Flash v. HTML 5
Posted by jeb in Uncategorized on 2010/02/05
Just read a good article by Tony Bradley called “Is it time for the Web to Abandon Flash.” In it he notes the controversy about Apple not allowing Flash on any of its handheld products, including the soon-to-be-released iPad. Millions of viewers of Steve Jobs’ announcement last week no doubt saw him demo the NY Times website where Flash content was missing and a nasty little icon appeared telling you you need to download a Flash extension for your browser.
I have disliked Flash for a long time, primarily due to its problems with assistive technologies; it often does not play well with screen readers, especially if it has not been developed correctly. In my mind, many Flash developers are graphic artists, illustrators or animators, and don’t really understand web design.
Add to this the fact that more people are now accessing web content via a non-traditional user agent (i.e., not a traditional browser) and you see why I agree with Bradley that Flash may be past its prime.
It’s ironic that Adobe developed Acrobat to find a way to share documents at a time just prior to the “invention” of HTML. Flash, build on the same business principles, was developed for the same reason. And once again, a new standard (HTML 5) may usurp their position. And, I should point out that the new standard will be accessible to screen readers.
But just as those who predicted the demise of Adobe Acrobat 15 years ago were wrong, I suspect it is not quite time for Adobe to throw in the towel and hire the undertaker. Look for Flash to be around for some time to come. But at least for some of us, there will be other options.
This will be interesting to watch.
Accessibility tools: new and “in the works”
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, Software on 2010/01/31
The good folks over at WebAIM have announced the availability of a new Dreamweaver extension that tests for the accessibility of web pages while still under construction. Using the architecture of their popular WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool, the WAVE Dreamweaver extension is installed inside of the Dreamweaver application and resides as a toolbar. When activated, the extension will review the currently opened file for basic accessibility errors but does not provide an explanation of the errors or necessarily how to fix them. Some knowledge of accessible web design is thus required.
I have been using the WAVE tool for years to do quick and dirty reviews of web pages for others and always use it to check my own work once it has been published to the web. The advantage of this new extension is that I will now be able to check the accessibility of my pages before publishing them live on the web.
The WAVE Dreamweaver extension (still in Beta) is free and works with Dreamweaver CS3+.
____________
Under the “in the works” category is none other than Microsoft’s Office 2010 purported to be release sometime in June of this year. Already out in Beta, one of the features garnering my attention is the inclusion of a new “document Accessibility Checker.”
Direct from Microsoft’s Office Engineering blog they state:
To solve this problem in Office 2010 we created a document Accessibility Checker (like a spell checker, but for accessibility issues) as a core feature of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
We started by examining the most common accessibility problems in Office documents and bucketing them in terms of their severity – we ended up with three categories:
- Issues where content is unreadable. For example, a picture missing alternative text (alt text provides a text based representation of an image) is unreadable to a person who is blind.
- Issues where content is difficult to read. In general, these issues are less severe than unreadable content – for example, if an author has created a data table and used complex formatting to alter its presentation (i.e. using blank rows or columns, or merged and split cells), then a person with a disability might have difficulty understanding content in the table.
- Issues that may or may not make content difficult to read. In our explorations, there were a set of issues that potentially cause users with disabilities difficulty for which we don’t have a high confidence, automatic way to determine whether the issue is really a problem. For example, knowing whether or not the reading order of objects on a slide or cells in a layout table is optimal for a particular reader falls into this bucket.
Based on these three categories, we came up with a set of issues our checker looks for (described in more detail below) – when presented to the user, they are bucketed into “Errors”, “Warnings”, and “Tips” – these buckets correspond to the above three descriptions.
As you know from reading this blog, the best solution to ensuring all documents on the web are accessible is to ensure that ALL documents – wherever they are – are accessible. This includes all word processor, spreadsheet, presentational and desk-top-publishing documents. PDF documents, often the most controversial of all web documents – in terms of accessibility – are best made from documents that are already accessible. This new tool will be a big step – I hope – in making that happen.
From the description provided by Microsoft, it appears the new document Accessibility Checker will be a “voluntary” wizard that users must choose to activate and use. It is not clear if it can be made to be “involuntary” and require authors to review and fix their documents before saving them. But that’s probably asking too much. Microsoft’s angle on this is:
For organizations that are concerned about compliance for employees, we’ve provided several group policy settings that can be used to customize exactly which accessibility violations are checked. Administrators can also increase the visibility and emphasis of the Prepare for Sharing information when there are errors or warnings. Finally, IT departments can leverage Office 2010’s UI extensibility to enforce a workflow that requires users to run the checker – this will help many corporations reduce the risk of employees creating inaccessible content and increase the amount of accessible information available to people with disabilities.
I’ll be interested in seeing this feature when it comes out. Stay tuned.
USDOJ smacks down Kindle
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, education on 2010/01/20
I’ve reported about the Kindle more than a few times in this blog and have been generally fascinated by e-reader technology. I keep predicting it is the next big thing and with the pending announcement coming from the creatives in Cupertino, we may have another e-reader in the mix very soon.
That said, the e-reader, and specifically the Kindle by Amazon, has been having a rough time of it. First introduced in November of 2007, the Kindle was a big hit, selling out in the first five hours and on backorder for months after that. The Kindle 2, released two years later was equally well received and the DX version released a couple of months later was also very popular.
Then the fun began. A controversy with The Author’s Guild forced Amazon to hobble the Kindle 2 by shutting off the text-to-speech feature. Disability groups stormed the Manhattan offices of The Author’s Guild to protest and claim discrimination, but the device, it seems, was already inherently inaccessible to people with disabilities.
In May of 2009, Amazon announced a bold move of a offering the Kindles to several large US universities with the goal of taking over the college textbook industry and making paper college textbooks a thing of the past. More fun followed when the inherent inaccessibility of the device became widely known. A number of the universities that piloted the program with the Kindle backtracked and dropped out when they started to see the accessibility problems. “Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also examined the utility of the Kindle DX as a teaching device and decided that they would not use the Kindle DX until it is accessible to blind individuals” – this according to the US Department of Justice (USDOJ).
The latest news on Kindle is a settlement with the USDOJ announced this week. It states:
Under the agreements reached today, the universities (Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Reed College, and Arizona State University) generally will not purchase, recommend or promote use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision. The universities agree that if they use dedicated electronic book readers, they will ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The agreements that the Justice Department reached with these universities extend beyond the Kindle DX to any dedicated electronic reading device.
This sounds pretty bad for Amazon and the Kindle.
And given Mr. Jobs recent efforts at making Apple products fully accessible, one can only imagine that the rumored “Apple Table device” WILL be fully accessible and perfectly timed to kick butt.
Stay tuned.
Is it too early for spring cleaning?
Posted by jeb in General Information, Software on 2010/01/03
I’ve gotten tired of my Joomla! template for jebswebs.com and had contemplated getting a new one. I’m in the market because one of my clients needs a new one, but I decided to see if there was a way to tweak this one. The current template is called Weblogic from JoomlaShack, and while I was looking over the JS site, I realized that there were a number of ways I could tweak Weblogic to make it look – almost – new.
The easiest thing to do was to simply change the font-family style element from Georgian/serif to a san-serif. That has made a tremendous difference. Let that be a lesson to you; a simple font change can make your whole site look completely different.
There are still some font elements I don’t like, but I gotta search out the code to find where the CSS for that particular code is hiding. Always fun trying to crack someone else’s code.
Next, I need to work on getting/creating some new graphics for the site. With my new HP Pavilion Elite, crunching graphics is a breeze. So, stay tuned.
It may not be spring (look at the photos I just posted of the New Years Storm of 2010), but it is the New Year and change is in the air.
~j
_________
Image licensed by Creative Commons
WordPress and Accessibility
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, Software on 2009/12/29
It seems this is a controversial subject…
A client of mine asked about this topic and, in doing my homework, I am learning that this is something where there are no easy answers. It seems that there are general issues with most if not all of the standard (free) WordPress (WP) themes and there may even be some issues under the hood. A Google search leads to a couple of folks who are claiming their theme meets the standards.
Our friend and colleague Dennis Lembree, of @AccessibleTwitter fame, is apparently also seeking the Holy Grail and wrote about his quest this past summer on his blog. In the responses to his query, there were several free WP themes suggested. I have just switched to one of those and am testing it out. Until I have reviewed it completely, that’s all I’ll say on the topic.
But this is a good time to again mention something I am fond of repeating. You can build the best content management system in the world – one that is completely accessible out of the box – and one user can ruin the accessibility with one simple action like failing to add ALT text to an image or creating a hyperlink using the words “click here.” You simply cannot rely on the software to ensure accessibility. Vigilance is the key.
As I continue my search, I’ll keep you posted. Feel free to comment.
Accessible Facebook
Posted by jeb in Accessibility on 2009/02/19
accessible facebook logo
From Dan Jellinek E-ACCESS BULLETIN
A tool to make the social networking site Facebook more accessible to visually impaired users has been created by Project:Possibility, a group of not-for-profit software developers in the US. The application allows visually impaired users to log in, navigate and use the site by combining screen reader technology with other coding techniques.
Brian D’Souza, a team member who worked on the project, explained: “We leveraged an existing technology developed by Google called AxsJax (accessibility + AJAX) which combines use of screen readers and java script and navigation methods to make navigation and modification of content of webpages easier. It provides a lot of value for a blind person.”
Facebook’s popularity has risen dramatically in recent years, with more than 150 million users worldwide. However some users claim it does not fully support assistive tools, with several groups active on the site itself pressing for a more accessible service, such as The Official Petition for a More Accessible Facebook, which contains almost 1,500 members. Some measures have already been taken by Facebook to accommodate the needs of disabled users, such as releasing screen reader-friendly versions of some of its applications.
The Facebook tool was one of a series of projects created at the recent UCLA SS12, an annual ‘code-a-thon’ held at the University of California, Los Angeles. Software developers spend a weekend working on projects for disabled people.
Other projects developed by the same team at this year’s SS12 included Project AWE, a ‘website accessibility tagging tool’, which allows users and third parties to rate the accessibility of web pages. Ratings are automatically retrieving when the disabled user visits the page, allowing them to immediately gain an idea of how easy the page will be to navigate.
NOTE: I’ve sent an e-mail off to the Project:Possibility folks to find out how one actually can acquire Accessible Facebook and will post their response when I receive one.
To subscribe to this free monthly bulletin, email eab-subs@headstar.com with ’subscribe eab’ in the subject header. You can list other email addresses to subscribe in the body of the message. Please encourage all your colleagues to sign up! To unsubscribe at any time, put ‘unsubscribe eab’ in the subject header.
~John B
Originally posted 02/16/09 | Posted by admin | Category Accessibility
Accessible Twitter
Posted by jeb in Accessibility on 2009/02/19
Accessible Twitter
Dennis Lembree the founder and host of Web Axe, a blog and podcast on web accessibility has built and produced an accessible access portal for Twitter called Accessible Twitter.
The newly developed site features a simple, consistent layout and navigation which meets WAI and Section 508 Accessibility Standards. The site also assures that all links are keyboard accessible and that users can access their Twitter account with or without JavaScript. Accessible Twitter uses large default text size and high color contrast and works well in both high or low resolution browser settings.
Lembree is the owner of the web development company CheckEngine USA, and co-founder of Refresh Detroit, a group of web professionals in Southeast Michigan.
~jeb
Updated/revised 2-19-09
Shoulda done this years ago
Posted by jeb in General Information on 2009/02/19
WordPress logo
I guess it’s the scourge of age. You get comfortable with something and as time goes on the resistance to change increases. But in the technology world, there is no such thing. You simply can’t get too comfortable.
I had been using a very simple – almost primitive – blog authoring program which served me well over the years. It was very accessible on both the front end and the back end when the prevailing big boys in the field were still asking how to spell accessibility.
There were a few quirks with that application and I set about today to fix them. As you may have guessed, that five minute project turned into a nightmare. So the long story short is I’ve jumped ship and installed Word Press. This template that I am using is supposed to produce valid XHTML and CSS 3.0; in which case it should be full accessible. I’ll be checking it over the next few days and giving you a complete report.
But the good news is that Word Press is an absolute delight in terms of depth, design and functionality. Adding and updating themes and widgets is a breeze and making changes to the settings a delight. And it makes the posting process so easy.
Being the Brooklyn-born cynic, I’m waiting for the other shoe to fall.
We’ll keep you posted.
~j
Description Key
Posted by jeb in General Information on 2009/02/25
Explore the Description Key
I just came across information about a website dedicated to Description for persons with a vision loss, literacy needs, or loss of cognitive abilities. This site is dedicated to providing description to educational materials and should be of interest to Assistive Technology specialists working in schools.
From the website, Description is defined as:
Description is the verbal depiction of key visual elements in media and live productions. Also known as “audio description” or “video description,” the description of media involves the interspersion of these depictions with the program’s original audio.
The vocabulary and language structure used in the description of educational media should be consistent with that used in the program being described. It is also important to make a distinction between media that is produced for educational purposes and that which is produced purely for entertainment—the “key visual elements” of an educational program should be those that serve in conveying a specific learning goal.
The site goes on to explain:
Description is the key to opening a world of information for persons with a vision loss, literacy needs, or loss of cognitive abilities. The American Foundation for the Blind reports that 21.2 million Americans have vision loss. While description was developed for people who are blind or visually impaired, millions of others may also benefit from description’s concise, objective translation of media’s key visual components.
Check out Description Key for educational media
~jeb
Adobe Acrobat Security Risk
Posted by jeb in General Information, Software on 2009/02/25
Adobe Acrobat logo
UPDATE: New versions of Acrobat Reader 9 and Professional 9 are now available for download. Updates and patches to older versions are supposed to be available tomorrow, March 18th. Also note that I patched what I could and then today received what I thought to be a very suspicious e-mail with a PDF attachment. Read about it on my other blog
I learned this on Twitter a few days ago and am frankly surprised it has not become more widely knows. Basically, there has been a security problem found in the Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat Professional which allows certain malware to attack your computer. Initially it was reported that by simply disenabling the JavaScript switch in Reader (and Professional) the problem went away. As an interesting aside, I did this and the very first PDF I downloaded and read an hour later came from Adobe and it required the JS switch be turned back on.
Anyway, in this latest report from ZD Net, it appears that that advice does not mitigate the problem and that Adobe is no closer to a solution than it was a few days ago.
So, the only general advice we can give sportsfans is to avoid opening Adobe Acrobat files until the security issue is resolved. As is stated in the ZD Net article: “All users of Adobe Reader/Acrobat should therefore show extreme caution when deciding which PDF files to open regardless of whether they have disabled JavaScript support or not.”
Here is a link to the ZD Net article with details
Update: Here is more information from Adobe – but the general consensus is to make sure you have you Anti-Virus programs running and up-to-date.
http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2009/02/adobe_reader_and_acrobat_issue_1.html
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa09-01.html
~jeb
I have drunk the “Kool-Aid”…
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, Software on 2009/02/24
VoiceOver icon
[Originally posted October 19, 2008]
I think.
I had the opportunity to partake in a presentation at the ACTEM MainEducation 2008 Conference last Thursday (October 16, 2008) where the presenter Mike Shebanek, Product Marketing Manager in Apple’s worldwide software product marketing group and 14-year veteran of Apple Inc. spoke on the new and improved accessibility features of the Mac OS X.
In addition to showing all of the marvelous widgets and gizmos that are built throughout the operating system, half of Mike’s presentation was on the new VoiceOver “screen reader” that is built into the new OS. VoiceOver first appeared in 2005 in OS X v10.4 Tiger, but grew a more distinct reputation when v 10.5 – Leopard appeared. The major reason was the inclusion of a new “voice” – Alex. Quoting from Apple, “…the new voice of Mac OS X Leopard, speaks English and uses advanced new Apple technologies to deliver natural intonation even at extraordinarily fast speaking rates.” My blind friend Steve noted that “Alex breathes!”
Those who know me know that “I’m a PC” and although I’ve tried not to get caught up in the hype of the OS Wars, Macs and I have not always gotten along very well. My first foray into AppleLand was in 1999 when I joined the staff at Maine ASCD – an All Mac Environment. Ironically, I had interviewed at Bates College earlier that fall – another All Mac Environment – and was assured by the folks there that I could be readily converted. I think the combination of the fervor and intensity of those from AppleLand are what I often find most troubling. Apple People from AppleLand tend to be a little over zealous and try a little too hard to find converts. They sometimes remind me of the Jehovah’s Witnesses on Fulton St. in Brooklyn when I was a kid. Stare at the ground and keep walking.
The Apple conversion did not take place in 1999 partially because I went from being fairly neutral about the Mac to downright hostile. The new iMac I was presented with actually bit me and drew blood – but that’s another story. Within a year I had divested Maine ASCD from their aging Mac fleet primarily for economic reasons. We simply could not afford the product. I admit to a little glee when the iMac kept crashing for unknown reasons and the G3 was full of macro viruses.
So with that background, I tuned into Mike Shebanek’s sermon fully expecting to find holes of faulty logic and extended examples of overreaching. While there was some of that – and I will note that Mike is a “Product Marketing Manager” – I was dutifully impressed. Not so much with all the gizmos, but I think that I actually sensed that Apple may “get it.”
The “get it” I am referring to is the concept of Universal Design that I have been preaching about for the past 8-9 years. The idea that products and services should be designed with the goal of making everything easier for everyone and in so doing, make it easier for people with disabilities.
I’ve heard many other speakers claim their respective companies were indeed modeling this behavior only to again and again find flaws in their message. My most recent experience was with the folks at Adobe who while claiming to have fully embraced accessibility, have been building and exploiting Rich Internet Applications using their new Adobe AIR development system. The best I can tell, everything they make with that product is completely inaccessible.
Unlike some of the competition – and I am now actually pointing my finger in the direction of northern Washington – Apple does appear to have practiced what they preach. The new VoiceOver does appear to really be a fully functioning – and fully integrated – screen reader AND actually has functionality that fully sighted people can use. This makes it a Universally Designed system; not an add-on or a plug in.
So, I was impressed and figured I had to make a public admission.
Now, the marketing pitch that Mike made did indeed make me a bit squeamish. But, paraphrasing the logic: “… for less than a thousand bucks, you can purchase a MacBook with OS X and not have to purchase an $800 copy of JAWS or other screen reader…” Hmm, kind of hard to argue with that.
To give the full picture – and just to prove that I was not completely co-opted – while VoiceOver is integrated into the OS, not all software made for the Mac – including many Apple-labeled products – work with it. And my colleagues and I are still testing VoiceOver before giving it our blessing. But I feel like I have drunk the Kool Aid. Stay tuned.
~j
Originally posted 10/19/08 | Posted by admin | Category Software and Applications
Apple moves towards Universal Design
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, Software on 2009/02/24
VoiceOver
[Originally posted 01/08/09]
As I continue to “drink the Kool Aid,” I am pleased report that Apple is continuing its move toward making the Mac OSX not only fully accessible but Universally Designed. The latest on this was the release of iWork09 the new version of the Apple “office suite.” The previous version was one of the few Apple applications that did not work with VoiceOver, the built-in screenreading application in Mac OSX.
With the revisions to iTunes and the iTunes website made last fall, and this announcement this week at MacWorld, Apple shows that it continues to “get it” and move towards a fully Univerally Designed operating system.
Keep up the good work. Or, should I say, keep up the good iWork .
Read more about the iWork news on Lioncourt’s blog
~jeb
01/08/09 | Posted by admin | Category Accessibility
New Safari Getting Good Reviews
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, General Information on 2009/02/26
Apple safari for Mac + PC
Judging from all the twittering on Twitter regarding the latest version of the Safari browser, most people seem pretty happy with the release.
This past Tuesday, February 24th, Apple released Safari 4.0 in public beta to the approving roar of Apple enthusiasts and technology wonks alike. Some in the industry have indicated that Safari 4.0 was long overdue, but as the latest round of browser wars seems to be reigniting, the timing of this release was pretty effective and perhaps well planned.
What is of concern to me is how well the new browser will behave in terms of accessibility and particularly how well it will interface with the Mac OS X screen reader – VoiceOver. Reports from my various colleagues who have been putting Safari 4.0 through its paces have been rather impressive. I suggest you head over to the Mac-accessibility blog for the play-by-play and to get specifics, but the general consensus is that the new browser is a winner and seems to work well with assistive technology. For mere mortals, ZDNet has several reviews with all of the details.
~j
New Service for Print Disabled College Students Announced
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, General Information on 2009/03/03
accesstext logo
The AccessText Network is a membership exchange network that will facilitate and support the nationwide delivery of alternative files for students with diagnosed print-related disabilities. AccessText will serve as the national nucleus for post-secondary distribution of approved alternative textbook file exchanges, training, and technical support.
The new service will be was launched in February 2009
AccessText is a venture founded and supported by the Association of American Publishers and Higher Education textbook publishers. AccessText is administered through the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, the University of Georgia, and the Alternative Media Access Center. AccessText is located at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.
Driven by its members and a national advisory committee, AccessText will operate as a conduit between the publishing world and post-secondary institutions’ disability programs.
AccessText will rely heavily on the expertise of state and national disability advocacy service organization including:
- Association of Higher Education and Disabilities (AHEAD) E-text Solution Group
- Alternate Text Production Center (ATPC) of the California Community Colleges
- The High Tech Center Training Unit of the California Community Colleges
- Learning Disability Association of America (LDA)
- National Federation for the Blind
For more information, visit the AccessText website.
~j
Originally published 12/05/08 | Category Accessibility
Maine Educators Buy More Apples
Posted by jeb in General Information on 2009/03/11
Maine Governor John E. Baldacci announced last night in his State-of-the-State address his intentions of expanding the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) – aka. the Laptop Program – to Maine high schools. This should be good news to the folks in Cupertino, CA as the contract for the new program will be going to Apple Computers.
According to the Maine Department of Education website:
The expansion is part of an agreement the state Department of Education negotiated with Apple Inc. for a reduced rate on the laptops, allowing the state to lease 100,000 machines within existing funds dedicated to educational technology. Under the agreement, the state will provide new laptops to all high schoolers and replace older machines at the middle school level. School districts are not required to participate in the program, though superintendents have indicated overwhelming support for the laptop expansion.
The MLTI program began in 2002 with deployments of Macintosh i-books to all 7th and 8th graders and their teachers. The program has been renewed once in the interim with laptops also being provided to high school teachers and some central office staff.
The newest iteration of the MLTI program was announced to include the capacity for families to be able to use their student’s laptop to access job and labor information from the state’s Department of Labor (DOL). I presume this means it will provide a link to the DOL Career Center website and not mean the state will provide home internet access to these families.
“We are going to revamp our laptop program and turn it into a powerful tool for the entire family,” Governor Baldacci said. “Every night when students in seventh through 12th-grade bring those computers home, they’ll connect the whole family to new opportunities and new resources.”
~jeb
Adobe Risk Update
I have updated my blog entry from a few days ago regarding issues with the security of Adobe Acrobat. Read the latest update there.
~John Brandt
Has your Kindle been hobbled?
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, General Information on 2009/03/20
I just finished reading a blog entry on the E-Access Bulletin about efforts to force Amazon to shut off the text-to-speech feature of the new Kindle 2 e-book reader. It seems certain publishers want additional “audio royalties” for providing what they see as a “audiobook.”
I know things are tough financially all over, but this seems pretty mercenary to me. Personally, I see a big difference between a mechanized text-to-speech reading application and audiobooks where the content is usually read by a compentent actor or perhaps by the author themselves. The richness of that experience is very different from the “computer voice. ”
It also seems to me that the publishing industry is running scared in light of what has happened to the recording industry and the Napster fiasco. They really need to put their heads together and come up with a plan to get into the game or they will simply dematerialize. Challenging every new innovation is not a solution and will only leave a bitter taste in the mouths of many consumers.
The text-to-speech features of Kindle 2 are a wonderful and universally designed element making printed materials much more available to persons with print disabilities. They should be rewarded and not punished.
Read the whole blog entry from E-Access Bulletin
UPDATE: Just read this additional blog entry from TechFlash about this controversy. Note the comments from the Authors’ Guild disputing some of the commentary.
National Federation of the Blind is into this – see press release. And see “KindleBoards.”
Some twittering about a protest in NYC on 4/7/09. Will post more when I know.
~j
NFB Protest Authors Guild
Posted by jeb in General Information on 2009/03/25
I blogged a few days ago about a recent decision by Amazon to turn off the text-to-speech feature of the new Kindle 2 after The Authors Guild complained about licensing issues. The National Federation of the Blind are organizing a protest on April 7th at the Authors Guild in New York City.
More information about the protest can be found on their Facebook page
~j
Technology Myths and Opportunities
Posted by jeb in General Information on 2009/03/27
Every once and a while, I need to get a “fix” of Alan November.
I’ve known Alan for almost 15 years and knew he was way ahead of things then. His thinking always helps me stretch.
This is from his website and is not about “Accessibility.” But it IS about “accessibility.” Watch and think.
~j
Reading Rights Coalition Formed
Posted by jeb in General Information on 2009/04/01
This news release comes from the National Federation of the Blind which is one of the organizations that is leading a protest against the Authors Guild. I’ve commented about this controversy several times in this blog, here and here. It appears things are starting to really get stirred up.
The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read print, will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, from noon to 2:00 p.m. The coalition includes the blind, people with dyslexia, people with learning or processing issues, seniors losing vision, people with spinal cord injuries, people recovering from strokes, and many others for whom the addition of text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 promised for the first time easy, mainstream access to over 245,000 books. Read the whole news release on the Maine Cite website
The Reading Rights Coalition have also started their own website
~j
Image from Creative Commons license
Sigh of relief. . .
Posted by jeb in Uncategorized on 2009/04/03
Application updates always drive me nuts. No matter how may times I do an upgrade to a web application, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, whatever, I always prepare for the end of the world.
Most recently when I tried to update Nucleus, my old blog program, I managed to “nuke” the whole thing. Had to install a whole new blog app (which was actually a blessing in disguise).
Anyway, I just updated my Joomla app (on the main jebswebs site) to version 1.5.10. I was using 1.5.0. That gives you some idea on how long it has been since the last update.
It went perfectly.
So confidence is back, blood pressure is back to normal, ready to take on the next challange!
~j
Image from Olaf – Creative Commons
Digital Magazines
Posted by jeb in General Information, universal design on 2009/04/14
PC Magazine has been a denizen of the Information Technology world for over 20 years and has been delivered to my doorstep for almost that long a time. Through thick and thin I have enjoyed reading this monthly publication and have used its website religiously to find reviews of IT products and services.
Last December they announce – quite suddenly – that they would no longer be publishing a print version. Ostensibly PC Magazine was falling victim to the same hardships that other print media were experiencing – fewer readers and rising costs. And with the pending decline in the economy and the obvious reduction of advertising dollars, it was probably their only alternative.
I am not real happy with their decision to move to a digital-only format, but I am frankly irate with the way they went about this transformation.
Following the surprise announcement of the change, I had expected to hear something explaining exactly how PC Magazine – or specifically Ziff Davis, the publisher – was going to fulfill the balance of my paid subscription. One month went by, then two, then three. I would think about it and then forget. So last week, a full four months after the last paper issue crossed my threshold, I decided to visit the PC Magazine website to see if I could find out what was going on. This was almost a complete waste of time as ultimately I needed to send them a digital request for information.
To their credit, the PC Mag folks did reply promptly to my query and explained that they had sent the notice to the e-mail address they had on record. This particular e-mail address was the one I used when I first subscribed to the magazine over 10 years ago. It has been out of use for at least 10 years. Needless to say, I never got the notice.
After three or four e-mails back and forth, I now have access to my three past issues. In the new digital system, the magazine content is apparently converted into a proprietary format requiring the use of a special reader software package provided by a company called Zinio. The glitzy “reader” presents the content in a format that mimics the paper copy complete with faux ability to “turn pages” using your mouse. On first blanch, the text is almost impossible to read, but by clicking on the screen, the focus is zoomed in and the text is then too big to allow easy viewing. The whole experience quite frankly sucks – sorry, I could not think of another word.
I just penned an e-mail back to the Customer Service folks at PC Mag and I am sharing it with you here (see below). It summarizes my experience and my next steps.
As you will read in this blog, I have been heavily involved in the movement to make digital content accessible to people with disabilities and have strongly advocated for the creation of universally designed websites. The Zinio/PC Magazine experience is very far from universal design.
So, as we all deal with the forthcoming changes to news and media industry, we will no doubt encounter more of this. I for one will be keeping watch and providing my opinion.
Here is my e-mail to the PC Magazine Customer Service folks:
Thank you for the resolution of this subscription issue. I have now been able to successfully download the past issues of PC Magazine and begun reading them. I must however express my disappointment and dissatisfaction in the process that I needed to engage in order to find out what had happened to my paid subscription.
At the very least, it seems to me that as you folks were planning to move from a printed to a digital version of PC Magazine you may have warned your subscribers of this eventuality and asked them to update their contact information. I apparently first subscribed to PC Magazine over 10 years ago since the e-mail address you have on record has not been used by me for at least that long a time. I have, over this time used the on-line updates from the website to send me some of the various special reports (e.g. Daily News Alert, etc.) and you had my correct e-mail address for those. Due to having the wrong e-mail information, I was missing my subscription for nearly four months.
I understand and can empathize that this has been a difficult time for many in the print publishing business, but I think you need to be more cognizant of your subscribers and work harder to keep the ones you have. Simply switching to digital from paper without notice was not a good move in my book (no pun intended).
Lastly, I must let you know that I will likely not be renewing my subscription to PC Magazine when it expires. I am very sad about this decision and I would like you to understand my reasoning.
Personally, I don’t find reading periodicals online at all satisfying. I tend to read my magazines and newspapers in location where I do not usually have – or want to have – access to a laptop or other digital device. That has been the beauty of paper! That was what I was willing to pay for. As for the content – you currently offer all of the magazine’s content free of charge on your website without needing to use any silly readers which are cumbersome to use and not universally-designed.
Until someone can find a way to digitally replicate the paper-reading experience, I regret that the publishing industry will continue to die, and I will continue to cling on to the last remaining pieces of paper.
Sincerely,
John E. Brandt
Web Design, Development, Consultation
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com
jeb@jebswebs.com
207-622-7937
Digitial Books – for school
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, universal design on 2009/05/07
Wow, two stories around the internet this week have to do with digital books in the educational arena.
Yesterday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the latest entry in the Kindle family – the DX. The new larger e-book is being marketed to colleges and universities as the first e-text for higher ed. The announcement was made at one of my Alma maters, Pace University in NYC. Apparently Amazon has several colleges lined up to pilot the new device in their classrooms and lecture halls. The new Kindle comes in at nearly $500 so the colleges have indicated some interest in subsidizing the cost of the device. Read the NY Times article about the announcement.
The second big e-text news came yesterday as well as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a plan to “make California the first state in the nation to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students.”
According to the news release on the governor’s blog:
“At the Governor’s request, Secretary Thomas will work with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell to develop a state approved list of standards-aligned, open-source digital textbooks for high school math and science. This list will be compiled after content developers across the country are asked to and have submitted digital material for review. “
It is clear the the e-book is the future of education. The exact shape, size and format remains to be seen. But whatever the outcome, the actions of the last two day will no doubt push accessibility issues forward as both the higher education and public schools entities will require that all of these devices and materials will be accessible.
Very exciting.
~j
How do you use TweetDeck?
Posted by jeb in Uncategorized on 2009/05/09
I am sure there has already been much written about the various “appliances” out there that folks are using to “tweet.” My personal favorite is still TweetDeck which I have been using now for about six months. This blog is not intended to compare or contrast the many apps, just to talk about my favorite.
For the uninitiated, the beauty of TweetDeck (hence called TD) is its ability to create various groups and to sort your “follows” into various groups or lists. The main default list is called “All Friends” and consists of all of the people you currently follow on Twitter. As you add more twits to this list, they automatically appear in the All Friends list.
The best feature of TD is the ability to create new lists based upon a subset of the All Friends list. Within these groups you can also filter the list using either the tweet content, name, or time. The groups are created as vertical lists that are arranged in columns that can also be moved around as needed.
I will not pretend to be an expert on TD – let alone Twitter – but I have developed a “system” for sorting the over 1,300 “twits” I am currently following. I like my system, but I am open to hearing from others as to how you handle yours. So feel free to comment on this blog or just tweet your ideas (presuming you can do so in 140 characters).
So my system (which has evolved over time) essentially comes down to four major groups. First, in the far left column is the All Follows. Next, for pure organizational purposes, I have the TwitScoop feed. I must admit this is a bit addicting. Then I have two columns that I might call my “A” List and my “B” List. The A List is technically called Education/Maine because it originally consisted of people who were educators in Maine that I knew and wanted to follow. But it has expanded to include any number of folks, mostly from New England, but a combo of educators and others whose tweets I find most interesting. In this group I keep my closest friends and colleagues so that when I have “conversations” all of the content is easy to follow. BTW, I have added my own Twitter name here so it posts my tweets too.
The B List is for folks a little farther (further?) away and from other more diverse backgrounds. There are a large number of other web designers here, writers, and other just plain interesting folks.
In the next column I have what I call my News feeds. These are twits that are either actual news organizations (CNN, BreakingNews, NYT, etc.) and some individuals whose tweets often take on a “newsy quality.” I also have some feeds from twits that post jobs and other cyclical news (earthquake announcements, weather alerts etc.). BTW, Mr. TD, if you are reading this, a cool feature to add would be the ability to have certain twitter accounts sound a tone or alarm when a new tweet is posted. This would be great for foul weather alerts and hot breaking news.
The next two columns are Replies (or as some call them “Mentions”) and Direct Messages. I call these my utility groups as I usually leave these scrolled off on the right side and only occasionally read them (1-2 times per day).
Rounding out my lists, I have included a column containing my 12seconds.tv feeds.
So how does it all work…?
Well by default, I have all new follows post in the All Friends column only. The exception is when, while reading tweets in TD, I notice someone in another tweet who looks or sounds interesting. After checking out their profile, I decide to follow. I usually then assign this new person to the A List or B List. But generally, in most cases, new twits start in the All Friends and I only move them up into A or B after I’ve had a chance to sample their tweets for a few weeks.
Over the past 6-8 months I have unfollowed a very low number, but I have moved some folks from B to A, A to B and from B back to All Friends. I sort of feel like the sports team manager; as the performance improves, they get into the starting lineup. As their performance drops, well you get the idea.
I can’t say that this is the best way for organizing my follows, but it works. If you have a system, please feel free to share.
~j
Newsletters and Newspapers: Paper or digital?
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, General Information, Uncategorized on 2009/05/12
So the question I am often asked goes something like this…
“I am involved with an organization (business, governmental or nonprofit) and we have been publishing a printed newsletter for many years. But now because of ….and we want to save money….How do we go about publishing this on-line and saving money…?”
I’ve been down this road numerous times with different organizations. Each time the reasons for the conversion are different but usually, somewhere in the discussion, there comes the part about saving money.
After a number of these conversations, I’ve ended up with this thinking: If you are going to jettison the “paper” newsletter, you need to ask yourself several important questions, look at the various options available to you, and do the math.
Question 1: What is the best way to get your news content into the hands of your constituents in a way that will increase the likelihood that they will read it?
You have two major publication choices to consider: print/paper and digital/on-line.
On the paper side, you can stay with the current format or modify the current format to accomplish your goal. If cost is an issue, you can reduce your volume or the size or frequency of the issues. You could experiment with different paper/media and perhaps go from color to monochrome. All of this saves some money, but you will likely find some costs cannot be avoided.
In considering these two major options, you need to have a clear understanding about your readership. Personally – and I suspect that you will find this surprising – I have found that many people (especially people in my part of the world: Maine) are still “paper trained” and like to get local and special news in paper form. While many large urban newspapers around the country are going bankrupt, there seems to be no shortage of small local newspapers and free publications that are sent by mail or are available in various locations. And judging by the girth of some of these publications, I suspect that finding advertisers has not been that big an issue.
In my work I have generally advised clients to stay with the paper-printed news if they can afford it. By using the suggestions stated above (reducing size, volume or quality of paper, etc.) organizations may be able reduce costs sufficiently to keep their newsletters going, but results will vary. Organizations may also want to consider a relationship with the local newspaper (or one of these free newspaper vendors) to see if they can get their content out to the public free.
If you and your organization decide to go digital, expect that there will not be the incredible savings you anticipate. The printing and mailing cost may actually turn out be the least expensive part of the operation. As always, do the math.
Question 2: If we choose to go digital, how is this best accomplished?
Once again, you have several options: simple e-mail; e-mail with an attachment; and, web posting. There are other options, but for this article we’ll stick to these choices.
Simple e-mail is the process of sending out news content and topical information (in plain text or stylized Rich Text Format – RTF or HyperText Markup Language – HTML format) within the body of an e-mail sent to your constituents. These mailings may be simple plain text or also include images and styling (if using RTF or HTML).
E-mail with attachment involves putting the content into a separate formatted document (usually an Adobe Acrobat-PDF file), attaching it to an e-mail and sending it out to your constituents.
Web-posting involves actually publishing the content to a web page (usually using a form of HTML) and/or posting a link to a formatted document (again usually a PDF) that is stored on a web server. In the linked form, the reader will have to download the formatted file from the web server. Often, web-posted news is associated with an e-mail alert (or through other means like Twitter) which “announces” the news and “drives” people to go and look/download.
E-mail solutions
Using any of the e-mail-based solutions assumes you have e-mail addresses for all of your constituents. In my experience, this is usually not the case. You will usually end up with the considerable task of getting the e-mail addresses and more importantly, maintaining them. If your newsletter goes to everyone within one organization (e.g. a company newsletter) and all of the domain names are the same, this might be an easy problem. But if your news is going to a diverse population, you will soon discover this is a monumental task because peoples’ e-mail addresses change very frequently.
Sending out large volumes of e-mail also requires special software and provisions to avoid spam blockers and filters so that your mail reaches your readership. In addition, unless you have your own mail server, you may discover that your ISP limits the amount of e-mails it will let you send in any one day (this is to try to prevent and discourage SPAM). There are server-based applications that you can use to work around this, and for an additional cost, you can hire a mailing service that will manage and maintain your list as well as send out the content. These companies are often paid by how much mail is delivered and have all kinds of clever ways of working around SPAM blockers and filters. All it takes is money…but wait a minute, wasn’t this something you were trying to save?
Web-posted solutions
For web-posted solutions you can either use a print-formatted document (e.g., Word file or PDF) posting on the web server or create an HTML-formatted version of the content. The amount of time to do either is about the same, so it may come down to the resources, skills and training of the people who you have on staff to create the newsletter. My experience has been that most staff talented enough to do layout and design in print form, often have the expertise to do webpage design.
Portable Document Format – PDF
Adobe Acrobat PDF can be a great solution if you want your newsletter to look just like it did before and if you want to be able to print it out. This assumes that the original newsletter was formatted to fit on conventional size pieces of paper. If the newsletter was printed on larger paper, your constituents will still be able to view the content on their computer screen but will likely not be able to print it out in a way that will make it easy to read.
It needs to be noted that historically PDF files have caused many problems for people with disabilities. In the early evolution of Acrobat, PDF files were simply “images” of the printed version and if you relied on an assistive technology device called a screen reader (a device that translates text into speech), you simply could not access the content of the file. Modern PDF files can certainly be made accessible, but frequently problems are encountered when the content is formatted into columns and spread across multiple pages. Knowing how to correctly “tag” PDF file content to make it accessible requires some additional skills and training. The evidence shows that many PDF documents that are distributed around the web are not correctly formatted and remain inaccessible to people with disabilities. Read about how to make Accessible PDFs and other documents on the Maine CITE website.
HyperText Markup Language – HTML
For the same amount of time and effort (and often a lot less), a trained staff person can usually put your newsletter content into HTML and publish it on a web server. With advancements in web design and software, much of the complex design elements have been eliminated making the job of posting content on the web easier and more efficient.
There are many advantages in using HTML to publish news content. If you use a content management system (CMS), the news content can be scripted to allow for comments, creating opportunities for dialog with readers (either through a simple comments section or via a blogging or wiki protocols). HTML content also allows for the use of linkage or “feed” services and “sharing” applications and protocols which promote and encourage readers to share the content with a wider audience through various social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
Once your content is in correctly coded HTML format (see Accessible Web Design resources on Maine CITE), it is usually accessible by all devices including assistive technology devices and handheld devices such as PDAs and “smart” cell phones. Furthermore, you can embed links, objects and rich media into your content making it more dynamic.
Final Things to Consider
Audience: When considering the move from paper to digital newsletters, it is most important to know you audience. Plan ahead, do your research, find out what your constituents would prefer. You may even want to take a poll to determine preferences.
You will need to know if your readers have access to the internet and will they be able to access the content as an attachment? If you choose to use an attachment to an e-mail, do your constituents have sufficient throughput and capacity to handle large attached files. Knowing something about the preferences and experience of your readership is crucial.
Lastly, you should consider if your audience will want to, and know how to, interact with the content and share it? Within certain segments, social networking still involves chit-chat at the church social and not via the internet. But you might be surprised if you ask your readers about this.
Staff: You also have to consider whether your staff have the resources and skills to converted content into accessible digital formats. If traditionally you have been preparing your content in a simply word processor and sending it off to the printer for design and layout, you may need to hire someone else (or provide additional staff training) to be able to do this kind of work.
Lastly, if considering an e-mail solution, you need to determine if your organization has the resources to create and maintain an up-to-date e-mail database, as well as the bandwidth and resources needed to send the digital content?
Summary
In summary, there is no easy or simple answer to the question posted at the beginning of this article. Thoughtful consideration and planning is needed in determining the path you take. As noted earlier, the conversion from paper to digital newsletters may not produce the savings you initially imagined.
Distance Learning and Access
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, Software, universal design on 2009/05/29
I have been on a quest to get the latest information about the various distance learning and conferencing software on the market and their accessibility. And I have not been having much success.
It seems that every day there is a new videoconferencing service or webinar package being created and most – if not all – have no information about accessibility and their use with assistive technologies. For example, my research about Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro has turned up nothing but some personal observations – all negative regarding access – and a VPAT that is less than stellar. The company claims that updates made last fall make it “more accessible” but I have not seen anything definitive other than the company’s own White Paper on the topic. Yet, I know of at least one state government agency that is using this application despite concerns about accessibility.
I do not mean to be picking on Adobe; it just so happens that Connect Pro is the last one I have been researching.
As people scramble with declining budgets, more and more organizations are cutting their travel budgets and will be relying on technology to connect people for continued learning and professional development. But will this be leaving out a multitude of people in the process if the DL tools are inaccessible?
You thoughts and resources would be appreciated. I would really like to know if there is anyone out there studying this.
~jeb
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Image used through license from Creative Commons - Goddard Video and Multimedia
Is the “touch screen” the way of the future?
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, Uncategorized, universal design on 2009/06/10
For the past several months I have been the proud owner of an Apple iPod Touch. As you know from reading this blog, I am far from being an “applefanboi” and have tended towards the “I’m a PC” side of things. But I have been dutifully impressed by this device and the technology behind it.
Perhaps what has impressed me most is the “touch screen” that is the main user interface. Like the move from the keyboard to the mouse – which Apple also perfected more than 25 years ago – the touch screen, I believe, is the way we will interact with computers in the future. I probably should expand that to include the fantastical 3D user interface that Tom Cruise’s character used in The Minority Report even though in that futuristic fantasy the interaction is between hands and holograms as opposed to actually touching a screen. But the concepts are the same – a more direct connection between human physical movement and the actions of a computer.
I think what I like best about the touch screen is how, almost intuitively (and I hate to even admit this), I was able to navigate the device. Being the typical red-blooded-American-male, I didn’t bother to read the directions until after I had given the device a good spin. I found it easy to navigate and move between apps and generally work the browser. The less intuitive stuff related to moving the badges around on the home screen or how to remove them from the device (I still don’t know how to do that on the Mac OS), I had to study to learn. But even these make sense if you think of it (unlike ejecting a CD by dragging it to the trash can – huh?).
The movement of dragging documents around on the screen to view them, squeezing and stretching them to zoom in and out and even the “flick of the finger” action of moving between pages is very close to the “feel” of hands and paper.
Well, it seems everyone has gotten into the “touch screen act” these days and yes things are getting ratcheted up dramatically with the recent release of the new Palm Pre – another touch screen dependent smart phone - in addition to the pending release of the Apple iPhone 3G S. Add to this is Microsoft’s announcement that touch screen capacity has been added into Window 7 (additional hardware required), and it is pretty clear that within a couple of years we will see more and more people engaging their technology “by touch” rather than using a clunky piece of hardware like a mouse or keyboard. Or will we?
Of course all of this creates many new challenges for people with disabilities. How does this new technology work with people who cannot see?
I am sensing that solutions to some of these issues may already be on the drawing board – well at the very least, on Apple’s drawing board. We’ll have to wait and see if the solutions become widespread.
Apple’s solution is the inclusion of the native VoiceOver screenreader into the new iPhone O/S. By the way, I was a little miffed by Apple’s insistence that the iPhone O/S is actually a version of Mac O/S X – bit of stretch if you ask me, Cupertino.
In addition to VoiceOver – which at this point apparently only works with the iPhone’s Safari browser and “native” apps – the new iPhone has Voice Control which will make dialing calls, choosing music and even announcing music titles accessible to people with visual impairments. As demonstrated, Voice Control is a universally designed feature which give heads-up control to all users and allows those who cannot see the device better ability to engage it.
But the clincher may come with the issue of the touch keyboard. If people who are blind or have visual impairments want to use the iPhone 3G S to send text messages or otherwise input text into the device, they are going to have to learn how to “touch type” in a whole new way. And the success of that remains to be seen – sorry no pun intended.
Of course, the next iteration of the iPhone (4G?) might have voice-to-text built in, but since we haven’t mastered that on desktop computers, it might not be that soon. But those Apple people are crafty.
It’s only been 48 hours since Apple made their big announcements at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference – WWDC (which I affectionately have referred to as the “Apple-Love-In”). It is clearly too early to gauge how this new iPhone will work with folks with disabilities. So, I am waiting patiently for the final verdict from my screenreading colleagues who just can’t wait to get their hands on the new toys when they are release to the public next week. I am assuming that Apple live tested these new accessibility features extensively before now – at least I hope they have – but I want to hear from my friends about what they really think about these tools when the phone is released and in the hands of real users.
So to answer my own question, it is pretty apparent that touch screens are the next big thing in personal technology, but maybe just a temporary thing.
Your thoughts?
~j
Accessibility in Higher Ed
Posted by jeb in Uncategorized on 2009/07/08
As a former university webmaster, I have a certain “positive regard” for those in that position. Back in the good old days, when we were “jacks and janes of all trades,” the most we had to worry about was whether we would get anyone to even visit our school’s website.
Long before the commercial world even had e-mail, college and university websites were out there breaking new ground. It was in these settings that the whole distance learning world began and colleges were the first place where e-mail became ubiquitous.
Things have clearly changed in the past 15 years and institutions of higher ed (IHE) now use their websites to deliver a lot of services to a lot of different people. And the idea of a single webmaster, responsible for all of the content, is long gone.
In the early years, most of the information I had on our site was directed towards potential students and perhaps other “university-types” who were looking for info about our faculty. Now, IHE sites offer ongoing service to alumni, current students, future students, parents, researchers, the media and even the general public. In many instances, the college’s website is a potential student’s or employee’s first interaction with the institution. All the more reason to make it a good one.
At the time I was the webmaster at the University of New England in Maine, I was just beginning to learn about web accessibility. Little did I know it would become my future full time job.
In those days we really only had to worry about “ALT tags” because rich media objects hadn’t been invented yet. Most of the information was simple text and even the number of images were fairly limited. But here too, things have changed dramatically and many IHE sites host a plethora of rich media components, much of which is not accessible.
So, I was pleased to read about a new initiative by the National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE) and WebAIM to develop a process to help IHE’s increase the accessibility of their websites.
The GOALS project (Gaining Online Accessible Learning through Self-Study) centers on the development, evaluation, and dissemination of materials and processes in web accessibility that institutions of education and accrediting bodies can use in their efforts to ensure that online content is accessible to all users.
While the GOALS project is not directed exclusively at IHE (all educational institutions can benefit), my thinking is that these are critical partners in this work. IHE usually have a much larger, more diverse constituency, and often can serve as role models for other educational institutions. And, BTW, “the GOALS project is made possible by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education.”
The project is also smart in that it is focusing its attention on both the educational institutions AND the accrediting agencies as these folks clearly have some “pull” with college administrators. And the focus with the institutions themselves is also directed at those administrators.
So now the work is getting the word out, and that’s what this blog is all about. The GOALS project is looking for individuals and institutions to field-test the materials and processes they are developing. Interested parties should contact Heather Mariger, Project Coordinator.
~jeb
Accessible PDF – Revisited
Posted by jeb in Accessibility on 2009/09/17
NOTE: 9/29/08 – I have added a few more resources about accessible PDFs at the end of this blog entry. If you find (or know of others) I will add them as well. Thanks to everyone who has commented.
I attended the Adobe Acrobat Users webinar a few weeks back and was pleased and satisfied that both what I have been doing, and what I have been advocating others to do, is the proper course of action.
This webinar did indeed introduce me to some of the more subtle nuances of Adobe Acrobat Professional that I was not aware of (although I am not sure if they are all part of the older version of Acrobat Professional that I own). But the dominant message – one that came across loud and clear – was the fervent appeal to create document that are accessible BEFORE converting them over to PDF (Portable Document Format).
In nearly all situations, an author considering the use of a PDF file will have created the original document in some other application. The exception might be a PDF “form” which one might create with Adobe LiveCycle Designer (not exactly Acrobat, but it comes with the Acrobat Pro package. Since MS-Word is the dominate player in this area, it is most likely that the PDF conversion will be from a Word document, but authors may be using MS Publisher, Adobe inDesign or any other document producing software.
I’ve already written about how to make accessible Word documents and other types of documents so I won’t repeat that information here. But I should note that there is a new White Paper from Adobe on Creating Accessible PDF with Adobe inDesign CS4 [PDF] that was just published.
The good news is that accessibly-designed document files will generally convert into accessible PDFs with almost no effort. But, the key here is that the original document has to be accessible first. And in most instances, the original document can very easily be made accessible by following some basic rules. Those rules fit into a nice acronym – H.I.T. The “H” stands for Headings, the “I” stands for Images, and the “T” stands for Tables. This is not to say that there aren’t other accessibility issues to be concerned about, but if the author attends to these three, they will be addressing the ones that often cause the most problems with users of Assistive Technology (AT).
Headings
Contrary to popular belief, the purpose of Headings in a document is not to make the font larger and more distinctive; the real reason is to create a semantic framework for understanding the relationship between and among the sections of content. The use of this semantic layout is essential for persons using AT.
When a person with a visual impairment, using a screen reader or some other AT device, reads a document, they most typically use the Headings to scan the document in exactly the same way a sighted person would scan it visually. Printers and typographers learned long ago that by changing the size, shape and spacing of the font, the reader can more easily semantically understand the organization of the document. The person with a visual impairment uses the hierarchical order of the Headings to semantically understand the document. Using a feature built into their screen reader, the user will simply jump from Heading to Heading to peruse the document. The hierarchical order of the headings cues the reader of the importance of the heading and the content that follows.
If you think of a typical textbook, the document starts with a title page that includes the name of the book and other identifying information (the name of the author, publisher, etc.). The most important information on that page is the title itself. For this reason, the title should always be Heading #1 and all other headings below this should be numbered Heading 2, 3, 4 and so on. While some will argue with me on this point, my general recommendation is to have only one Heading 1 in each document. My logic is that documents have only one Title.
In the typical textbook, there are usually a number of chapters and sub-chapters or sections. In our example, each of the chapter numbers and names would use Heading #2. Sub-chapters would then be styled with Heading #3 and sections within each would be Heading 4, 5, 6 as needed (Note: it is rare to see more that three or four sub headings in most documents). This is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1
It is noted that different applications may call Headings by different names, but they all operate the same way. In Microsoft Word 2007, Headings can be found in the Styles section of the Ribbon. In Apple’s iWork Pages, the Headings elements are found in the Styles Drawer. And in Open Office Writer, the Heading can be found in the Styles drop-down bar.
Images
Images, whether they are on a web page, or in a word processed document, can present difficulties to many people using AT. Screen reading software, when encountering an image in a document, will announce the discovery by stating the word “image” followed by the alternative (or ALT) description provided by the author. Without the ALT description, the screen reader simply announces “image” leaving the user to guess what this means. This can be particularly problematic when the image in question is graphic text, that is, text embedded into an image such as in a logo. Even worse is when this image contains a hyperlink to some other resource. In these cases, without an ALT description, the screen reader user has to go to that new link to find out (or try to find out) what that resource is. It all makes for a rather confusing experience.
When creating web pages in HTML, the author is required to use ALT description for the image. But the author also has the option of using the “null” attribute – that is ALT=”" – which is a command to the screen reader to simply skip over the image completely. When creating other documents, whether they be word processed or PDFs, there is an option for adding a descriptive text to the image. However, unfortunately there is no capacity to make this a “null ALT” so all images must have a description.
As I have discussed in previous articles, most images in documents are simply “pretty pictures” designed to “catch one’s eye” and to make the overall document more visually appealing. They may be used as placeholders, to fill in white space, or to simply attenuate the topic of the writing. But in most cases, they add nothing to the understanding of the document. So choosing an ALT description for a PDF document can present some challenges. The general consensus among the designers I know is to try to keep ALT descriptions short and to the point. Here is a more thorough discussion on how to write good ALT descriptions.
Tables
Finally tables, or tabled data, in a document can present challenges to users of AT if the tables are not constructed correctly. To understand a table, the reader must understand the meaning of the data in each cell and this is typically accomplished by the use of column and/or row headings. Most tables use the top row of the columns for this heading information so most word processors software packages, when they create a table, will automatically assign this top row as the heading.
For example in Table 1, the first column contains the list of months; the second column the number of cars sold. A screen reader will read this as: Month, car sales, Jan, 67, Feb, 56, etc. In other words, the screen reader will read each cell starting in the upper left corner and read across the page to the right and then down to the next row.
In a large table with many rows and columns, a person using a screen reader could easily become lost in the data not knowing what row or column they are on. By the use of the “Table Mode” and special commands commonly found in most screen reader software, users are able to navigate around the table in various ways (e.g., reading columns or rows separately). But if the layout of the Table is not correct, the screen reader user can easily get lost in a sea of numbers and disconnected data.
Table 1.
| Month | Car Sales |
|---|---|
| Jan. | 67 |
| Feb. | 56 |
| Mar. | 34 |
| Apr. | 67 |
| May | 86 |
| Jun. | 56 |
| Jul. | 44 |
Therefore, tabled information in documents should generally be kept as simple as possible and the author must ensure that the layout of tables is constructed in such a way as to make the information understandable to all users. If a large complex table is required, it is best practice to publish this on a separate page in the document (or on a separate webpage if an HTML document). Ideally, a complex data tables should be kept in a spreadsheet application (e.g., MS Excel) and sent along as a separate document.
Converting Documents
Converting documents into PDF format can be done by any number of conversion solutions. Perhaps the most robust converter is the Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker, a plug-in that comes with the Adobe Acrobat Professional suite. However, I have discovered that when using Microsoft Office 2007, the Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF does a much better job of converting Office files with fewer errors and faster results.
If you are using Open Office 3.1, the application has a built-in “save as PDF” feature. However, my experiments with this feature showed mixed results with most converted PDF documents failing to pass the accessibility test.
Note: As of this writing, I have only been able to test Apple iWork08. Regretfully, documents made by this application cannot be made accessible. I have ordered iWork09 and will report on those results on my blog as soon as possible
Testing Documents
Before making any PDF document available to the public, it should always be tested thoroughly for accessibility using the Adobe Acrobat Professional. Apart from actually testing the document with a screen reader like JAWS, Acrobat Professional is the only application I am aware of that tests PDFs for accessibility. Not only will the Acrobat Professional accessibility application test the page, it will provide detailed instructions on how to remedy any errors that are reported. For details on using this feature on Acrobat Professional, please visit the Adobe website or the Acrobat Users website.
Resources
Previous article about Accessible Documents
Accessibility resources from Adobe
Here are some more web-based articles about accessible PDFs:
- Accessibility testing 14 PDF creation tools by Ted Page of PWS
- No Fuss Accessibility by Antonio DaSilva
- Are PDFs more important than web accessibility? by Mark Magennis
Stretching with Joomla
Posted by jeb in General Information on 2009/08/02
I must admit that I am a bit threat-sensitive to monkeying around with the back end of servers. I’m not sure why I have this neurosis, but I fear that if I make a mistake that the whole Internet will come crashing down and five minutes later the “web police” will be pounding on my door.
The logical explanation of my phobia is that “things can go wrong” when you play around with web servers and when you develop with content management systems (CMS) like Joomla!, Drupal and Word Press, you’re bound to hit a few snags along the way. It’s happened to me before.
My strongest aversion is to upgrades, especially Joomla upgrades. This is probably due to the fact that a year or so ago when I upgraded this site from 1.0 to 1.5 the whole thing crashed and burned and I had to completely rebuild the site. So, I am a little gun shy…you understand.
Well I am feeling pretty cheeky today after launching a new revised site for the Maine Coalition to Fight Prostate Cancer. I had built their original site last summer using basic HTML and a free CSS template. It looked pretty good and I got lots of compliments which I redirected at the guy who did the CSS work. But the MCFPC folks were so impressed they wanted to push the envelope further and expand their site to a CMS.
I met with some of their board members and we talked about the design at length. And then, once they had agreed to the plan, the moment of truth came. Now I had to rebuild the site.
My first decision was deciding which CMS to use. As this site would likely involve the use of one or more volunteers serving as authors and editors, I liked the fact that Joomla had a pretty user-friendly WYSIWYG content editor. Yes, I know you can install TinyMCE or some other editor in Drupal, but I’ve had lots of problems getting those to work well over the year. In the meantime, Joomla’s editor works quite nicely “out of the box.” So, Joomla it was.
Next chore was finding a suitable template with colors that matched the original. Thanks to the good folks at Joomlashack, I was able to get a nice pro template and install it pretty quickly. The colors were pretty close to the old design and the MCFPC folks seemed to like the beta site that I put up.
It had been several years since I rolled out a new Joomla install and I was pleased that the latest iteration of v1.5 installed quickly and easily. There have been a number of back-end features which have experienced major improvements. The entire media management system is much improved and will make it very easy for novices to add images to their new “articles.”
In the process I learned a lot more about the back-end of Joomla and have been pretty impressed.
So now I really want Drupal and Joomla and Word Press to get married and have a little baby called…DroomlaPress…or JoompalPress….or WorDrumla…
I’ll stop now…you got the point.
~j
21st Century communications access bill introduced
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, Uncategorized on 2009/08/13
This posting come from the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology (COAT) website and is published here as a service to the community:
Before Congress adjourned, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced the “21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009″ (H.R. 3101). This comprehensive measure would modernize disability accessibility mandates in the Communications Act, bringing existing requirements up to date as TV and phone services connect via the Internet and use new digital and broadband technologies. COAT leaders say the following:
“The time is now to safeguard an accessible communications future,” say Jenifer Simpson of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD). “We commend Rep. Markey for his leadership and look now to the U.S. Senate for a similar leader!”
Karen Peltz Strauss of Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD) says, “H.R. 3101 puts people with disabilities squarely into 21st century broadband communications so we can take full advantage of Internet advancements enjoyed by everyone else.”
“Digital technologies make it possible for TVs and other video devices — of virtually any size — to receive, transmit and display TV programs and video clips with captioning,” says Rosaline Crawford of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD). “Captioning is needed for video material shown on the Internet for the same reason captioning is needed on TV.”
Mark Richert, of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) stated,” We are fed up with playing catch up whenever new technologies are released. People with vision loss will finally have access to everything from text messaging, watching TV and receiving emergency infromation, if this bill is enacted.”
Adds Eric Bridges of the American Council of the Blind: “Video description and accessible user interfaces on TV devices are essential for us. We’ve waited a long time for this.”
Everyone’s talking about digital textbooks…
Posted by jeb in General Information on 2009/08/14
Perhaps because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California gave it some broad public attention, or perhaps it is a sign of the times, but it seems not a day goes by that there is not another news story about digital textbooks. Since my concerns are related to the accessibility of the media and the medium, I have been reading all that I can.
Here are some of the latest stories, just in case you are interested.
California names first digital textbooks that meet standards for high school math, science
Online textbooks offered free to students
U.S. company to offer digital textbooks on iPhone
Digital textbooks may soon take over for paper predecessors
And so it goes…
~j
Have we entered a brave new world?
I read this brief article from yesterday’s New York Times with great interest. Entitled, “Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom,” it grabbed my attention immediately.
Having spent a fair amount of my career dealing with distance education, I always found myself defending this style of pedagogy with my traditionally inclined colleagues. When logic and research failed, the comeback was always, “…well I just could not learn without there being a teacher in the room…”
Personal learning styles and technologically-literate students aside, there had been no definitive study to prove either way if distance education was as “effective” as traditional methods. The NYT’s article describes a new research study from SRI that may have done just this. I will now be endeavoring to pore through that study. In the meantime, I thought I should share some of the comments made about the study so far:
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
Hey, not shabby…
…and where have you heard this before (Hint: Me!)
The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
Again, surprise, surprise, surprise! (deference to Gomer Pyle)
Mr. Regier sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said.
~jeb
Content Management Systems for you
Posted by jeb in General Information, Software on 2009/09/01
technology
I have been toying around with an article for my website describing the difference between traditional “static” websites and “dynamic” websites created with open source Content Management Systems (CMS). I may still finish the article/blog and post it, but in the meantime a nice little article was just published by the folks at TechSoup which describes Joomla!, one of the several open source CMS out there. Thought this article was written for people who work in the nonprofit world, the article is fairly generic and can be broadly applied.
I particularly liked these two paragraphs:
Until about two years ago, there simply was no easy, cost-effective way for non-technical users to update their own site content. Clients either had to train existing staff to code HTML, purchase additional software, hire a webmaster, or contract for ongoing maintenance. Installing individual desktop software was especially cumbersome for organizations functioning outside the traditional office environment — a description that fits many nonprofits, which often rely on volunteers, part-time staff, and staff who work from home.
CMS technologies such as Joomla enable authorized staff members and volunteers to edit their own site content from a web-based interface, with no prior knowledge of HTML or programming. CMS users can create new menu items and web pages, add news and calendar listings, upload photos and videos, and even build online communities.
So check out the whole article!
Oh, and if you have a nonprofit that needs a Joomla! site, well, “we can do that!”
~j
Maine 1-to-1
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, education on 2009/09/14
The Maine Learning Technology Initiative – affectionately known in these parts as MLTI (pronounced “Milty”) – has unveiled their new professional development blog called Maine121.org.
Apart from the fact that it is built in WordPress and just happens to use the same template as this jebswebs’ blog, it should be a welcome addition to the program and to Maine educators.
Most noticeably the blog will feature a section discussing “accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL).” We are pleased that this “theme” is important to the MLTI program and look forward to the potential for collaboration.
BTW, a little background. The MLTI program is Maine’s “laptop program;” designed to get laptop computers into the hands of students and teachers. The program started in fall of 2002 with Apple iBook G4s deployed to every student and teacher in Maine’s middle schools. Eventually the program was expanded to include administrators and support staff and most recently, it was expanded into Maine’s high schools. About 64,000 Apple MacBooks were sent out this summer making it one of the largest 1-to-1 educational technology programs, of its kind, in the country. Read the MLTI history
~j
New Literacy?
I have been indulging in some more thoughtful reading of late about the nature of literacy and particularly the skills of our latest generation. I am a member of the TV Generation and when I was in high school, the educational community was all upset because the nation’s SAT scores had started to drop. There were all kinds of theories at the time: television and comic books were the prime culprits, particularly in my household.
When I was doing my masters degree in school psychology we took a field trip down to Princeton, NJ to visit Educational Testing Service the then-purveyors of Scholastic Aptitude Test – the dreaded SATs. We had a conversation about the declining SATs score with some of the big honchos at ETS and they were engaged in real research at the time about the causes of the decline. They had theories, and yes, television viewing was on the list, but not nearly as wicked as my mother contended. It seemed that there were a lot of factors at work, but we were assured that children were not getting stupider…
As I entered the field of education, I continued to harbor some guilt feeling that we, the TV Generation, did not really work as hard as previous generations. At the time, I sensed that we had had it easier and that there was less pressure to succeed. Clearly, we were allowed to goof off more than the kids who sat in our seats 5, 10 years earlier. After all, there were all these “new technologies” to play with and things to explore. Studying Latin, which had been a requirement for all student at my high school up until 1966, the year I entered, was now only offered as an elective. By the time I graduated, there were no Latin classes, the teacher retired and was not replaced. But this was okay, right?
In college, there were similar events where it looked like corners were being cut. Expectations and entrance requirements had been lowered from previous years, and graduation requirements lowered. But I wasn’t about to complain. Hey, it was the 70s and I was too busy playing my guitar, drinking beer and hanging with my friends.
But this sense of complacency has haunted me all these years.
In 1990, the brilliant film maker Ken Burns released his 11-hour epic “The Civil War” on PBS. I can still remember the episode where the letter from Sullivan Ballou was read. A letter written by a man on a battlefield to his wife telling her how he was “impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.” With Jay Unger and Molly Mason’s beautiful and haunting rendition of Ashokan Farewell filling the background, I was moved the first time, and the every time I’ve heard the elegant prose. A graduate of Brown University, a lawyer in civilian life and a man who rose to the rank of Major in the Union Army, Ballou clearly had achieved a level of literacy that far exceeds what most college graduates have today. Could a student today, write a Facebook entry as elegant?
Two articles that I just read talk about “the new literacy” and appear to take the position that things are not so bad. Clive Thompson published The New Literacy in last month’s Wired magazine which described a recent study by Stanford University professor Andrea Lunsford called Stanford Study of Writing. It seems Professor Lunsford thinks thing are not all that bad. Thompson poses this:
But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
You should read Thomson’s whole piece. Good stuff.
The other is from Paul Barnwell and appears in today’s issue of Education Week. Entitled Literary Accountability in a New-Media Age, Barnwell, a middle school language arts teacher from Kentucky, suggests that the perceived decline in the literacy of today’s children is a function of the type of metric we are using to measure literacy. He states, “If we judged these students’ ability to interpret and gather information solely based on their mastery of print media, we’d be doing ourselves—and society—a huge disservice.”
I just don’t know. I can’t find the reference right now, but I recall a few weeks ago there was a report (I think it was in the Washington Post) complaining about students not being prepared for college and the costs of remediation for these students once they get to college is growing.
So, if you have thoughts on the topic, feel free to drop a comment. Me, I’m gonna go watch TV.
~j
Multi-tasking
Posted by jeb in General Information, education on 2009/10/14
I just finished reading an article in the New York Times (on line of course) “Texting, Surfing, Studying” written by a pediatrician about “her” own children and how they “multitask.” BTW, I cannot tell by the name (or anything in the text) as to whether this is a man or a woman writing – my bias is it’s a woman – so apologies given if necessary.
In any case Dr. Klass shares the story of an “experiment” with her son who is currently a medical student and his friends (also medical students). She asked them about study habits and it turned out most of them indicated that when they studied they were also doing something else (watching a movie, texting, or exercising). Apparently, all of these highly educated and competent medical students could manage to successfully study and do the other task.
Dr. Kass notes in the article about the research showing that there is no such thing as multitasking in human behavior. My own personal and professional experience would back that up. But Dr. Kass appears to be supporting the notion that today’s generation of “digital natives” are perhaps different their forefathers. This notion is in dispute among cognitive neuroscientists, but I would venture to guess there are some stylistic differences at work here.
Rather than quoting research, I thought I would tell you about my stepbrother. Chris is eight years younger than I, but still falls within the “baby boomer” generation. We became brothers when he was 11 and I was 19 and so I only got to observe his studying behavior for a few years. The fact that I was a psychology major helped.
Chris’ technique for studying – which, by the way he did very little of – was to have a book open on his lap while he was watching television. I, on the other hand, have to be in a room with almost complete silence for me to study anything. The only exception is listening to classical music and only such music that has no one singing – no opera!
Now I won’t pontificate and talk about the level of academic achievement that my brother and I attained – suffice it to say there was some variance here. But to this day, he is still much better at remembering things that he has learned by listening and can repeat lines from plays and movies seen years ago with ease. I, on the other hand am one of those people who when I got to a meeting or party and am introduced to new people, cannot remember their names to save my life. And, I can only remember lyrics to songs when I am playing an instrument along while singing.
Both my stepbrother and I are fairly adept at using technology and in other ways are very similar. So I have my doubts about the digital immigrant/digital native notion – sorry Marc Prensky. The only geeky behavior that I eschew is video gaming. For the life of me, I just don’t get it. To be a gamer I think you have to have been born with a GameBoy in you hands.
Check out the NYT article and feel free to comment.
Image from Gideo Burton Creative Commons license.
Making Accessible Educational Documents
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, education, universal design on 2009/11/13
I have written and published a new article about accessible documents on the Maine CITE website. This is the first of a series I plan to write on the topic called Making Accessible Educational Documents. The articles are based upon the series of articles I wrote for the Maine State Government Office of Information Technology over the past two years and will refine the content, focusing it specifically on the needs of classroom teachers and educational administrators at all levels – Kindergarten through college.
As more and more curriculum and school-related content is being provided to students, parents and the general public in digital form, it is essential that these documents be created in a form that everyone can access.
The articles will also appear in print form in the quarterly newsletter published by the Association of Computer Technology Educators of Maine (ACTEM).
The first in the series is called Making Text Documents Accessible and deals with word processor and Portable Document Format (PDF) documents .
Also featured on the new web resource will be quick tips and resources to help teachers and educational administrators communicate better with their constituents.
~j
Very Cool WP Plug-in
Posted by jeb in Software, universal design on 2009/11/15
As a web designer with some high mileage on the odometer, I can scornfully remember the days of ole when the “browser wars” forced us to add all kinds of goofy code to make our web designs appear consistent – let alone appear at all – on various browsers and browser versions. There are still some designers out there who fuss about making their sites work on IE6. I say, let them eat cake!
But I have been watching the development of many of the new hand-held technologies and realizing that the time is coming when more people will be viewing websites on small 2-3 inch screens than on the 27-inch monster like the one I have on my desk. In fact, there is some evidence that day has already come.
I have prescribed for some time that the solution to all this was good coding – and by that I mean standards-based , universally-designed coding. My rationale has been that the new devices and their tiny browsers would eventually regress to the mean and adopt the W3C standards. This is turn would allow for an “efficient” transition from the big screen to the small.
With my purchase of an iPod Touch last spring and a Garmin GPS several months earlier, I have recognized that simply making a website that looks okay on the small screen is less than ideal. These small devices are much more interested in your content, not how it is displayed on the screen. When I access web content on my tiny Safari screen, I want to be able to read it clearly and navigate to the things I want. I don’t care about your “pretty pictures” and fancy Flash animation. In fact, I can’t even see your Flash!
Over the past month, I have started noticing certain blogs that, when I access them with my iPod, magically appear as though they were built inside an iPod/iPhone apps. The look, feel, buttons and controls familiar to iPod/iPhone users are all there and, more importantly, work. The first of these I notices was my local NBC affiliate WCSH-6 TV in Portland, Maine. A couple of months ago they introduced a new iPod/iPhone-friendly interface that appears when one accessed their website with a hand-held device (you can still access the “full site” by activating a button at the bottom of the screen). The effect was stunning to say the least, and joyous in that I no longer has to resize the screen repeatedly to read the content. I needed to get me one of those!
This morning I found a blogger who had a similar iPod-enhanced Word Press blog site and at the bottom I found the magic word WPtouch. A few minutes later my jebswebs blog was sporting the new look and I must say, I am very impressed.
The WPtouch Mobile Plugin by the BraveNewCode folks is an easy-to-install script that loads in seconds. Once activated, the settings page gives you all kinds of options and choices. And, once installed, my WordPress blog site instantaneously looks like it was built into an iPod app. Tres cool.
At this point, WPtouch is all I could ask for and more. But, I suspect that as time goes on, I will want more. Maybe a similar plugin for my Joomla! and Drupal sites! Maybe they already exist.
Gotta go, I feel quest coming on.
Last word, if you are looking for a great plugin that makes your WordPress blog look great on a mobile device, check out the WPtouch Mobile Plugin!
~j
Static vs. Dynamic Web Design
Posted by jeb in General Information, Software, Uncategorized, universal design on 2009/11/17
How to choose what’s right for your organization
Web sites come in many shapes and sizes and, given the magic of current technologies, can do many wondrous things. But to many, the inner workings of a website can be confusing. Having the responsibility of developing, or updating the web presence for your organization can be a major challenge. This article is designed to help.
Two Flavors
To begin this discussion, you should know that web sites still come in two major “flavors” – static and dynamic. To the knowledgeable purists reading this, I understand that there are no truly static websites, but please allow me some poetic license here.
The terms static and dynamic have little to do with the actual look of the website and refer more to the “backend” or inner workings of the site and to some extent the functionality of some or all of the features on the site. Either can be right solution for your organization, but how do you choose the right one for your organization? Let’s begin with some information about the flavors.
Static web sites are built using individual web page files written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), along with some support files for styling (e.g., Cascading Style Sheets – CSS), images (e.g., JPGs, GIFs, etc.) and media elements (e.g., audio, video and Flash objects). Files are usually prepared off-line on a local computer using specialized web-authoring software like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression, and then “published” to a web server connected to the World Wide Web (WWW). Note, there are other programs that purport to be able to create web pages (like MS-Word or MS- Publisher), but be careful. Good web design requires the right tools and techniques. Using the wrong ones can make your site misbehave or worse, not work at all.
The web files are typically “published” to a web server using a piece of software called a File Transfer Protocol or FTP client. The FTP client may be built into your web-authoring program, or it may be a separate program. The “web server” is a special application that runs on a specialized computer (also called a server) that is connected to the Internet. This web server does just what its name implies; it “servers up” your web files when “called for” by someone on the Internet.
Most organizations do not own their own web server and will use a “host” like Maine Hosting Solutions to serve up their website. The cost of this hosting service ranges from a few dollars per month to many thousands of dollars depending on the size of the website and the amount of traffic is receives. There are many options and a web design firm like jebswebs can assist you in this decision.
In a Static web site, when you want to change the content, someone has to change the local file and re-publish it to the web server, thus overwriting the original file. If it is something like a link on a menu bar, this may require that every web file on your site be changed and re-published also. So, this quickly can become time consuming.
With the exception of some simple executable files, most of the content in static websites is fairly flat, meaning it allows little or no interaction with visitors/users. In other words, people viewing the site will typically only be able to read or view the content and not able to write or submit content to the site.
When the World Wide Web was first developed in the early 1990s, designers had very limited choices of things they could do. Designs in those days were almost exclusively static in nature and developers were constantly challenged to make the user experience more interactive and exciting.
Dynamic web site development came out of that need for interaction. These sites often provide the user with the ability to interact with the content and provide some kind of feedback. But the real reason for calling these sites dynamic has to do with how the sites are constructed and maintained. In the dynamic web site, all of the content, styling files and related web documents are contained within one or more databases located somewhere on the Web and “controlled” or administered by an application called a Content Management System (CMS). The content is “hung” on the website using various templates written in a dynamic markup language such as PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion or Java. These templates are similar to HTML, but are more complex and can do a lot more things. Think of your website was a Christmas tree. The template is the tree itself with trunk and branches. It has some color and texture. The content is like decorations and lights that are hung on the tree. Each of your “pages” (also called nodes) uses the same tree, but the decorations and lights vary from page to page, node to node. Some of the “decorations” are built-in to the tree and will appear on every page/node. For example, the heading/logo area, the main menus and the footer of the page. You can also add blocks of content that will appear on every page/node. The choice is up to you.
There are many CMS applications out there and each works a little differently. The three big ones, Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, have become the standard in the field. These are all “open source software” meaning that they are developed by volunteer code writers who are always trying to improve the code. They are also free and freely available to be modified and changed to meet your needs.
I should point out that there are commercial CMSs as well and they can cost many thousands of dollars to purchase and license each year.
The CMS is used to create and edit content and runs on the web server itself, requiring almost no additional software. Many of the CMSs have built in image editors which can do some basic edits like resizing the image, however serious edits are usually done off-line with a local editing application. There are many modules, plug-ins and “widgets” that can be freely added to the dynamic site making the experience for the user very rich.
All CMSs allow for multiple users and the administrator can control how much access each user has to the website.
How to Choose
Generally the first consideration when trying to decide between a static vs. dynamic website is the basic size of the site. This can sometimes be decided by looking at the size of the organization. If the site is for a single person or small organization, you can probably get by just fine with a static site. If there are a large number of people going to be involved with this website, it’s probably best to go for a dynamic design. If you are looking at some kind of an e-commerce website – in other words you are looking to sell things on the Web – you are probably going to need a dynamic web site.
Next in your consideration is how often the content needs to be updated. Static sites by their very definition tend to have information with a relatively long shelf life. That is, if the information that you are putting on a website is relatively stable and will not be changing for months or years, you can get by just fine with a static site. If your content is changing more frequently than once per month, you should consider a dynamic website.
“Who will manage your content?” is your next question. If you have on your staff personnel that know how to design and update web pages, you are all set and can have either a static or dynamic site based upon your organization’s particular needs. However, if you have a small staff, or perhaps are a small nonprofit organization staffed with a handful of volunteers, you are going to need to either hire someone or find a volunteer with extra talents and time.
Finding staff or volunteers that know how to design and maintain a website is not as difficult as it once was, but sometimes keeping that staff is difficult. These people are usually in high demand and may get a better offer from one of your competitors.
Choosing a dynamic web site will be an advantage here in that adding, deleting and editing content is very easy. If you have ever ordered anything on line, written or commented to a blog, or added a comment to an online discussion group, you can easily learn how to work with a dynamic web site.
The last question you need to consider in selecting what type of web site you want is -how interactive do you want your site to be?
One of the big advantages of choosing a dynamic web site design is that they are designed for interaction. In some ways, that’s the goal of the dynamic design; it encourages lots of people to contribute and collaborate. However, you will be comforted in knowing that with a dynamic web design, you still have complete control of who can add, delete or edit content. You can also assign sections of your website to different parts of your organization so that only these groups can see and work with the content in that section. Or, you can open your site up to the whole world for input and discussion like many people do with blog sites. This is all entirely up to you.
Dynamic websites can also import content from multiple sources including automated ones so your website will be constantly updating and changing as these sources update content. And, as noted earlier, dynamic websites can be use to conduct commerce on the Web.
We can help
Whether you are considering your first website or updating one you’ve had for years, it can be very helpful to discuss your needs with a web design firm like jebswebs. We are here to help you with each stage of the design and development experience from concept development to implementation to staff training. Please feel free to contact jebswebs today to request a free initial consultation.
Kindle Fails on Accessibility
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, education on 2009/11/26
With much fanfare a few months ago, Amazon.com rolled out its latest version of Kindle, the e-book appliance that they hoped would revolutionize the industry. At the time, close to the beginning of the school year, Amazon also announced that several “major” universities in the US would be “testing” the Kindle as a way of inexpensively delivering college text to college students.
In the meantime, Kindle has also been embroiled in a debate between consumers who have disabilities and the association that represents writers, The Authors’ Guild. Central in that debate was copyright issues and whether having a text to speech conversion tool built into Kindle’s operating system would be a violation of the copyright rules. More on that story.
But the Kindle story took a new twist when two of the “major universities” rejected the Kindle because – get this – “the menus of the device are not accessible to the blind”
Reported widely in the press, both Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have decided to say, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the Kindle.
E-Access Bulletin reports,
The institutions’ decision was “applauded” by the US National Federation of the Blind ( NFB: http://bit.ly/gBnAC ), which said that although the reader contains a text-to-speech feature, “the menus of the device are not accessible to the blind”, meaning that blind users cannot purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select which book to read, or even activate the device’s text-to-speech feature.
They further state,
“If e-books are accessible, then there will be no need for the expensive and time- consuming process of converting a printed textbook into Braille, audio, or electronic form. Blind students will have access to the same book at the same time and at the same price as their sighted peers”, said Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the NFB.
Danielsen said that Amazon could increase the accessibility of the Kindle DX by “making the menus speak and/or by allowing the functions of the device to be controlled by keystrokes from the keyboard.”
Captioning and YouTube
Posted by jeb in Accessibility, Software on 2009/12/10
I recently heard the news about the new “automatic captioning” that Google is providing to certain YouTube accounts. According to the “Official Google Blog:”
…we’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.
Apparently, Google is rolling this out with a select group of partners and on specific channels. My understanding is that Google will simply start captioning videos in these groups using this new automatic system.
Anyone who knows anything about captioning knows that automatic systems are fraught with problems. It seems the best captioners are still human beings. And, well, I’m guessing Google is not interesting in hiring half the population of the planet and training them to become transcriptionists. Cause that’s what it would probably take to get enough human power to deal with the zillions of YouTube videos out there.
But if you can’t wait for Google to automatically caption the home videos of your kids opening their Christmas presents, you can use another, lesser-known, and equally free service called CaptionTube. It is not clear from my reading if CaptionTube is a service that Google Labs developed themselves or whether is was acquired through some kind of company merger, but in any case, the price is right. I’m still playing with it so I don’t have an official opinion yet. If you are a master user, send me a comment or an e-mail.
I have, for a year or so, been also playing around with an application called MovCaptioner that runs on the Mac OSX. SynchriMedia, the maker of MovCaptioner has been promising a Windows version, but I’m thinking CaptionTube might be the right product at the right price. MovCaptioner costs $39.95 for one license which provides free updates. Multiuser licenses are also available for a discount.
Both MovCaptioner and CaptionTube work essentially the same way. You load your video (in the case of CaptionTube, you can work off an existing YouTube video that has already been published). As you play back your video in the application, you can stop (marking the time code automatically) and type in what the people on the video are saying. It is not really easy to do, so I have developed an new affinity for the people who do this work professionally. People do not talk in nice tight sound bytes, so you will quickly find it is hard to “stop the tape” at the appropriate spot and add the caption. You also have to have pretty good listening skills. You will end up often repeating the clip to get the wording correctly. Again, it’s not easy.
After you have created the text for your captions, you click some buttons, uploading the caption file, and check back in a little while and see your YouTube with captions. In the case of MovCaptioner, you have a number of options for saving and publishing your video. MovCaptioner has the advantage of saving a file that can use it with, or converted for use with any media player, not just the Flash media player that YouTube uses.
Both captioning systems appear to use an “closed caption” method meaning the caption transcript is kept separate from the video file (not embedded like subtitles in old movies). It can be turned off and on by the user, and the transcript itself can be saved and used separately – with or without the time codes. This is a nice option.
I’ve made this all sound very simple; it’s not. But, it is not all that difficult either. Like anything, it is an acquired skill.
I am hoping this new automatic service from Google takes off and become universally available soon. At the very least, Google could first provide this as a service for folks who need to get their videos captioned now (e.g., educational institutions, governments, etc.). Maybe even open it up with invites like they did with GMail and GoogleWave. I’d be happy to be a beta tester.
Anyway, a solution to finding a quick and inexpensive way of captioning short videos is coming closer to fruition. Exciting times. Stay tuned!
WordPress 2.9 Update
Posted by jeb in General Information, Software on 2009/12/20
This is primarily intended for my clients who are using WordPress on the websites….you know who you are, right? Ahem…
Anyway, three exciting changes found in the new version of WordPress are “the Trash Can,” “image editing” and “video embedding.”
The Trash Can now adds a step between removing a blog entry or page and permanently deleting. When you “delete” something in WordPress 2.9 it automatically goes into a trash can (just like in Windows or Mac OS). You can go to the Trash Can tab and permanently delete the items then, or simply wait and WordPress will automatically delete the item permanently in 30 days.
An even more exciting addition to WordPress 2.9 are new image editing tools that will pop up when you insert an image into a post or page. The editing tool features a cropping tool as well as some basic flipping and spinning features.
The third new feature may come in handy for some clients and I will be trying this one out myself. This has to do with embedding video clips. In the past, to embed a video like a YouTube clip, you had to grab the embedding code from YouTube, then open a page or post and click on the HTML version of the editor, then find the location where you wanted your video clip to appear, and then paste the code. It wasn’t always a smooth process. Well, apparently – and I haven’t tried this yet – all you have to do now is grab the embedding code and place it where you want the clip to appear right on your page, then simply paste the code right into the page (using the standard Visual editor) and voila! The video will magically appear…or so I believe. I’ll check that one and get back to you.
To “embed” a video in either a page or a post on WordPress, you actually have to use the URL link code NOT the Embed code. Your code with be the one with the “http://….” NOT the one with the “<object width=…>” This might be a little confusing. But it works – see the embedded video at the bottom of this post.
To learn more about these new features, go to the Official WordPress blog where there is a short video explaining and demonstrating these new features.
Here is the sample of one of my You Tube videos
Silver Tech
Posted by jeb in Uncategorized on 2009/12/28
There was a good article in this week’s Maine Sunday Telegram about a number of interesting – and relatively low cost – assistive technology (AT) for “seniors.” Written by Michelle Maltais of the LA Times, the article notes that “a daylong series of sessions called the Silvers Summit, focusing on new tech products and services for boomers and seniors” will be featured at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Some of the more interested AT devices for Seniors noted in the article were: “Lean and Zoom, computer software that magnifies what’s on the screen when a user naturally leans in to see it. It works with the computer’s video camera to determine the user’s position; the closer a person leans, the more it zooms.”
The article describes how some of the technology originally designed for fighter jets and missiles can now be used in consumer devices to help people with stability and mobility issues.
Good read…anyone going to CES Las Vegas and can give us reports?
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