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

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 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…

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.

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.

UPDATE – March 10, 2010: Yes, it is true. Google has announced that the “automatic captioning service” first detailed in November, is now available to all accounts (channels). It appears that, for now, you have to “request” the service (although it appears they automatically had captioned my latest video which was posted several months ago), and they will eventually get to all of them. Pretty cool. More on the announcement. Directions on how to caption

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!

In their article, Report: Malicious PDF files comprised 80% of all exploits for 2009, ZDNet reports:

A newly released report shows that based on more than a trillion Web requests processed in 2009, the use of malicious PDF files exploiting flaws in Adobe Reader/Adobe Acrobat not only outpaced the use of Flash exploits, but also, grew to 80% of all exploits the company encountered throughout the year.

The other blog, Adobe plugs more gaping holes in PDF Reader, ZDNet reports that Adobe has released a new patch for the Adobe Reader yesterday.

This morning, both of my Windows XP machines lit up with an announcement that there was a new version of Flash Player available and urged me to install. I did despite the fact that I manually updated them all last week when the first stories appeared that the patch was released.

Perhaps the scariest conclusion noted in the ZDNet article about report from ScanSafe was that:

Therefore, the increasing use of malicious PDFs can also be interpreted as the direct result of the millions of users using outdated and exploitable Adobe products (emphasis mine), with the only preference a malicious attacker could have in this case remaining the incentive based on the 99% penetration of Adobe Flash on Internet-enabled PCs.

I guess the adage, “you have no one to blame but yourself” comes to mind, but clearly, people have come to expect that the people who make the stuff that they run on their computers ensure that their stuff is safe.

So the message here folks is: when you get a notice that there is a new version of your software available, drop everything and install it.

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.

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

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.