[wac-announce]
News from the WAC: Assistive Tech Users Group, Events,
New Resources, The Business of Access
Ken Petri
petri.1 at osu.edu
Mon Jun 12 15:33:28 EDT 2006
NEWS from the OSU Web Accessibility Center (WAC)
- February 10, 2005 -
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In This Email:
* Assistive Technology Users Group Forming
* Event: "Disability, Narrative, and the Law" Conference
(February 16 and 17)
* Event: "Reaching All Learners:
Accessibility Features in Apple's Mac OS X Tiger" Seminar
(March 29)
* Event: "Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion,
and Disability Annual Conference"
(April 17 and 18)
* New WAC Resources Pages
* Making the Business Case for Accessibility
* Undergraduate Job Opening at OSU Libraries
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FORMATION OF OSU ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY
USERS GROUP UNDERWAY (OSU-ATUG)
The Office of Disability Services (ODS) and the Web Accessibility
Center (WAC), in cooperation with the OSU ADA Coordinator's Office and
other campus organizations, are seeking input and participation toward
the formation of an Assistive Technology Users Group (ATUG).
First and foremost, the group will serve as a venue for sharing ideas,
experiences, and knowledge among users of assistive technology and
other interested parties. Second, ATUG will act as an advocacy group
for technology access issues confronting students, staff, and faculty
with disabilities. Finally, the group may function as a "test kitchen"
for new technologies and for usability studies of computer and web
technologies being distributed or in use on campus. We hope that this
last function will facilitate improvements in the availability and
usability of current and new technologies.
In March 2006, we will begin development of a web site with forums
and a blog and start a listserv for ATUG. We would like to hold an
organizational meeting before the end of this quarter.
To be added to the listserv or to give feedback or request further
information, please send email to wac at osu.edu or call (614) 292-1760.
EVENT: DISABILITY, NARRATIVE AND THE LAW CONFERENCE
This unique public interdisciplinary conference will draw together
researchers from law and the humanities to explore how themes of
autonomy and dependency, "normal" and "abnormal," innocence and fault,
sameness and difference all play out in legal discussions about
disability and in the self-understanding of persons with disabilities.
The all-day conference (February 17) is collaboratively organized by
the Moritz College of Law, the Department of English, the ADA
Coordinator's Office, and the Institute for Collaborative Research and
Public Humanities. The keynote speaker is Tony Coelho, the principle
author of the Americans with Disabilities Act and a former member of
the US House of Representatives. Conference sessions will intersect
legal and humanistic studies of disabilities.
The conference is free and open to the public.
February 16 and 17, 2006
Full program and agenda:
--> http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/cilps/conference/dnl2006/agenda.html
EVENT: REACHING ALL LEARNERS:
ACCESSIBILITY FEATURES IN APPLE'S MAC OS X TIGER
A free, one-day seminar (registration required) from Apple; March 29,
Wednesday, 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The seminar explores the added
accessibility features built into Apple's Mac OS X Tiger and how they
can help students with vision, hearing and motor skills challenges
personalize their learning experience.
8 AM to 3 PM
March 29, 2006
Ohio State School for the Blind
A continental breakfast and lunch will be served.
Registration:
--> http://seminars.apple.com/goToEvent.html?id=3D42011
The WAC has done some initial testing of the new accessibility
features in OS X Tiger. Features include a screen reader that
navigates the desktop and will voice menus, TextEdit documents,
including those in RTF (so it can read Word documents), PDF documents,
and web pages in Safari. There are also a screen magnification program
and settings in the Universal Access section of System Preferences
that make it easy to adjust screen content and set up "Speakable
Items"--controls and error dialogues that voice themselves.
These free tools (free with the OS, that is) will compete favorably
with JAWS and ZoomText on Windows. Though not as full featured as the
PC applications, the Universal Access programs in Mac OS X are fully
integrated with the operating system and their future looks bright.
Consider coming to the Apple seminar. The WAC will be there! You can
read a little bit more about these exciting technologies from Apple on
our new resources pages:
--> http://wac.osu.edu/resources/at.html
EVENT: MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ON ACCESS, INCLUSION,
AND DISABILITY ANNUAL CONFERENCE
The organizing theme for the sixth annual conference is "Personal
Perspectives & Social Impact: The Stories We Tell." The goal is to
encourage presenters and participants to reflect on how personal
experiences create and transform social, cultural, and legal
realities. A look into what the psychologist Theodore Sarbin referred
to as "the storied nature of human conduct."
Put on by the OSU ADA Coordinator's Office with local and state
organization support, this two day event has multiple concurrent
sessions on a broad range of topics. Registration is free for students
or with a lunch for $5. Faculty and staff pay only $20 per day.
April 17 and 18
Pfahl Executive Education and Conference Center
Registration and conference program:
--> http://ada.osu.edu/conferences/
NEW WAC RESOURCES PAGES
The WAC is beginning to move toward rebuilding its web site. We'll be
moving the current site over to a new server machine in a couple of
weeks and a redesign will start taking shape in the Spring. In the
redesign, we'll move to a cleaner-looking, more usable and feature
rich, full-CSS layout. Content will undergo trimming, updating, and
much reorganization, and many new features will be added, including an
RSS feed and the ability to comment on articles.
As you know, any development effort of this scale is a daunting
undertaking, but you have to start somewhere. So, we started by
reinvigorating our resources pages. They had become pretty out of
date. Now they're fresh, with lots of shiny new links to best-of-breed
resources. We also have made a page surveying some of the major
assistive technologies used on campus. We hope that page and the other
resources help developers with new ideas and tools. Also check out our
tips on hiring a web designer.
Beyond the necessity of a new web site, the inspiration for
reinventing the resources pages came out of our participation in the
World Usability Day (WUD) event held on campus in November (see
http://accad.osu.edu/~rstone/wud.html) . The idea for our presentation
at WUD was motivated by the latest World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
accessibility guidelines.
The current W3C accessibility recommendation is the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG, say "wuhcag"). The new "draft"
recommendation, WCAG 2.0, represents a decided shift from the complex,
long, checkpoint-driven WCAG 1.0. WCAG 2.0, by contrast, concentrates
on broad principles of usable design--basic qualities of web
interfaces that help ensure that universally content is [P]erceivable,
controls are [O]perable, interfaces and content are intuitively
[U]nderstandable, and applications are [R]obust enough to work on
multiple platforms and within future technologies. We should build
"POUR" web sites, the WCAG 2.0 declares.
We tried to choose and organize resources to give a long view of
accessibility: Accessibility ought to be considered as a fundamental
principle of usability, not as a series of checkpoints to satisfy.
Most of us already think this way, but perhaps these resources can
help deepen our understanding and motivate us to build sites that
inspire others to rethink the way a web site ought to work.
The new WAC resources pages are here:
--> http://wac.osu.edu/resources/
MAKING THE BUSINESS CASE FOR ACCESSIBILITY
- Accessibility: 'Profoundly the Right Thing to Do' -
In the latest edition of his lucid and concise book on web usability,
"Don't Make Me Think," Steve Krug catalogues the typical arguments
that get made when we try to convince clients and superiors that
accessibility is good for business:
- "Everyone should have the same opportunities and equal access to informat=
ion."
- "Most accessibility adaptations benefit everyone, not just people
with disabilities."
- "People with disabilities use the web and they have lots of money."
- "It's a huge potential market. 65% of the population has a
disability" of some sort.
- "Section 508: It's not just a good idea; it's the law."
Krug writes that there is truth in all of these reasons. But, since
disability is not encountered daily by most people, the reasons can
seem idealistic, unrealistic, or perhaps just paranoid, especially in
face of the (false) perception that designing with accessibility in
mind is a lot of extra work. The door is opened for skepticism. But
worse, he says, is that the skepticism "obscures the fact that there's
really only one reason" why accessibility is important: "It's the
right thing to do."
Krug continues, "And it's not just the right thing; it's *profoundly*
the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that
doesn't get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it
makes some people's lives." "How many opportunities do we have to
dramatically improve people's lives just by doing our job a little
better?"
- Statistics Are Your Friends -
How many people's lives improve as a result of your work?: A lot.
The Office for Disability Services provides learning and testing
resources for students on campus. It serves around 1200 students each
quarter. Many of these students benefit directly from accessible web
resources.
In Spring 2005, 621 ODS-registered students had attention deficit
disorders, were learning disabled, had language acquisition or reading
impairments, or had permanent brain injuries. Clear, usable,
well-structured and laid out design and content benefits these people.
56 ODS-registered students had mobility impairments. Guaranteeing
intelligently ordered, visually prominent, keyboard navigable web
resources benefits these people.
38 ODS-registered students had visual impairments. Accessible
navigation, meaningful link text, skip links, accessible forms and
tables, proper contrast, and well-structured code benefit these
people.
34 ODS-registered students had hearing impairments. Captioning and
other textual cuing in multimedia and web applications benefit these
people.
Thus, if you worked to make web resources accessible, you contributed
to helping more than 700 students further their educations. This
figure doesn't include faculty and staff or the unquantifiable number
of users across the world who may have benefited. Thus accessibility
makes education possible, and education is the business of the
university.
- Google Likes Accessible Web Sites -
Okay, so your boss takes the short view: "Just make sure it passes
those OSU MWAS requirements! We don't want the ADA Office giving us
any grief!" The WAC realizes this is an unlikely response, given we
are a university and a public trust. Nevertheless, what do you do?
Pull out the big guns: "An accessible web site is not only a
requirement and a help to learners and educators; it also means we'll
get indexed better by Google."
Specialist in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Andy Hagans, writes in
a recent article for A List Apart that "high accessibility overlaps
heavily with effective white-hat SEO." In other words, authoring a
site employing well-structured HTML, using solid text descriptions for
graphics and tables, creating front-loaded paragraphs with highly
readable content, using unobtrusive JavaScript techniques, and, in
general, designing with accessibility in mind helps optimize how
Google and other search engines index and rank your web site.
Hagans's article notes the significant similarities between Google's
design, content, and technical guidelines and the W3C's WCAG. Read
"High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization" here:
--> http://alistapart.com/articles/accessibilityseo
UNDERGRADUATE JOB OPENING: OSU LIBRARIES
STUDENT ASSISTANT FOR TECHNICAL SERVICES
The library has an opening for someone with a knowledge of accessible
design practices. If you or colleagues know of a talented
undergraduate, please pass this along.
Job information follows:
Assists in the development and maintenance of library web sites:
including creation and revision of HTML, CSS, and PHP files.
Required:
* Working knowledge of HTML
* Familiarity with PHP and CSS
* Attention to detail
Desired:
* Specialized knowledge of HTML, PHP, and CSS
* Experience with Web Accessibility Standards
* Ability to work in blocks of 2 or more hours
Hours: 15-20 per week, M-F 8-5
Pay rate:
$7.50 per hour
Contact:
Lisa Iacobellis
Scholarly Resources Integration Dept.
4-7551, iacobellis.2 at osu.edu
Until next time, with kind regards,
Your WAC Staff
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OSU Web Accessibility Center
102 Pomerene Hall
1760 Neil Ave.
Columbus, OH 43210
Phone: (614) 292-1760
mailto:wac at osu.edu
http://www.wac.ohio-state.edu
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To add or remove yourself from this list, visit:
http://www.wac.ohio-state.edu/listserv.htm
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--
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Ken Petri
Director, OSU Web Accessibility Center
102 Pomerene Hall
1760 Neil Avenue
Columbus, Ohio 43210
(614) 292-1760
mailto:petri.1 at osu.edu
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