DIIA Blog

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched the National Broadband Plan in a forum at Thompson Conference Center on Monday. In a Daily Texan article today, Commissioner Meredith Baker said, “The Internet is a critical educational tool. We came to Austin first. It is a model for educational benefits over the Internet.”

Featured at the forum were high school students who have benefited from three UT-Austin Continuing Education programs–the UT Online High School, the Migrant Student Graduation Enhancement program, and the Language Learners at the University Center for Hispanic Achievement (LUCHA) program.

DIIA Faculty Development Specialist Leslie Jarmon received a grant from the Transforming Undergraduate Education program to support a University of Texas System innovative teaching initiative based in Second Life. Dr. Jarmon leads the nation’s first system-wide program to stimulate creative approaches to instruction, increase student access and success, and manage or reduce instructional costs.

The program will “use the virtual world environment to cultivate working communities of learning and discovery transcending the complex, interdisciplinary UT System, empowering students to become innovators and thought leaders throughout Texas, the U.S., and the world,” according to this week’s DIIA spotlight article by Michael Barrett.

The Chronicle of Higher Education picked up on the project here, and Dr. Jarmon was featured in a UT-Austin OnCampus accolade here.

Today’s The Wired Campus announces a new program that indicates book publishers are taking steps to improve accessibility to electronic class materials for vision-impaired students.

AccessText, now in beta, has created an online database that makes it simpler for disability-student services at colleges to track down alternative forms of course materials from book publishers. When electronic versions don’t exist for a particular book, the college would get permission to scan the pages so a student could either make the font larger, or use other text-to-speech or refreshable Braille reading devices.

It’s a step in the right direction.

Even after posting approximately 60 entries, clearing 2,364 spam comments, and live-blogging SXSWi and AccessU, I still can hardly believe it has been a whole year since the DIIA Blog came online.  The experts say that a blog is only as good as its content, and I sincerely hope that readers found the DIIA Blog to be a rich source of up-to-date information, insight, amusement, resources, and perspective.

It was personally gratifying to see page hits approaching the 100,000 mark while live-blogging at SXSWi, knowing that we were spreading the word about DIIA among the industry movers and shakers.

AccessU, although smaller in scale, brought attention to the vital importance of accessibility to everyone who uses the World Wide Web. It was there that I coined my mantra, “Curb cuts for computers!” as an analogy for how accessible design benefits all of us. Glenda Sims (UT), Sharron Rush (Knowbility), and all the caring geniuses who developed the standards have made me a life-long advocate of designing for usability. We will all most likely face obstacles in communicating via the Internet as we age, so why not plan ahead?

Most of all, I have enjoyed learning more about the world we live in–from my blogging colleagues, and from the research I’ve engaged in to find something worth blogging about. I hope to hear from more DIIA voices in the years ahead, bringing wider-ranging, thought-provoking information to our attention, and engaging in dialogue through comments–although not the spammy ones, please!

If you use a Mac platform, Amy Miller has developed some nifty widgets to ping you when a new post goes up. Dana DeLoca, DIIA’s creative videographer and photographer has added a rich visual dimension through the “Photo of the Day” to complement our wordy posts, along with her fantastic sidekick AJ Landeros (Mr. iPhone). Truly, it takes a village…

My birthday wish for the DIIA Blog is to see it expand and grow, touching more lives, enhancing the University of Texas at Austin experience for faculty, staff, and students, and drawing in a wider circle of commenters to challenge and engage us in fruitful dialogue.

Blog on!

Carlos Ramon is with Idea II in Houston, Texas. Semantic markup allows humans AND machines to read a Web site. Markup keeps the clutter out of a screen reader, AND improves SEO. This point came up all the time at the conference–accessibility can will improve traffic to your site. Google acts like a screen reader. Carlos brought up the markup for the Google site, and you can get around it using a keyboard only.

Why is building the semantic web into design important? Because it will cost us much more later to remediate. More importantly, using simple semantic coding helps everyone, not just differently-abled people who may have these constraints: old browsers, missing plug-ins, no speakers/headphones, small displays (with the exception of mobile devices), noisy environments.

Accessibility enhances SEO (search engine optimization). Both Google and commercial screen readers only look at content and semantic markup, not styles or style sheets. If Jaws can easily navigate the site, it will rise in Google.

An accessible site does not = ugly..

Most CMSs are good with accessibility, but use the same principles that you would with a static site and make sure it’s accessible.

Carlos ran the Jaws screen reader on several Web sites, including Nascar and Knowbililty. Knowbility won hands-down. Code is very clean, headers used properly, skip to links, et al, works. Nascar has a hole where the video player lives. Code is messy, hours of listening to “http://….,” and very little content.

Other screen readers include NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access–open source), HAL (Home Automated Living), and the readers that accompany Macs  and PCs (Apple V/O, Window-Eyes).

It may be appropriate to include screen magnification accessibility, through zoomtext, or by using Lynx, an open source, text-based browser.

An accessibly designed site will have style sheets that contain valid code (develop in XHTML in “strict” mode), structural markup (only 1 H1 header), text equivalents (alt txt), or long descriptions (longdesc) when appropriate, image maps, skip navs, tabbable forms and data tables (not layout tables) with proper headings. If you must use Flash, code alt txt to alert reader that they won’t be able to see it. If you use dropdown menus in forms, you must also include a “submit” button to move forward, not simply click one of the choices–otherwise, you have no warning that it will take you directly to your choice.

Use good descriptive field names in forms–instead of “Name1,” nest sections under “My Information,” etc.

Set up a QA testing environment with HTML validators, a wide selection of internet browsers in different versions, screen readers, and color/contrast settings (Juicy Studio, WCAG’s contrast checker). Additional tools: NCAM Accessibility ZA Favelet, Web Accessibility Toolbar, Section 508 Toolbar, MAGpie, and FireBug (looks for mistakes in code).

Ron Lucey, Policy and Accessibility Manager for the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services (DARS) and Dan Kinnunen, Accessibility Specialist for DARS led this session.

Accessibility policy is mandated for every Texas state agency and university, with a deadline of June 30, 2009, including a plan for Web remediation. “Electronic curb cuts.”

Policy development is an ongoing policy, extends to the maintenance of the policy. Texas Government Code 2054.45, Subchapter M - 1 TAC 206, TAC 213. Says much the same thing as Federal 508.

There is a lawsuit from the National Federation of the Blind to the State of Texas. Suing for inaccessible Web-based human resources. The Target lawsuit–place of public accommodation. ADA does not have accessibility guidelines. Section 504 - prohibits discrimination based on disability in programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance. Section 508 - the standards live here.

1. Gain top level support and sponsorship

2. Organize a Web accessibility committee and needed subcommittees with representation from all stakeholders.

3. Apply sound project management principles and a project charter with planned deliverables.

4. Plan for effective governance to address committee process for decision making.

WebAIM

Intranet must be accessible as well. This ensures that qualified individuals with accessibility needs can succeed. Having an accessible intranet can’t wait til after you hire them. Must include other areas of Electronic and Information Resources (EIR). Any interconnected, subsystem that stores or transmits data. Any goods and services contracted by Texas. Phone service has to be accessible as well. Blogs fall under accessibility process.

Accessibility comes about through design. Don’t trust, TEST! Policy must include testing.

What doesn’t come under policy but must be compliant in order to do business with: software applications, multimedia, telecommunications, self-contained products and office equipment, procurement. Self-contained and embedded technologies (kiosks). Electronic voting. Voting kiosk should be self-voicing. Fax/copier, etc. falls under embedded products. Purchasing–write into contract accessibililty requirements.

By all means review what other universities/agencies have done. State borrowed from UT, who borrowed from Cal State. Taxpayers should not have to pay for policies more than once–plagiarism is OK.

Draft guidelines addressing HOW to meed the policy. Policy may be a short, one paragraph, concentrate on how to approach accessibility for each area. Iterative process. Define policy review, comment period, and approval process flow. Who do you need to sell it to next? Who are you accountable to? Build in the time for reasonable review and number of reviews.

Must include remedies to help other agents comply–don’t have to refuse the contract. Remedies should be IN the contract, along with the requirement for compliance.

Policy does not tend to change, until circumstances over time require it.

Procedures = can change frequently. Protocol for implementation (”how to”), are action oriented, outline the steps you expect and sequence to perform those steps. Work group must have the authority to edit procedures. Council of accessibility coordinators. Who is responsible? ID current and ongoing training needs. Integrate acesibility into existing systems: procurement, application/Web development, document control.

Implementation is ongoing. DHHS has 50,000 employees. Will inform/train them all about accessibility compliance, focusing on the various areas. Web-based training on accessibility.

Developing a communication plan to go back and educate where needed. Change management is paramount. Real consequences if we don’t follow. Example of mgr. putting up non-accessible page. Was told could either ask the commissioner for an exception, or make it compliant, or take it down.

Will need tools (WC3 to find free or low-cost tools) to determine initial compliance leves, develop remediation plan, then maintaing and improve compliance. Firefox IE have accessibility tools available. Can’t test large numbers of pages, but should be used on each page.

Audit/compliance - how and by whom the standard will be enforced, and what consequences will befall those who violate the policy? Each content contributor owns their own page. Single solution in footer that lists all approved plug-ins. Implement the same solution agency-wide where possible.

Define exceptions and who can grant them. Continually test and document, including alternative means of access for exceptions. Alternate means must do the same thing. How can a disabled manager access a site that can’t be read by Jaws reader (i.e. training records)? Usually end up with separate but unequal. May have to send it out to another division or agency, and what are the guidelines. Some solutions are tech, some human-based. Instead of entering data through site, enter via phone.

Ex. policies: Texas Health and Human Services (THHS), UT System, Texas Department of Insurance, IBM. Law, Texas Admin Code, policy, procedure, and coding to comply. Self-assessment tools are helpful, including checklists, forms, applications, slide shows, videos, PDFs.

3 million Texans with disabilities, only 700,000 are visually impaired. 1 in 10 have reading or graphic disabilities. People with fine motor challenges benefit. We all benefit. Our friends, our neighbors, relatives, one more tax-payer. As California and Texas go, so goes the nation. We are leaders in developing and implementing accessibility policy and procedures.

Pat Ramsey, Principal, slash25.com. What’s your definition of social media? From participants: 1) where content is user-generated, 2) forums, 3) e-mail groups, listservs, 4) online space where people can communicate and collaborate, 5) any space that allows you to build community, 6) media away from the Web. From traditional media sources, on-line communities–broad term.

Define: Social Media (Wikipedia, Bottle PR, Search Engine Watch). Ramsey defines as the online equivalient to “The Kitchen At A Party.” Increasing number of social media sites, some are beginning to fold, being compared to the .com bubble.

Social Media succeeds: 1) people come together with little regard to geographic barriers, 2) allows the crowd of humanity to reach information otherwise unattainable, 3) sparks creativity and imagination.

SMS is the only tool for much of sub-saharan Africa. Convert text to e-mail messages and send.

Hash tags on Twiter.

Social Media steps in it: 1) when there is no method of skipping repetitive content (skip-naves, skip links), 2) when there are not text equivalents (alts) for images–social media sites tend to lean towards the heavy-image category of sites, 3) when there are little to no means of identifying the purposes of inputs, controls, and text areas.

Facebook–automatically generated link names that go on forever, have no clue what it is. Other problems: form labels. No title attributes–no way of knowing what to put where. Has no area for alts for photos. Twitter does alts on thumbnails in timeline, automatically generated by user name, so can link to other users.

Competitive market causes folks to rush stuff out without planning in accessibility. User-generated, and users are not educated about accessibility. Ex.: YouTube. Even developers don’t know–lack of awareness, certainly no testing.

Text alternative problems: thumbnails in discussion threads, images in user photo galleries, avatars in forums. CAPTCHAS–alt attributes can be problematic for CAPTCHAS as their purpose it to reduce accessibility for computer programs (robots), but maintain accessibility for ONLY normal sighted humans.

Audio CAPTCHAs offer greater flexibility, but still pose challenges to user. Difficult to understand. Possible solution: validating questions (”What color is the sky?”). When you make it difficult for users to interact, you’re not serviing your folks. CAPTCHAs have already been broken. Better to rely on your e-mail spam functions. If commercial products offer solutions, most likely Black Hat hackers already broke them two years ago.

Information, relationships, and labels are problematic. Labels must be properly associated with a field via the “for” and “id” attributes. Jaws sees title attributes used in fields.

Looked at how three social media sites do 3 major functions.  Facebook minuses: form fields unlabeled, no title attributes; audio CAPTCHAs difficult to hear; lack of alts on images. Facebook pluses: help page available regarding accessibility. Works better on mobile site: m.facebook.com. text/xhtml+xml means it works with IE, simpler version of site, easier to use for most things, faster loading, *login and other form fields still unlabeled, much easier for screen reader use.

Twitter: “What are you doing” textarea properly labeled. Images conveying information have appropriate alt attributes. Skip nav present. “Following,” “followers,” “updates” links start with number value rather than object–maybe invert them. Greasemonkey scripts (Firefox add-on, can write them yourself) available to enhance accessibility. Third-party accessible alternative. Hover function that shows links isn’t readable by screen reader.

Twitter Mobile: application/xhtml+xml will load in Firefox, not IE. No images, stripped down text, no sidebar, etc.

New solution for Twitter w/Jaws: “Jawter.” Allows you to get updates, with audial alert. SXSWi broke AT&T’s network, killed Twitter. SMS worked, however! Don’t activate “all text messages” or will kill your phone.

WordPress (.org, not .com): 2 areas of concern–accessibility of published content, accessibility of the administrative interface. Function of their CMS system. Make sure headings are correct, forms labeled properly, colors aren’t out of whack–test with the same steps you do for any Web page. Templates then build pages, propagating accessibility code throughout all pages.

Administrative interface: can be edited just as theme templates, but edits will be lost when you upgrade. Post title input has no label or title attrib, no skip nav, Visual Editor uses ifram with HTML page for textarea–body of the post. Good: alt-z jumps straight to the body of the post, however, this should be made known to users, using a heading or label that’s positioned offscreen. A few other keyboard shortcuts, but the code doesn’t tell the screen reader.

Developers know that things can be better. The developer community is making strides–distributed, back-channel development: TPG-notifier. WAI-ARIA.

Iterate: find the accessibility hooks in your social media app of choice; share your findings so others don’t slog through unnecessarily–you may find people have written workarounds and fixes. Communicate with developers, submit patches if possible.

Session by Tom Jewett. Former teacher at Cal State Long Beach. Worked on getting the 23 Cal State campus Web sites accessible. Along with other experts, authored the techniques portion of WCAG 2.0. Cuts for Curbs is obvious. Barriers to internet access are not so obvious. Barriers are every bit as real, we just don’t recognize them, especially if we are sighted and manually dexterous.

508 implemented in 1997. Web had been around only since 1992, so the guidelines have been outdated.

Content standards for developers, user-agent standards, online environment platform standards.

W3C is the committee which worked out the standards. It’s a tremendous advance once you learn to deal with it.

WCAG 2.0 is not going to contain any technology. Web site must be based on four Principles (POUR) in whatever mode people use: perceivable, operable, understandable (including ADD, dyslexia, 2nd language–which helps everyone), and robust.

That’s just the first level. For each of the principles, there are guidelines (1.1)–what are the characteristics of what is perceivable, etc. Under guidelines, there are success criteria (1.1.1), going to the specific. Once they get to that level, the official recommendation stops–an entirely separate document to cover the technology–formative, not required. The principles are concrete. This allows the technology to evolve, to encompass things like social media, etc. and to have the best chance to be successful. You can achieve 508 in a much more documentable manner. If one person can do it at 2 a.m. in the dorm, everyone should be able to do it at 2 a.m. in the dorm with equal access.

If you meet 508, you meet most all of WCAG 2.0.

In <img alt=”….”>, image is the element, alternate is the attribute. Longdesc (long description) is useful for non-text content: charts and diagram. Helpful for all–he writes data dictionaries, etc. which help in general understanding of the image.

Live-blogging from the 2009 John Slatin AccessU at St. Edward’s University. Sharron Rush, director of Knowbility, is kicking off the two-day conference focused on user-centered design–making the Web accessible for everyone.

No one is an accessibility expert by themselves. We all need to network to bring awareness to our institutions, and share ways we can help champion usability.

Web usability experts from North America are in attendance, with one notable exception: Derek Featherstone took a family vacation to Mexico just as the H1N1 hit. After the problems they encountered when returning to their home in Canada, the family decided that it would be best if Derek stayed home. Mark Moody from Adobe is filling in to instruct Derek’s classes.

Whitney Quesenbery, chair of the federal committee writing the standards for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), is the keynote speaker. Design is part of usability. Legislators are designing by law, sometimes with no thought to usability. Think in terms of what to design, not how. Moving from accessibility to usability. Testing is paramount. “Better Ballots” written in response to usability at the polls. The largest university in the UK is online.

Less text written more clearly. More descriptive headings.  UX = user experience.  Jean Luc Doumont “To sharpen your cross cultural skills, experience more cultures first hand.”

Want to see, touch, and hear about the future of higher education? Then you definitely won’t want to miss the Innovative Instructional Technology Awards Program (IITAP) ceremony this afternoon from 2:00-4:00 p.m. in the Texas Union Ballroom. Exemplars in instructional technology from across the UT-Austin campus will be featured in a new “See and Touch” environment, available for your browsing pleasure. Supported by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost, top winners are recognized with cash prizes and iPod Touch devices, (mobile devices courtesy of Apple, Inc.).

DIIA staff have been working extra hard to create an exciting celebration, complete with interactive media, avatars, and the opportunity to discuss this year’s eye-opening projects in depth with the faculty and student developers. Oh, and did I mention groovy refreshments?

For a taste of amazing classroom technology that has evolved into nationally-recognized, ongoing, fully-supported projects, check out our past winners.

The IITAP Awards ceremony is the place to be–hope to see you there!