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Posts Tagged ‘Accessibility’

On the DOJ Testimony: E-Books

April 29th, 2010 jeb No comments

supreme courtLast week (April 22, 2010) Samuel R. Bagenstos, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on technology accessibility, civil rights, and federal law. It is a long piece of testimony, so I decided to break it into parts to make it easier to digest.

I am choosing to look at the the issue of “electronic books,” (i.e., e-books) first since it comes up that way in the chronology of  testimony.

First, let me say that I think the testimony is very articulate and accurate in summing up the topic and providing both a historic reference and a clear and precise justification for why we need to focus on the topic. Mr. Bagenstos begins by speaking in general terms discussing the importance and the ubiquity of this technology and how it has the potential for greatly leveling the playing field for persons with disabilities. He then describes the controversy over the Kindle DX and how the Department of Justice (DoJ) took action when it realized the devices were not completely accessible to students with disabilities.

Here is the excerpt from his testimony:

Accessibility issues arise outside of the Internet as well. Most significantly, as schools increasingly use electronic texts, the inaccessibility of many electronic book readers has become more and more salient. At the same time, however, the use of electronic texts holds great promise for people with disabilities. Students who are blind or have low vision have long used a form of electronic text as an accommodation that enables them to access the course materials their classmates use. These electronic texts, which are converted from standard print texts, are read on a computer, using a screen reader or a refreshable Braille display. In order for these electronic texts to be truly usable by someone who is blind or who has low vision, however, the texts must be coded with structural data so that the assistive technology can properly identify where to begin reading or where a sentence or paragraph begins and ends.

This system disadvantages blind students in colleges and universities as compared with sighted students, because it can take considerable time for a university to locate texts from publishers, and convert the text to a format usable by a screen reader or similar assistive technology. As a result, all too often course materials are not available to blind students until well after classes have begun. If you ask just about any disability student services center at a major university, you will learn how significant this problem really is. Imagine as a student being unable – on a routine basis – to obtain your course materials for the first four months of the semester. As an alternative to obtaining converted texts from the publisher, universities may scan printed texts in order to provide them in electronic form. But this method can result in a “text dump,” which lacks structural data to ensure proper reading by assistive technologies. Conversion errors, too, are common. So, the choice available to blind students prior to use of the new, electronic book readers was to receive accurate materials months into the semester or inaccurate materials in a more timely manner.

The emergence of dedicated electronic book readers thus holds great potential to place students with disabilities on equal footing with other students. But that happy result will occur only if the electronic book reader is equipped with text-to-speech capabilities, so that it may read the electronic text aloud. In a few moments, I will discuss the Department of Justice’s settlements in investigations of colleges and universities that used the Kindle DX, an inaccessible electronic book reader, as part of a pilot project. At the time the Kindle DX was used in this pilot project, it contained text-to-speech capabilities B meaning that it could read the electronic text aloud, rendering the text audible and therefore accessible to blind persons. Unfortunately, the device did not include a similar audio option for the menus or navigational controls. Without text-to-speech for the menu or navigational controls, blind students could not operate the electronic book reader independently, because they had no way of knowing which book they selected or how to access the search, note taking or bookmark functions of the device. Electronic book readers developed by companies other than Amazon also pose barriers to use by individuals who are blind or have low vision, typically because they entirely lack a text-to-speech function.

But a dedicated electronic book reader can be made accessible. From the user perspective, an accessible electronic book reader might speak each option on a menu aloud, as the cursor moves over it, and then speak the selected choice aloud once made by the user. Special key strokes might be programmed specifically for blind users. For example, the user would press the alt-A key any time something related to accessibility is needed, at which point a menu with additional choices would come up allowing the user to scroll over the menu as described above. Appropriate coding would mean that the text, even mathematical formulas, or poetry in which line lengths vary, would be read aloud coherently. In this way, the user with the disability would gain access to all the information on the printed page.

Apart from the issue of the accessibility of e-books,  Mr. Bagenstos’ testimony also, more briefly, details the issue of general web accessibility. In this section, to be described in a separate blog entry, he notes that there have been some inconsistent responses on the part of the DoJ over the years.

The testimony ends with more details about the specifics regarding the Kindle DX case and the settlement with the several universities who had employed these devices.

My impression is that the testimony doesn’t really do much in terms of changing any position that the DoJ has held, but rather reaffirms the position and perhaps sets some baselines. It may also provide us with a sense of where the DoJ will be focusing their attention when it comes to investigations regarding the rights of people with disabilities and “emerging technologies.”

Accessible Online Learning

March 28th, 2010 jeb No comments

Mac keyboardI just presented a 45-minute talk about accessible Learning Management Systems (LMS) for PEPnet at RIT earlier this week. When I got home and started rummaging through unread e-mails, I gleefully discovered one from the Web 2.o Accessibility Forum on Linkedin. The discussion that immediately caught my eye was one from Ana Isabel BB Paraguay detailing a new document by Hadi Rangin from the University of Illinois. Hadi is one of my heroes and the source of a good deal of the information about the accessibility of LMS that I used in my presentation in Rochester. So in the words of Paul Harvey, here is the rest of the story…

If you are interested in learning more about the accessibility of LMS (and many Web 2.0 things), with the research to back it, head on over to: How-To Guide for Creating Accessible Online Learning Content found on the cannect.org website. Thank you Hadi for this great resource.

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Image acquired through Creative Commons license – by Lizzardo on Flickr

Section 508 Standards Update

March 27th, 2010 jeb No comments

US Access Board seal/logoOn the remote chance that you haven’t seen this information, I am re-posting it here.

While the date for the public hearing has past, it is not too late to sign up for the §508 Standards Refresh webinar which is taking place on  April 1, 2:30 – 4:00 (ET).

It is also not too late for submitting comments via the website: www.regulations.gov or via e-mail: ictrule@access-board.gov; fax: 202-272-0081, or Pony Express: Office of Technical and Informational Services, Access Board, 1331 F Street NW, suite 1000, Washington, DC 20004-1111 .

Here’s the announcement:

U.S. Access Board Releases Draft Update of §508 Standards and §255 Guidelines (U.S. Access Board)

The Board is undertaking an update of its standards for electronic and information technology in the Federal sector covered by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. As part of this effort, it is also updating guidelines for telecommunications products subject to Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act. On March 17, the Board released for public comment a draft of the updated standards and guidelines. The draft features a new structure and format that integrates the 508 standards and 255 guidelines into a single document referred to as the “Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Standards and Guidelines.”

Requirements have been reorganized according to functionality instead of product type since many devices now feature an array of capabilities and applications. The released draft includes proposed revisions to various performance criteria and technical specifications that are designed to improve accessibility, add clarity to facilitate compliance, address market trends, and promote harmonization with other guidelines and standards.

More information about the process

US may be moving closer to full accessibility

March 11th, 2010 jeb No comments

Washing machineIt is always nice to read information about your own country coming from a foreign press source. Not sure why the US press did not pick up this story…or why I didn’t see it.

In any case, our friends overseas at the E-Access Bulletin reported recently on legislation here in the US that calls for requiring product manufacturers and suppliers of consumer technology to make their products accessible to blind consumers.  According to E-Access Bulletin:

Introduced by Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Illinois, the Technology Bill of Rights for the Blind Act 2010 is based around creating accessible alternatives to what it calls “increasingly complex user interfaces” found in consumer electronics.

Many of these devices, from televisions and dishwashers to office equipment such as photocopiers and fax machines, are operated by touch-screen technology or other visual displays that are not accessible to blind people, the bill says. “This growing threat to the independence and productivity of blind people is unnecessary because electronic devices can easily be constructed with user interfaces that are not exclusively visual”, it says.

What is even more interesting is the possibility that this legislation could also impact web accessibility. Again from the report in E-Access Bulletin:

Peter Abrahams, accessibility and usability practice leader at IT research organization Bloor Research, told E-Access Bulletin that as well as being a significant step for accessible manufacturing of consumer electronics, the bill could, in theory, also be used to enforce website accessibility. “I can imagine you could say that [a website] is the interface to a product or service, and therefore it has to be accessible and be covered by the same bill. My view is that in the future it could be used to push [the web accessibility] agenda as well.”

However, it may take some time for manufacturers and website owners to be affected by the technology bill, even if it is passed, warned Abrahams. The bill needs to pass both houses of the Congress by a majority vote, before being examined and signed by President Obama. This process, combined with setting up the office of non-visual access compliance and carrying out the study and report as set out in the bill, means it could be several years before the proposed legislation comes into effect.

Stay tuned.

Read the whole article on E-Access Bulletin Live.

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Image from Creative Commons/Wikipedia Commons

Captioning and YouTube

March 10th, 2010 jeb 2 comments

youtube logo

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!