Gary Barber on Killing Accessibility

This is well worth the read, here are just a couple of gems from Gary Barber’s article titled Kill Accessibility:

The old UX catch call is never truer here – we are not the users. The disparity between us and the people we are really working for, with accessibility, is sometimes just too great for us to even get a idea of what it is like, no matter how many videos of people using assistive technology we see.

And this zinger:

In reality there is no socially inspired public relations value in accessibility. A business can be seen to get more value out of sponsoring a guide dog than making their web site accessible.

The rest of the article is well worth the read. (via @scenariogirl)

Accessibility Fail, Fail, Fail, Fail and a Win

After seeing a number of accessibility fails posted on the Fail Blog:


picture of stairs with an accessibility symbol on them


stairway entry with an accessibility sign on it


Impossibly steep ramp going into a building


Poster for disability awareness month encouraging people to take pictures of people with disabilities

It was great to see this one on their companion blog, Epic Win:

Person using a wheelchair being passed above the crowd at a heavy metal concernt

Open Education and Accessibility

The Open Education Conference is happening right now in Vancouver, but is also offering a number of ways to participate remotely, including live and archived streams of the event, or simply follow the tag opened09 just about anywhere (Twitter opened09, Flickr opened09, Delicious opened09, Blogsearch opened09, etc…)

The theme of this year’s conference is “Crossing the Chasm” and while I was disappointed that there weren’t more sessions addressing disability accessibility directly, there is a tremendous amount of value in almost every session I have watched to anyone interested in any kind of accessibility. Through the conference website I was able to find a couple of good resources on the accessibility of open educational resources for people with disabilities:

One of the resources I learned about today is folksemantic, a service and set of tools to help identify open educational resources. A quick search for accessibility resources yielded the following shareable learning resources:

If you do join in the conversation, be sure to add yourself to the virtual attendee list!

Game On

Dallin Paul

Dallin Paul Looking Good

Congratulations to my youngest brother Dallin Paul who graduates from high school today. After high school, many students with disabilities are offered the opportunity to to participate in some type of post-high education program. Dallin Paul is graduating with an exceptionally large cohort of peers in special education and because of poor planning on the part of the school district his options for a post high education have been severely limited.

Long story short, the school district picked the wrong family to try and place a student in a converted gym for a classroom with little opportunity for community involvement or interaction with any nondisabled peers. If anyone from the school district is reading this, did you not realize that the Phillips family has multiple Special Education degrees, a Master’s degree in Rehabilitation Counseling, Part of a Doctoral degree in Rehabilitation Counseling and a Juris Doctorate? On top of that we have a combined lot of years as teachers and administrators in special education and direct care of person with disabilities. Game on.

Mad Pride

Newsweek tagline: “Why some mentally ill patients are rejecting their medication and making the case for ‘mad pride.'”

From The Growing Push for “Mad Pride”.

I am familiar with various movements that celebrate the positive aspects of difference such as Disability Pride, Deaf Pride and Crip Pride, but only recently came across the idea of Mad Pride, a movement that celebrates the positive aspects of mental health diagnoses. The movement has been around for awhile, but a recent Newsweek article was the first I learned of it, at least that I remember since I received my own mental health diagnoses.

There is much good that comes from accepting a mental health diagnoses and “coming out” to friends and family. Benefits include an increased understanding, a sense of community with others with like experiences and a greater openness to receiving help and managing lifestyle. Of course there can also be negative consequences, but I believe that the perception of those is generally greater than the reality.

On the other end of the spectrum from “mad pride” there are many who suffer from the debilitating effects of “mad shame”- an unwillingness to acknowledge a mental health diagnoses in ones self. In between those two extremes are the masses of people who have a mental health diagnoses that treat it as an illness managed through some combination of pharmaceuticals, self-medication or other treatment options.

When first diagnosed with a mental illness, I found myself somewhere in the middle- never ashamed, but neither was I anxious to shout it from the rooftop. Since that first diagnoses there have been long periods of darkness and frustration, I’m in a good place now with a completely different diagnoses (ADHD). I now freely share my diagnoses and am feeling successful in work and family life and my ADHD is a an important part of that success.

Additional Resources

Accessibility Blog and Twitter Roundup from WebAIM

Jared Smith has posted an updated list of the list of accessibility blogs that he follows. In addition, he has added a list of Twitter users “that post frequent and insightful messages on web accessibility”.

Disability Perspective

A “man on crutches” is sharing the experience of just one small part of his day affected by his disability, getting a seat on the bus in the seats reserved for riders with disabilities. He has done an excellent job of conveying his experience and perspective through images:

People Who Sit In The Disability Seats When I’m Standing On My Crutches

The Promise of Accessible Readability

Guideline 3.1 of the WCAG 2.0 states “Make text content readable and understandable.”. There are lots of ways to measure readability, but today I came across an example (Thanks Jeff) of what might be referred to as ‘extreme readability’.

Tar Heel Reader is a collaboration between the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and the Computer Science Department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is a collection of over 3000 online books in an extremely online readable format. From the site:

Each book can be speech enabled and accessed using multiple interfaces (i.e. switches, alternative keyboards, touch screens, and dedicated AAC devices). The books may be downloaded as slide shows in PowerPoint, Impress, or Flash format.

A high school student with an intellectual disability may have difficulty finding age-appropriate reading material if he reads at 1st grade reading level. Enter Tar Heal Reader, not only is the text extremely readable, but it is also accessible in a number of different ways.

Go check out some of the books or even write your own.


screenshot of a online book on the Dallas Cowboys

Each of the books listed on the Tar Heels site was created one at a time, a model that doesn’t scale very well. At the other end of the spectrum is Readable (or Readability). Readable allows a user to take one aspect of readability (formatting of text) and apply it to any website.


screenshot with options on formatting text

Imagine now a tool that could take any paragraph (Like Readable) and converts that paragraph into some type of text or multimedia that is understandable to any user, at whatever level of understanding that user specifies. Cool.

What other projects or efforts are laying the groundwork for this type of accessibility to exist one day?

Additional resources on making your content more accessible to users with disabilities

See the Person, Not the Disability

Great video I came across at walking . is . overrated:

In his post titled, Some Sweet Disability Thinking, Red references a post from Mark Smith:

If you told me of all of the complications of your disability – physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, economically – and I simply replied, “So what?” would you be offended?

In fact, I give this very response to my friends – and, more importantly, myself – every day when it comes to the challenges of living with disability: You and I have disability hardships, so what?

Read the rest from Mark Smith’s post titled Three Pages in the Trash.

“So what?”

Never Leave Home Without a Spider-Man Costume

This is a great story from Thailand where a student with autism had a panic attack and climbed onto the ledge outside of his third floor classroom. It was the student’s first day at a new school and no one was able to convince him to come back inside, so the local fire department was called.

Fireman Somchai Yoosabai shows up and hears that the student loves comic book heroes. It just so happens that Somchai hasa Spider-Man costume that he keeps in his locker. He puts costume on and quickly and safely convinces the student to come back inside.

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