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Although it is not considered a major update, Microsoft (MS) recently released the latest iteration of its highly popular MS Office. To me, it appears most of the changes to this version (Microsoft Office 2010) are minor in nature and looks very similar to version 2007 – which WAS a major upgrade. That said, there are clearly things “under the hood” that have been revised and it is always fun to try and discover those new things.

I will not comment on the cost effectiveness of upgrading to MS Office 2010 except to say that if you are still using MS Office 2003, this is probably a worthwhile investment. But if you are responsible for ensuring that the documents coming from your organization meet accessibility requirements, MS Office 2010 might be an excellent investment.

Accessibility Checker

For the new version of MS Office (MSO), Microsoft has made accessibility a priority since one of the new features is the Accessibility Checker (MSO-AC) built into three of the core applications: Word 2010, Excel 2010, and PowerPoint 2010. According to the MS promo, the MSO-AC helps users create more accessible content “by identifying areas that might be challenging for users with disabilities to view or use, and providing a task pane to review those areas, users can fix potential problems with their content.” So far, my limited experience with the MSO-AC has been favorable and here is what I have learned so far:

1. To use MSO-AC, click on the File tab [or Alt-F], tab to, or click on Prepare for Sharing and then tab to or click on to Check Accessibility. The MSO-AC dialog panel will appear along the right side of your screen and show you Warnings, Errors or Inspection Results. The MSO-AC works dynamically (see 3 below) and will continue to run as you create or edit your document. To find the location of the error in your document, click or tab to the Warning statement and your screen will refresh showing the error location highlighted.

In the lower panel of the MSO-AC, there is Additional Information which explains the reason for the Warning/Error and step-by-step instructions on how to fix it.

In developing this tool, Microsoft apparently differentiated between accessibility issues that are minor and those considered critical. For example, including extra characters (Warning: Repeated Blank Characters) is considered minor – issuing a “Warning,” whereas the absence of ALT text for an inserted image is considered critical – issuing an “Error”

2. When creating new documents using the default version settings (not documents saved in pre-2007 versions of MSO), the MSO-AC seems to run smoothly as advertised. Documents created in older versions of Office, or saved in the pre-2007 format, may or may not work as expected. For example, testing some 2003 version Excel spreadsheets yielded an error statement: “Unable to run the Accessibility Checker – Cannot check the current file type for accessibility issues.” Attempts at saving the file in the current (2010) version had no effect on this. However, if the data is copied and pasted into a new Excel 2010 spreadsheet, the MSO-AC worked fine.

When using Word and PowerPoint, the MSO-AC worked essentially the same way (error when trying to check documents made by older versions), but sometimes simply saving the document in the new 2010 version allowed MSO-AC to work. Note to Microsoft: I found this to work inconsistently.

3. One of the best features of the MSO-AC is that once activated in the application it will run dynamically and continue to alert you to accessibility issues via the Accessibility Checker task pane (see image on this page) as you continue to create or edit your document. In other words, in PowerPoint, as you add features to a slide such as an image or chart, the MSO-AC immediately notes that the new object is lacking an ALT text description and provides directions and rationale on how to fix the accessibility error. And if you accidently – or purposely – remove an accessibility feature, MSO-AC will note this and provide a description of the issue, how to fix it and why it needs to be fixed. This dynamic feature allows the author to add the accessibility on the fly, as the document is being created. This feature alone has the potential of making the process of adding accessibility features faster and easier. The feature should be very helpful in enterprise settings, ultimately reducing the cost of training and accessibility auditing.

4. When adding ALT description text in MS-Office 2010, the procedure has been thankfully standardized across all applications. Right clicking with your mouse (Note: there are a series steps to accomplish this task using keystroke alternatives) brings up the Format Picture dialog box. Choose the “ALT Text” option at the bottom of the list and add the alternative text. Unfortunately, Microsoft has chosen to add an input box for adding a “Title” and/or a “Description” to this option. Even though the MSO-AC will “approve” an inserted image that has only a Title and not a Description, if you convert this document into another format (PDF or HTML) the Title will not pass as a valid description for accessibility purposes. In other words, for conversion purposes, the Description is more important than the Title. At this point, it is recommended that users add BOTH a Title and Description to their inserted image and make the content of the Title and Description the same.

Final Thoughts

One can only hope that the next version of MS Office will expand the Accessibility Checker to MS Publisher and all of the products within the suite. Hopefully MS will also include this feature in updates to its version of MS Office for the Mac OS.

As I continue to play with MSO-AC, I will no doubt find new and interesting features. I will post them as additions to this blog article or as separate entries. See the Resources below for links to what others have said about MS Office and accessibility.

Resources

MS Tutorial on how to use the MSO-AC

A blog article from MSO2010 Engineering (January 2010) describing the how the MSO-AC was developed and more about what it checks for.

WebAIM article about how to build accessible documents. Includes information about the new MSO-AC.

Another blog article from Microsoft on Office Web Applications accessibility

Media Access Australia blog about the new MSO-AC

YouTube Video on MS-Office 2010 Accessibility features

Perhaps you may have overlooked this in your own attempt to gather as much information about your web visitors as I had. I am talking about Google Analytics’ requirement that users make sure they have a Privacy Policy which lets visitors to your website know that Google Analytics (GA) are being used on the website.

I just finished writing a Privacy Policy for the jebswebs site and will be adding a link on the blog to point to it.

Personally, I am not overly concerned about privacy on the web, but many people are, and I can certainly understand this. I am concerned about some of the “biggest offenders” who have made the press lately. It’s one thing to have an online service that gather’s information, it is something else when you don’t let people/visitors know about it – or if you constantly change the requirements to keep your information private. The “biggest offenders” are also guilty of creating a false sense of security by creating the illusion of a “gated community” when all the while, their patrons’ personal information is available to those beyond the “gate.”

So, I am a bit ashamed that I didn’t catch this a few weeks ago when I stated adding GA to several of my sites. Rest assured I’ll be remedying that in the next few days.

For those who don’t know about GA and wonder, why all the fuss, let me explain.

Google Analytics is a neat and free service provided by Google to website owners and developers. The developer inserts a small amount of JavaScript code on the pages of their website, and every time someone visits that page, the script grabs some information about the visitor and adds it to the owner’s GA account database. The website owner and/or developer can access this database information by logging into their GA account and seeing charts and graphs which aggregate the data collected. The information collected ranges from what pages are being visit, what browser is being used, and how long they stayed on the site. It should be noted that no personally identifiable information (i.e., names and addresses) are gathered through this interaction. There may be some debate about the use of IP addresses. GA’s policies say they are not harvested, but GA does give you location data – at least in terms of country of origin – and that would have to come from IP data.

It is important to note – and this is where the Privacy Policy comes in – that nearly all of this information is rather innocuous and completely anonymous. But, because the information is also sent to Google, and in the theme of complete disclosure, it is important that visitors know this. I guess you could make the case that by virtue of visiting your site, the visitor’s data is already collected, but let’s not go there…

BTW, just to play it safe, Google offers a free browser plug-in called the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on which, when installed in a browser [at this point available for Internet Explorer (versions 7 and 8), Google Chrome (4.x and higher), and Mozilla Firefox (3.5 and higher)], the information gathered by GA will be shared with the site owner, but not Google. So, if you are concerned about your privacy, you may want to install this.

Note: In researching for this blog entry, I came across an Australian news article on just this topic. Reading it next.

I took the plunge and installed WordPress v 3.0 last night. I used the automatic install/upgrade which is a godsend and completed the task in about 20 seconds. But before I go and upgrade the rest of my clients’ installs of WP, I figure I had better test things out first. So, this posting is a bit of a test…

I think I may have also discovered a bug in v3.0, and am search for others who are experiencing this…it is minor, but annoying. The “bug” is in how the Dashboard displays content. To the uninitiated, the Dashboard is the administrative “back end” of the WordPress  application where you make settings adjustments, install stuff and where you post your blog entries.

Using the “screen options” tab (upper right) you are allowed to choose having a number of different elements to be visible on the Dashboard. The elements include messages from WP, plus quick links to some of the things you use regularly. Most important is that you have the ability to put this information in 1, 2, 3, or 4 columns to make it easier to read.

Well, the first thing I noticed after the upgrade was that all of the information on my Dashboard was being squeezed into two columns even though I had the settings set for three columns. When I tried changing the settings, I apparently made it worse since now everything is squished into one LONG column and the 2-3 columns to the right are empty save what appears to be an empty php/div block. Hmm.

A search of WP forums turned up nothing so far…I may try posting a bug report. I will also post this observation to Twitter and see if it is just me…always a possibility.

End of test…

Back in March 2010, I rather gleefully blogged about YouTube’s latest feature called “automatic captioning.” Since that time, I have become bemused and amused by the state of this “service.” It seems Google – the owners and operators of YouTube – have been using our videos as fodder for their new Google Voice speech-to-text (S-t-T) translation machine. Google claims, “It (Google Voice transcripts) will improve over time as our transcription engine gets smarter.” It is not clear how the Google transcription engine will get “smarter,” but I’m, figuring the more the system is used, the more it will learn, and the smarter it will become…make sense?

Whoever perfects S-t-T stands to make billions in the first year, so it stands to reason Google would be interested in tapping into that treasure chest. But perfecting S-t-T has always been an elusive goal and anyone worth their salt in the captioning or transcription business knows the human beings still make the best captionists.

That said, at the recent Accessibility Unconference a few weeks ago, the issue of S-t-T came up and there was lots of interest in YouTube’s “automatic captioning” service. I should note here that YouTube currently calls this a “machine transcription” service and offered it with some caveats. They also seem, in some ways, to be more interested in the language translation tool that was also delivered on YouTube at the same time. Perhaps there is more money to be made in the translation of Chinese to English than in S-t-T.

At the Unconference, there was one gentleman who represented a transcription service company in Massachusetts that used a system based upon a combination of automated S-t-T and human power. He claimed that his system was much faster than regular human-only transcription because machines  take the first cut at the translation and humans completed the final edits. He also claimed it was flawless. Lastly, he noted that the fee for this service ranged on a scale based upon the quality of the audio. Apparently, the poorer the quality of the speech, the more interactions with humans is necessary, and the more expensive is the price tag.

So all this got me thinking about the experimental YouTube video I created and posted back in early March. The “automatic captioning,” eh, machine translation, of my video was indeed a bit hilarious. Sharing it with friends, we all howled at the bizarre transcripts that were produced by the system. It was a bit like playing that children’s game, “Telephone,” where you whisper something into someone’s ear and they whisper it into the next person and so on down the line until the last person says it out loud. The final product never comes out correctly and is usually quite funny. And indeed, the YouTube “machine transcription” was much the same.

For my test video, I purposely read a printed text -  as opposed to spontaneous speech – so I would have an exact copy of the content from which to compare the transcript. The results were marginal at best and honestly, the transcript really made no logical sense. It was also amazing what YouTube’s machine translation failed to recognize. The machine translation had a particular difficult time with the words “accessibility” and “web design.” Go figure.

I recently learned that you could download the YouTube machine translation, edit it, and then re-post it to the original YouTube video. So, today I finally got around to trying this and though successful, the process was not without pain.

First, the machine transcript is saved in some unique YouTubian format (.SBV). The content is readable using a simple text editor and looks like this:

 0:00:02.179,0:00:07.740
   okay so am I- of doing it tested video here
   it and I'm going to read this to see if the
   0:00:07.740,0:00:09.959
 captioning system works well

Fortunately, my MovCaptioner software could import the file and provide an easy way for editing the content. But after editing the text, I could not export the transcript without first merging it with a video. I had to grab the original video from YouTube (which I downloaded in .MP4 format) and then load that into MovCaptioner. Once the editing was finished (see note below about time), I was able to save and export the file in another format (.SUB for Subtitle format) and then upload that transcript file to YouTube.

The final edited .SUB file looks like this:

 00:00:02.17,00:00:07.72
   Okay so I am doing a test
   video here and I'm going to
   read this to see if the
   00:00:07.74,00:00:09.94
 captioning system works well

As predicted, the most strenuous part of the process is the actual editing of the transcript. Even though the machine transcript had gotten about 50% of the content correct, it still took close to 45 minutes for me to edit the three minutes of video. It is clear that I talk pretty fast, as there was 75 lines of text that had to be edited. I can’t imagine doing this for anything longer.

So, I’ve learned a few things here:

First, YouTube’s “automatic captioning/machine translation” is far from perfect and must not be used, at this point, for anything other than amusement. I am not sure if Google has a timeline on when this will get better, but until it produces accuracy at a 85% or higher basis, I would not rely on it as a usable transcription.

Second, while machine translation, followed by human editing is clearly more accurate than machine translation alone, the time savings may not be all that one might imagine. I’m guessing that a professional transcriptionist using state of the art equipment would have been able to transcribe the three minutes of video a lot faster than I was able to edit the machined version.

Last, we are still a long way from fully accurate S-t-T and if you are going to use videos on your websites, and want them to be accessible, you are probably still going to have to pay someone to create a transcript/caption file for you.

Note: jeremykemp has posted a YouTube video comparing human vs. machine translation on several video clips. You can see the errors produced by the machine transcription.

It occurred to me while I was posting a response to a potential client that I didn’t have a resource I could point them to as an answer to the question in the subject line. Certainly, after doing this work for over 10 years, I know the answer to the question, but I had never written in down in exactly that form. Indeed, I have given innumerable workshops and talks over the years and always covered this in the first five minutes. But I guess I have always assumed that everyone already knew this. Silly me.

So here is my answer to the question: Why should my website be accessible? Feel free to comment as a way of adding to the list of reasons. The more (reasons) the merrier.

To begin, not everyone knows that a certain number of people with disabilities must use specialized hardware and software (called Assistive Technology or A.T.) to use computers and technology. For example, most people who are blind (and many people with visual impairments) use a application called a screen-reader which “translates” content on a computer (or other technology) into speech or Braille. The screen-reader software also provides a easy way for the blind person to use the various controls on a computer or device by providing audio feedback which tells the user what is being typed on the screen or what controls are being used. There are also “tools” built into the screen-reader application that allow the user to “scan” the information on the screen and navigate quickly through the content in a way that is purposeful and meaningful. Without screen-reading technology many blind people and those with visual impairments would not be able to use these technologies.  Here is a link to more information about Braille and how screen-readers works.

Consider for a moment all the people in the United States who have some form of visual disabilities – that is, all the blind and visually impaired folks. Recent estimates are that there are about 15 million people in the United States who have these disabilities (source Braille Institute). Can you afford to have your website not be available to 15 million people in the US alone?

If we also consider other people with disabilities, the numbers grow even larger. People with hearing disabilities frequently need to have video content captioned or audio files transcribed in order to be accessible. People with mobility impairments, that may not be able to use a mouse to navigate around a computer screen, need to have accessible websites that work with the various Assistive Technologies they use.

So the first reason your website should be accessible is because only accessible websites will work correctly and completely with Assistive Technologies. Those websites that are partially accessible or not accessible at all, will be partially usable or completely unusable by people who have disabilities. So, if you want everyone to have access to the content on your website, you should make sure your website is accessible.

The next reason for having an accessible website is because accessible websites meet the international standards for web design and for this reason will work in every “user agent,” that is, every browser, on every operating system, and in every mobile and handheld devices (e.g., mobile phones and small WiFi devices like iPods and iPads). There are literally thousands of different devices and configurations with new technologies being developed every day.  So, if you want your website to work with virtually all devices that connect to the internet, you should make sure your website is accessible.

The next reason to make your website accessible is because Google will love you for doing so. Well, not really, but if you want people to find and use your website, then you should be concerned about how search engines like Google “feel” about your site. The science behind this is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is based upon a set of methodologies that search engine services use to rank websites.

The corporate world spends lots of money tweaking their websites in order to improve their SEO. They understand that the difference of 1% in traffic flowing to a website could mean millions of dollars of profit for their company. Simply put, accessible web sites rank higher on SEO because they are built better than non-accessible sites and Google likes that. So, if you want to improve your SEO, you should make sure your website is accessible.

The last reason I will give here is one that is not exactly universal – yet. However, the trends suggest that it is just a matter of time before it becomes universal. What I am talking about is the legal requirement to make your website accessible.

Currently in the United Kingdom, it is the law that websites be accessible to people with disabilities (here is a summary about the law from Royal National Institute for Blind People). While not everyone is yet in compliance, there has been a steady increase in the number of websites in the United Kingdom that meet accessibilty standards.

In the United States, there is no universal law requiring all websites to meet accessibility standards. However, there are laws on the books that require websites for all federal and state government programs to be accessible. Currently, there are several groups reviewing two federal laws that deal with accessibility and websites, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, with an eye on expanding these laws to cover more websites. In recent years, various advocacy organizations for disabled Americans have also brought numerous civil rights complaints against businesses for not having accessible websites. And, while there has not been a definitive legal ruling, it is clearly just a matter of time before website accessibility becomes the law of the land in the United States. So, if you want to get ahead of this and be ready when the laws and rules change, you should make sure your website is accessible.

Here are some links to some other folks who have addressed this issue:

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – Web Accessibility
• WAI’s “Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization” (thank you Andrew Arch @w3.org)
• WebAIM
• Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWD)
• Disabled World
• Admixweb
• Hipertext.net

And if you think of more reasons, please pass them along by commenting.