Tackling Accessibility Issues
Access to all of our K12 Online
Conference websites is critical. Lack
of access can create barriers and awareness of those barriers should be
foremost in our minds as we plan our online activities. Check the
resources, suggestions, and issues we have gathered for you to help
make everyone welcome. Enjoy the conference! ~ The K12Online07 Accessibility Committee: Lee Baber, Kaj Rietberg, James Stanger, Jeremy Brown and Karen Janowski
General Accessibilty Web Sites:
Browsers
Keep in mind several different kinds of browsers that might:
- render web content as Braille - transferring information into
Braille is done by means of a Braille display, which is a strip located
in front of the computer keyboard. The strip consists of 40 or 80
signs. A fine mechanism controls small pins which go up and down and
represent the letters of the Braille alphabet. Those who have been
taught to work with Braille displays read the text with their
fingertips. The Braille display is much more precise than a speech
output system, because it is able to check the spelling much faster. A
speech output system has to spell out words it does not recognize.
- using voice synthesis - read
a web page through a speaker. Such a user agent (browser) might also be
used by non-handicapped people to access the web in their car, while
they're driving. Websites are interpreted by the speech output system
or the Braille display in a way that lets visually impaired people
comprehend the contents and navigate in the WWW. This is only possible,
however, when the pages are designed to comply with the rules for
increasing accessibility. This compatibility is important, because the
screen readers have certain limits and requirements in terms of the
design.
- blow up the font size very large, for those with limited vision.
- browser may handle only text.
- additionally,
there are also ways of specifying the language (English, Spanish, etc.)
in use on a particular page. And this specification would be used by,
e.g. a voice-synthesizer, to pick appropriate pronunciation.
- Opera - provides many great tools and accessibility tools out of the box. http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/ Some examples are:
- Zoom - You can zoom the contents of any Web page from 20%-1000% using the zoom dropdown or the + and - keys.
- Text
size and colors - You can change text size and color, link styling or
background color to your liking in Tools > Preferences > Web
pages.
- User style sheets - Opera comes with a set of ready-made style sheets, including accessibility style.
Web Site Standards
Keep the following in mind: "In order to meet the standards, websites need to write text descriptions of pictures and multimedia files; need to be easily navigable using text commands, mouse, or keyboard alone; and should avoid frames and pop-up windows
that screen readers can't translate, among other things. Remember, even
when using Web 2.0 tools, you can make choices to help with
accessibility. Decide what out of a set of options would be 'less bad'
for all users of your site. Pleases look over these Checkpoints for
creating accessible webpages.
- WebXACT (formally known as Bobby) - is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy
issues. The WebXACT accessibility checker is an automated tool enabling
you to check some of the accessibility issues your web pages may have.
However, like all automated accessibility checking tools, it must be
used in conjunction with manual testing to gain a complete picture of
the accessibility of your pages. For instance the tool will be able to
check that there are no missing "alts" for images, but it will not be
able to determine whether or not the alt text assigned is meaningful
and appropriate. http://webxact.watchfire.com/
- Wave (http://www.wave.webaim.org/wave35/index.jsp): Similar, and likely more detailed than Bobby.
- Web Standards and Accessibility Guide - Queen's University design tips for colour, font, navigation, image maps, photos, images, and icons.
- CHECKPOINTS for creating accessible webpages.
Color Blindness
Screen Size Testing
- AnyBrowser.com -
http://www.anybrowser.com/ScreenSizeTest.html Kind of cool - it allows
you to see what your sites will look like using various resolutions.
Not just relevant to true accessibility - great coding practice.
Text Readability
- JuicyStudio - And don't just
focus on technical accessibility. What about the cognitive dissonance
caused by prose that is difficult to understand? Here's a site that
purports to help folks make stuff easier to read: http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php The tool might not be all that great, but using it might help raise questions about site readability.
- Adobe
- From the Kings of Ruining Accessibility Everywhere (Adobe) Flash and
PDF are major accessibility killers. Here are some tips from the
creators themselves. http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/
- Font Style and Size Guide - Queen's University describes how to decide what font and size to use
Browser Add-ons
- Firefox Web Developer Add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
- The Web Developer extension http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
- Accessibar:
For end users, but understanding how this tool works from the end user
perspective helps teach about accessibility issues (e.g.,font choice,
text to speech recognition issues, Flash issues)
http://accessibar.mozdev.org/
- Vision Australia Accessibar - What should be a Firefox add-on, but is a stand-alone product: http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/ais/toolbar/
Disability Tools
Text to Speech
- Talkr - http://www.talkr.com/ - allows you to listen
to your favorite text-only web sources rather than read them. If you
can point it to an RSS or Atom feed it will convert that feed from text
to speech. Talkr can also provide you with a podcast of that source. Talkr will keep tabs on your feeds and send audio to your computer as those audio files become available.
- Odiogo
- http://www.odiogo.com/ - free text to speech for blog and other
online text conversion, can be embedded in your blog. Odiogo downloads
the latest articles from the registered RSS feed. It extracts the
relevant text from the page and converts it into a high quality
spoken-word MP3 file that can be listened to on an iPod, MP3 player,
phone or the PC. It's that simple and powerful!
- Word Talk: http://www.wordtalk.org.uk/
- ReadPlease!: http://www.readplease.com/
- NaturalReader: http://www.naturalreaders.com/
- Google Gadget RSS to Speech: http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/rsstospeech.html
- Google Translator WITH AT&T Text to Speech! http://translate.1888usa.com/
- Click Speak extension for FireFox Browser: http://clickspeak.clcworld.net/downloads.html
- Speakonia: http://www.cfs-technologies.com/home/?id=1.4
Commenting for the Blind
- Graphical
verification (such as Captcha) prevents users who are blind from
commenting on blog posts - an alternative is WP Gatekeeper at
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/wordpress/wp-gatekeeper.html/
WP-Gatekeeper is a comment-spam defense plugin for WordPress 1.5. Upon
installing it, a challenge will automatically be added to comment
forms: "What color is an orange?". In order to post, the commenter must
enter the correct answer. The strength of Gatekeeper is that it allows
you to create any number of challenges you like, and picks one at
random to insert into the comment form. You can also define your own
markup template as well as manually place the challenge in your comment
forms, should you so desire. A screen readers should pick up the
question.
Translation Tools
Translating text to another language will make a webpage more
accessible. There are a number of online translation-machines but only
Babelfish and freetranslation.com can be put into a website. I think
that's the best way to do it because then you give visitors already the
tool into their hands and that makes it for the visitor easier. If it
is easier then people will stay on the website. Look at the description
of each translation tool because some translate to more languages then
others. For example Google doesn't translate to Dutch.
- Babelfish [http://babelfish.altavista.com/ of Altavista;
translates texts and complete web pages. It is available for very many
languages, certainly from English. It is possible to add Babelfish to a
website[http://www.altavista.com/help/free/free_searchbox_transl.
- Free translation
[http://www.freetranslation.com/; translates text and complete webpages
from English to several languages. It has also a professional solution,
but you have to pay for that. There is the possibility of downloading
the Google toolbar
[http://www.freetranslation.com/tools/google-toolbar/ of their site and
in it sits then freetransaltion.com, but if you have the Google toolbar
you can add freetranslation.com. Furthermore you can add their tool to
your website [http://www.freetranslation.com/tools/applets/.
If you put it on your website you have different possibilities to
choose from.You can choose a tool which translates in several languages
or you can choose a tool that only translates to 1 language.
- Systran
[http://www.systran.co.uk/; translates texts and complete web pages.It
assists many languages. They have also professional possibilities. I
can find no possibilities on the Internet site to place this
translation machine on a website.
- Google
[http://www.google.com/translate_t; Google has a page where a text or a
web page can be translated. There are several languages in which it can
be translated, but I miss Dutch and several languages are in Beta. It
is possible to put the Google Translation browser button in your
favorites toolbar in your browser, then a page is translated from 1
language to 1 language. But also no Dutch. It is not possible to
integrate Google translation in a website.
- Microsoft
[http://translator.live.com/; Microsoft has a webpage where you can
translate a text and website. You can translate to several languages.
It is not possible to integrate this translation tool in a website. If
you want a professional solution the website refers to Systran.
Kaj's weblog is http://www.kajrietberg.nl/
He wrote an article [http://www.kajrietberg.nl/?p=248] about
translation on his blog for the K12conference. But he wrote it in
Dutch. You can translate the article by going to this: [ http://babelfish.altavista.com/%5D.%7CThen copy the link and the article will be translated in the languages you want. Click here to see the article in Dutch. ~Kaj is mainly in charge of the Translation tools section of this wiki.
References
The National Service Inclusion Project www.serviceandinclusion.org
http://www.ataccess.org /resources/lowcostnocost.html
User Focus: http://www.userfocus.co.uk/resources/accesstools.html
Top 10 Accessibility: http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/webarticle26
Nonprofits/Civil Society -- Resources & Services www.coyotecommunications.com/
International Development Work & Studies www.coyotecommunications.com /development
http://digitaldivide.net /mailman/listinfo/digitaldivid e
James Stanger - VCampus Corporation
University of Oxford http://www.ox.ac.uk/web/guides/accessible.shtml
Text to Speech - most of this list has been provided by the Rapid Fire blog. |
