to let key­board users (even those using Inter­net Explorer) know when they are focused on a link.