Last night, I was privileged to attend the great “Multiple Facets of Accessible Design” presentation conducted by MilwauCHI and hosted by IndependenceFirst (a place so amazing that I’ll be doing upcoming blog posts about the experience)

After a great introduction to the IndependenceFirst facility by Carol Voss, including a 5 minute video about their new building, we were treated with two very different but equally compelling presentations.

The first was “Unleashing Opportunities through Accessibility” from Shawn Henry. Shawn Henry needs no introduction in the web accessibility ranks, as the Outreach Coordinator of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and an all-around advocate and voice for accessibility awareness. She is also the author of Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design.

Shawn covered a lot of ground. She explained that accessibility doesn’t just pertain to those with visual disabilities — there are many more to varying degrees. There are also other “limitations”, such as technology, bandwidth, literacy, non-fluency in a certain language, etc.

She raised a point that has really been hitting home with me lately, as I discussed in my last post. There are easy things to do to improve the accessibility of a site. Sure, complexity increases when you deal with rich applications, Flash, and more complicated scripting, but many important obstacles can be cleared on the simple markup level — alt tags, page titles, headings, lists, to name just a few.

Shawn summed up accessibility poignantly by calling it, “an act of enlightened self-interest.” After all, any one of us may at any point become a disabled web user, through accident, illness, or just through the aging process.

We had the pleasure of chatting with Shawn further after the event. She is very down-to-earth and clearly passionate about accessibility. She gave us some very good advice and tactics on pursuading organizations to see both the business needs and obligations of ensuring their web presence is usable by all.

The second speaker was downright amazing. His name is Scott Mayer, a usability services specialist for American Family Insurance, who became blind at the age of 24. In my next post, later this week, I’ll share highlights from his powerful presentation.

Related Links:

• IndependenceFirst (@Independence1st on Twitter)
• MilwauCHI
• Shawn Henry (@shawn_slh on Twitter)
• Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design – online version

Tags: alt tags, assistive technology, IndependenceFIRST, milwauCHI, milwaukee, Scott Mayer, screen readers, shawn henry, W3C, wai, wai-aria

Wrapping up my email interview series with IndependenceFirst, the last questions delve into assistive technologies – what IndependenceFirst have to offer as well as experiences that disabled users have using them. We also cover a little bit about their social media presence.

Q: Do you provide usage, renting, etcetera of computer assistive technologies such as screen readers or refreshable Braille?

A: We have open lab times where people who require assistive devices have internet access with our devices in our labs or just develop proficiencies with a computer and the internet, we have a Try-A-Gadget Lab which allows people to investigate Assistive Technology (AT) options for work or home use e.g. environmental controls, telecommunications, voice communications and more…as well as low tech options e.g. adaptive gardening devices, adaptive feeding equipment, memory/communications boards, etc. before they would purchase an item for their own use.

We lend equipment to some people to try in their work or home environments for up to a week if they want to do that as well. We are the only Microsoft Accessibility Resource Center in WI and we have expertise with their products and built in features. We do have adaptive computer inputs, screen readers, voice activated controls and many devices–over 700 in there! We will lend hardware, but not software or computers themselves.

Q: Can you share some of the experiences — both positive and negative — that people using such technologies routinely encounter?

A:
Positive experiences: A man who is quadriplegic received a computer through our Computer Recycling Program, says it’s now his lifeline to go to school online, find info about his disability, coordinate his transportation and trips out to local businesses, keep in touch with friends. That story was featured on Fox 6 News.

A lot of people with disabilities who have received computers through our program have felt like it has opened doors to them that they didn’t feel were possible due to their financial limitations. Positives are also just the doors that AT can open. Technology can be the means of achieving mobility, communication, employment, etc for people who have barriers.

We often hear people saying “I never knew that there was a way that I could do that.” Sometimes the experience is so emotional they cry. It always touches us when that happens, because to us it means that the door opened by technology really means a lot.

Negative experiences: Our Deaf staff and consumers cannot watch videos online nearly 100% of the time. No captioning. No text version of the audio on the videos. Not good. Negative experiences people may encounter include incompatibility issues because computer operating systems evolve before software and hardware adaptations do. Another issue is lack of local resources. AT is a relatively small market, so it is not always possible to comparison shop close to home. One of the biggest issues for technology users is lack of unbiased information. There is a lot of slick marketing out there, and people are often convinced that they need a particular product when something else might be a better fit. There is also a misconception that people who sell products for people with disabilities are all nice people who have their customer’s best interest at heart. Vendors are business people who are trying to make a profit. Some are good, some are pushy, some lie. Good consumer skills are essential when buying AT, but people often assume the vendor is trustworthy because he is helping people with disabilities.

Q: You have been active for some time on Twitter via @Independence1st, and now have almost 700 followers (edit: now past 700!). How has this experience been for you?

A: Twitter is a great way for us to create conversation around access and disability topics, cultivate relationships with potential and current consumers, donors and volunteers; as well as open people’s minds to inclusion around topics of independent living, housing, employment, aging in place and access among other issues. It’s another advocacy, marketing and customer service tool.

It also helps people to get their questions answered in real time and generate a wider network of contacts around the issues (around the world!) and build our brand. If there’s a hot topic, the viral nature of Twitter can really help to raise awareness for us and the issues which ultimately can change the world in a positive way for people with disabilities.

Special thanks, again, to Carol Voss of IndependenceFirst for all of her wonderful answers. I hope those of you reading this have gained as much insight about all the wonderful things that IndependenceFirst do as I have.

More about IndependenceFirst:

• IndependenceFirst web site
• IndependenceFirst Facebook fan page
• IndependenceFirst Twitter profile

Tags: assistive technology, disability, facebook, Independence1st, IndependenceFIRST, metro milwaukee, milwaukee, SEWCIL, Social Media, southeastern wisconsin, Southeastern Wisconsin Center for Independent Living, twitter

It’s one thing to summarize screen reader technology in a few sentences. It’s entirely more meaningful to watch one in action.

Victor Tsaran, an accessibility engineer at Yahoo, talks about and demonstrates how a blind user navigates their computer via a screen reader. It’s a revealing look into an experience of which most of us fully-sighted people have no frame of reference.

Of course, it should be noted that there is no captioning or text version of this video, for those with hearing disabilities.

Tags: assistive technology, screen readers, visually impaired

Social media juggernaut Facebook, which boasted reaching 200 million users this week, has been working with the American Foundation for the Blind, and announced some strides towards improving the accessibility of the site, particularly for the visually impaired.

Carl Augusto, President and CEO of AFB, posted a lengthy entry on the Facebook Blog, sharing how he, as a blind person, initially had troubles utilizing Facebook when first visiting.

Two years ago, AFB began discussing with Facebook ways to make the social media site more accessible to blind users. Facebook is working on enhancements, and has published an informational page called Making Facebook Accessible for Everyone.

Among the features highlighted on that page are:

• Audio alternatives to CAPTCHA, which is the technology you see on some websites that requires you to enter letters from a distorted display that a human can decipher but a computer script or automation cannot.
  
• Straight HTML version of the site (specifically, the mobile version) that is friendlier to screen readers.
• Non-Javascript version of Facebook Gift Shop, which addresses a standing frustration with the inaccessibility of that locale
• Ability to use Facebook Chat via screen reader.
• Shortcut keys to key sections of the Facebook, listed out by browser

Tags: american foundation for the blind, assistive technology, carl augusto, facebook, screen readers, Social Media

As I covered in Web Accessibility 101: Assistive Technologies, the text browser Lynx is particularly useful for stripping down a web site to its raw, GUI-less nature.

Why is this useful? Well, someone with a motor skill disability that prevents them from effectively using a mouse can navigate a website in Lynx solely by keyboard. Also, blind web surfers using certain refreshable Braille displays can use Lynx as their browser. There are others – disabled or not – who may have connection or hardware limitations that make graphical web browsing slow or just impractical.

Lynx strips out all graphical elements as well as JavaScript, leaving just the raw text, links and alt tags. As such, depending on the complexity or manner by which a site was constructed, a user surfing the web this way may be able to get around, or may be hopelessly barred from getting where they are trying to go.

I recently checked out my site in Lynx and was pleased to see that, overall, one can get around effectively via the arrow keys. I can’t take too much credit for that, given I’m using WordPress as the guts of this blog, but it’s at least another area of accessibility where I can set my mind at ease.

If you’re a Mac user like me, you can download Lynx right from Apple’s website. Once you install it, you can fire up Terminal, type in “lynx” and surf the web.

Otherwise, check out the Lynx site for more information.

Tags: apple, assistive technology, braille, internet software consortium, lynx, terminal