A couple days ago I mentioned a college student’s accessible version of YouTube being used to conduct some research on web 2.0 accessibility. Here’s a quick audio demo of the web page.
Leave a CommentCategory: Accessibility
For anyone who likes to try the latest and greatest in software, a beta of Windows 7 is now available. full details with instructions on how to download and more are at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows7.
Whether you try the beta or not, there are at least two excellent resources for learning what’s happening with Windows 7 from people at Microsoft. The Engineering Windows 7 blog and The Windows Blog are resources where extensive info about how Windows7 is evolving is posted.
I’ve used the Windows 7 beta successfully with several screen readers including JAWS, Window-Eyes, System Access, and NVDA. Your mileage may very but I would suggest you run the newest versions of these programs if you do try the beta.
Leave a CommentI have loads of info and experience in most aspects of technology accessibility. This, however, is an area where I’m seeking to learn from others.
An impending change by Comcast to eliminate most analog signals means that my current solution for video recording of a Media Center PC with an analog TV tuner card will no longer work. In researching my options, I thought I’d see what anyone knew related to the state of the art, if any, there was in terms of direct access to the functionality of the set-top box?
I seem to recall some prototype software once that showed how the interface for accessibility on a set-top box might work. Did that go anyplace ever? In short is their anyone doing something good in terms of accessibility in this space I can share with Comcast and the manufacturers of the boxes?
For what it is worth, this change has nothing to do with the impending switch to digital TV for broadcasters. Instead Comcast is replacing most analog signals in their cable lineup to make room for more HD signals. My current proposed solution is looking like replacing my media center PC with a newer computer with a digital tuner card capable of handling a cable card required for decoding of digital cable signals. But at $1200 or so, it isn’t the most immediate solution I’d like to use.
A recent posting on the Google Blog announced that Google’s toolbar for Internet Explorer added accessibility enhancements. The gist of the posting is that keyboard access to the various toolbar buttons as well as better support for Microsoft Active Accessibility has been added.
This release adds support for Windows Accessibility APIs (used by screen readers, etc.) and enables keyboard navigation and access. From inside a browser with Toolbar installed, the global shortcut Alt+G places your cursor in the Google Toolbar search box. If you’re using a screen reader, you’ll hear “Google Toolbar Search”. Pressing the Tab key brings keyboard focus to the button placed immediately after the search box, and right and left arrow keys move focus between buttons. More information on keyboard access is documented in the Toolbar Help Center.
Using the keyboard access in the toolbar is straight forward. From within Internet Explorer, press alt+g and focus is placed in a search edit box for searching Google. Press tab once and focus moves to a search button. From that point use left and right arrows to explore and access the various toolbar buttons. Enter typically activates the button with focus, while down arrow brings up options for that button. Finally the typical keyboard method for right click/context of shift+F10 or the application key on your keyboard brings up further options on many buttons. It seems like a nice job of improving keyboard access here.
Leave a CommentColleagues at work frequently talk about del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. These are just two web sites and services in the category of social browsing. The theory behind these kinds of web sites is simple. You find web pages that are interesting and mark them in some fashion. Then others who are users of the services can see what you find interesting and correspondingly you find what others with similar interests as you are browsing. It all sounds grand and I suppose anything from marginally interesting to quite handy depending on how much you want to tap the collective experiences of others browsing the web.
Signing up for StumpleUpon and del.icio.us is what’s largely the standard for new accounts with services on the web today. And it is here that we see yet another example of the unsocial web.
StumbleUpon and del.icio.us both use the typical CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) for web sites of requiring entry of the characters from a graphical version of a word to stop hackers, spammers and other ne’er-do-wells from causing problems. Unfortunately these tests have a tendency to lockout honest people too, especially if you are not able to see the characters to enter.
Solutions to the inaccessibility of these tests do exist that can improve the situation to some degree. The most typical is to offer an audio version of the characters. There is a more in depth discussion of the issues around the inaccessibility of CAPTCHA in this paper.
I have no firsthand knowledge as to why StumbleUpon or del.icio.us do not offer audio solutions for this problem. I suspect like most situations, the inaccessibility of these tests was not known to the individuals responsible for implementation at the particular companies.
Like many with disabilities who encounter these challenges, I’ve started the contact process to see if either of the companies in question here offer alternative sign-up solutions or are aware of the issues. We’ll see what kind of results happen.
My own reaction to the general class of problem here runs the gambit of emotions. I fully understand the reasons why these tests are in place and as a general practice will not fault individual web sites for needing them. Nor can I entirely blame the web sites for not knowing about the need to have some solutions to the accessibility challenges in place.
The simple fact is that societal awareness of disability and related issues is still generally low. It requires a relatively high degree of awareness to know that people who are blind can actually access the computer and web sites but also that this access is not magical and does not work perfectly.
All that said, it is annoying, frustrating, and sometimes downright anger-inducing to be on the wrong side of anything that blocks you from trying to do what you want. In this case I’ll give the contact and awareness routines some time to work themselves out with a taciturn acceptance that the social web is sometimes not as social as we think. I’d like to join the party too.
Leave a CommentAs anyone who starts using Office 2007 likely knows, one of the more dramatic changes is the elimination of traditional menus and toolbars. These have been replaced with what Office calls the Ribbon. The short explanation of this new user interface is that more commands are displayed at a time without having to hunt through various submenus, dialogs and toolbars.
While the Office team has done work to try and support Office 2003 hotkeys through a method that let’s you type those keys and have them still work, commands themselves have been completely rearranged. For example if I remember that in Office 2003 the hotkey sequence to bring up the Paragraph Format dialog was alt+o,p, I can still press this sequence. However if I only remember that a particular feature I use was located on a certain menu, then it is a bit of an exploration expedition to find the new location.
The Office Online pages have some very handy documents to assist with this challenge. For each Office 2007 application that had an Office 2003 equivalent, there is an article explaining the new UI. Better yet each article has a link to an Excel workbook that lists each menu and toolbar from the Office 2003 version of the program and explains where to find the equivalent command in Office 2007. My Paragraph Format command for example can now be found on the ribbon under Home | Paragraph | Dialog Box Launcher.
Here are links to the articles and the Excel workbooks for the three Office programs I use the most, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
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As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, at least one U.S. court has said that our currency needs to be made more accessible. Since that time things have heated up a bit.
The treasury department has appealed the court decision largely on what the treasury department sees as the cost of making currency accessible.
But in their petition to the appeals court, government lawyers argued that varying the size of denominations could cause significant burdens on the vending machine industry and cost the Bureau of Engraving and Printing an initial investment of $178 million and $37 million to $50 million in new printing plates.
The American Council of the Blind (ACB) who filed the original legal action has vowed to continue the fight.
The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has sided with the government in the appeal of the court ruling on accessible currency. The NFB’s position is outlined in an editorial that ran in the New York Times.
NPR ran a story featuring both sides of the debate.
Finally there’s now an online petition directed to the U.S. congress in support of accessible currency. As of this writing the petition has close to 1800 signatures, mine included.
One CommentNPR’s Weekend Edition featured accessible audio games today.
Leave a CommentI’m sure the court fights and battles will go on for years but at least for the first time today a court has recognized that the U.S. Government does not comply with our own laws on accessibility when it comes to money. Maybe sometime I won’t have to ask others what the bills in my wallet are.
Sure their are strategies (folding money) and gadgets to read bills but the fact is that U.S. money is not accessible today. It should be in my opinion. How can we claim we as a nation want meaningful accessibility when something as simple as our money doesn’t meet that standard?
The NYT has this article on the most current legal action over online accessibility. This time around it is the NFB against Target, with the case claiming Target’s web site is not accessible.
As the article points out, this is really just the latest in a series of legal actions to apply some sort of accessibility standard to the web. The typical question in these cases boils down to whether the web can be considered a place of public accommodation.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was written before the web became the ubiquitous part of society that it is today. That’s unfortunate because it has left room for much ambiguity in this area. Perhaps the legislation should have been stronger in the beginning to allow for more applicability in new circumstances but I think the spirit of the law is obvious—do not exclude parts of society from what you offer.
Whether it is this case or another down the road, I tend to think at some point the ADA or another legal standard will be applied to the web. Today it is mostly government web sites that have a legal obligation to meet accessibility requirements of Section 508 here in the U.S. There are other legal standards in the international arena as well.
Of course the real fun’s going to be determining what constitutes an accessible web site. Here in the target suit you see disagreement over even that basic fact.
The National Federation of the Blind sued Target, contending that the company’s inaction violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because the Web site is essentially an extension of its other public accommodations, and as such, should be easily accessible to people with disabilities.
A Target spokeswoman would not comment on those assertions, but in court the company offered testimony from three blind users rebutting the federation’s arguments.
From my experience pinning down exactly what’s accessible is often a challenge. I’ve successfully purchased items from Target’s online site on several occasions. Does that mean the site’s accessible? I also know of web sites that I’ve not been able to use but know that the reason was attributable to the particular screen reader I was using at the time.
Then too comes in the question of accessible versus usable. It is ironic that the article site’s Amazon’s “accessible” option here as an example of a company doing the right thing.
Amazon, she added, “is already generally usable for people with screen readers.” It has offered a text-only, streamlined site designed for such devices (amazon.com/access).
Ignoring the entire question of having a separate site for accessibility, opening the referenced Amazon.com web page one can quickly find a basic accessibility issue that violates any known standard on accessible web design. Specifically, the edit box used for entering search terms is missing the HTML title or label tag. These are used to give the box a menaingful name for screen readers and other assistive technology. Today this box reads simply as “edit” to a screen reader.
Now does this make the site inaccessible? By definition one could probably say yes. That said, the page is clearly usable. If there were multiple edit boxes on this same page, the missing labels could become quite a problem though.
What about user skill and knowledge? What level of familiarity with the web , access technology and such should be expected when considering accessibility and usability?