Web Accessibility

Yesterday we had another Web Focus Meeting. This meeting was a lot more interesting than the others. We actually had hands-on experiences and demostrations. The meeting took place in the “Academic Support Center – Services for Students with Disabilities.”

During the meeting, we learned about sites needing to comply to Section 508. Section 508 basically states that “Federal agencies’ electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities.” This require is mostly important since I design and script sites for an University.

We also learned how to use the software and equipment the students with disability use. The first we learned about was screen reading. The software used for screen reading was called JAWS. It basically reads your Word Documents, Webpages, etc. The trouble with webpages is that if your tables are in columns, the software will read the page from left to right rather than from column to column. We screen read our campus website and it was just terrible. Because of the tables, the entire site made no sense whatsoever. Too much content on a page can be a great problem for people with disabilities.

The next thing we learned about was a software called Open Book, which uses an “optical character recognition (OCR) to create a reading system which allows individuals with visual impairments to read print material (i.e. books, magazines, memos, etc.) and electronic files, identify currency, and perform sophisticated editing functions.” The lady did a demonstration by scanning a piece of paper. She then opened up the file scanned and the software read the paper to us. And if we wanted a Braille copy of the file, you would just print it and the equipment would generate a Braille copy of the file. The equipment sounded like a typewriter – very loud.

The director also talked about the problems with the web today — untagged graphics, animation, columns, flash, and PDF’s. It may look amazing to some people, but to a blind person, it’s very cumbersome.

I really enjoyed this presentation. I learned a lot more about how other people would read my sites. And it’s important that if you site contains a lot of content, then making it accessible to everyone is very important. Some people don’t care about the beautiful graphics on your site (because they can’t see it). But they do care about the content. So please think twice about how you present your web media.

Here are the resources she used for the demonstration:

• A guide to Making Documents Accessible t People Who are Blind or Visually Impared
• Bobby – web accessibility software tool
• EASI’s Web Design Access Kit
• Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards

And I remember a software called Naturally Speaking from the last time I went to Comdex. They also did a demonstration where a user would read a document and the software would type it out for them. Kind of like a secretary. :)

To further my study on web accessibilty, I decided to sign up at The 508 Universe and take the course. This should be interesting.