This item also published on Maine CITE News.

The New York Times (NYT) recently published an article about the use of “apps” for children with pervasive developmental disorders like autism. They note:

Anecdotally, teachers, parents and therapists describe the profound difference that apps for Apple and Android products have made in helping autistic children develop skills. IPad programs have provided a means of communicating for some children with autism who cannot speak or have language delays. Other apps help children learn to handle social situations that can be stressful, like crowds at malls. And many programs can help develop fine-motor skills, which promote functions like writing or manipulating small objects.

Several lists of apps are provided and readers are encouraged to add more to the list by making a comment.

Read the entire article: Finding Good Apps for Children With Autism

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Photo credit: Licensed by Creative Commons by Notions Capital

While much of Sarah’s presentation covered accessibility features I was already fairly familiar with (i.e., VoiceOver, screen flashing for deaf/hard-of-hearing folks, and sticky keys for folks with mobility impairments), she started off demonstrating the new AssistiveTouch feature. It was a lot to absorb.

I had almost forgotten about AssistiveTouch until yesterday when I discovered New York Times tech dude David Pogue’s article from November 10th where he described the new AssistiveTouch features in greater (and great) detail.

Rather than having me comment any further, please head over to Pogue’s Post entitled Apple’s AssistiveTouch Helps the Disabled Use a Smartphone

From CBS News-60 Minutes:

(CBS News) Ten-year-old Nuno Timoteo, an autistic child who does not speak, was thought to have the intelligence and attention span of a two-year-old until teachers put an iPad in his hands and learned he loved opera and classical music. Joshua Hood, 27, also non-verbal and autistic, was thought to understand much of his world, but his lack of speech frustrated him and all around him until he began communicating freely with a touch-screen tablet computer.

Nuno, Joshua and others whose autism prevents normal speech have made these breakthroughs with the help of tablet computers and special applications that allow them to communicate, some for the first time. Lesley Stahl reports on this new tool for understanding autism for a “60 Minutes” segment to be broadcast on Sunday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

More of this story from 60 Minutes…

A preview of the episode…

Among the presenters at this year’s conference is yours truly, John Brandt representing Maine CITE and the Maine AIM Program. Also there will be my colleague Cynthia Curry, Consultant and MLTI Integration Mentor. Both of these presentations will take place on Friday and require full conference registration.

My presentation, AT & AIM – Tablets and Pods in the Classroom will demonstrate and evaluate several devices and apps used for instruction and as assistive technology (AT). Used with Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM) these devices can be very helpful to students with disabilities. This presentation takes place at 11:00 am (session 2) in the Arnold Room.

Cynthia’s presentation, Text to Speech, Speech to Text, and Screen Readers will discuss “computer programs that talk.” In the presentation she will demonstrate and discuss how these unique applications can be used to enhance student learning. This presentation takes place at 1:20 pm (session 3) in the Washington Room.

Back by popular demand this year is Sarah Herrlinger, Senior Marketing Manager in Apple’s education division. Last year, Sarah presented on the accessibility features built into Apple’s Mac OS X and iOS and gave us a first-hand look at some of the features of the new iPad. This year, Sarah will again talk on this topic and demonstrate some of the new and improve accessibility features of Mac OS X and iOS in her presentation entitled Accessibility Features of Mac OS X and Apple Mobile.

Sarah’s presentation is co-sponsored by Maine CITE and Apple, Inc. and is offered free of charge to ACTEM members. It will take place from 1:30 to 4:30 in the Sagadahoc Room. If you are not an ACTEM member and would like to attend, please contact Maine CITE.

For more information about the conference and to register, please visit the ACTEM Conference website.

Sadly, I must report that SP1 does not solve the issue of fixing the program so that VoiceOver, the resident screen reader for Mac OSX, works with the product. VoiceOver is still not able to read the content of the document pane. VoiceOver will read the toolbars and their content, and says that it is “interacting with document pane view” but that’s all. VoiceOver cannot read the content of the document pane, thus the product is still not accessible.

Now the bad news: MS Office for Mac still does not fully work with VoiceOver. VoiceOver will read the toolbars and their content, and says that it is “interacting with document pane view” but that’s all. VoiceOver cannot read the content of the document pane, thus the product is still not accessible.

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I was hoping that with my recent purchase of the latest version of MS Office for Mac – version 2011 – I would be happily telling you about the outstanding accessibility features of the new version. I was hoping that unlike its predecessor, MS Office for Mac 2008, there would now be the ability to add alternative descriptions to images (see below for an explanation as to why alternative descriptions are important) and that when converting or saving documents made by the new version, the PDFs and HTML pages created would all be accessible. I was sure that given the fact that this is a brand new version of Office it would work fluidly and fully with the Mac OSX native screen reader VoiceOver, a built-in feature in Mac OS since version 10.4 (Tiger) in 2005, nearly SIX YEARS AGO.

But no, I can’t report any of this because, in terms of accessibility for people with disabilities, Microsoft Office for the Mac – 2011 is a complete failure. Not only can you not make accessible documents with this product, it does not work with VoiceOver. That’s right; you cannot read documents created in MS Office for Mac 2001 with VoiceOver.

A VPAT – Voluntary Product Accessibility Template – “is a tool used to document a product’s conformance with the accessibility standards under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. The purpose of the VPAT is to assist Federal contracting officials and other buyers in making preliminary assessments regarding the availability of commercial ‘Electronic and Information Technology’ products and services with features that support accessibility” (quoted source itic.org). The VPAT, as the name implies, is a voluntary statement made by the manufacturer regarding their own evaluation of their product in terms of how it meets the Section 508 requirements. In a rather bizarre finding, the VPAT for MS Office for Mac -2011 proudly notes that VoiceOver effectively works with the toolbars and “the ribbon” of MS Office for Mac 2011.

Unfortunately, Apple’s own office suite, iWork, isn’t much better when it comes to making accessible documents. iWork ’09, the latest iteration, does not have the capacity to make accessible documents either. Specifically, there is no way to add alternative descriptions to images or other objects inserted in a document.

But the good news is that at least VoiceOver can read the contents of documents made in iWorks in addition to working with all of the menus and toolbars.

If you need a word processor, or spreadsheet, or presentation software for your Mac, save your money and download the latest version of open source solution LibreOffice (3.3.0). Oh, if you don’t speak Spanish, the word “Libre” means “Free,” as in no dinero!

LibreOffice (v 3.3.0 for the Mac) does have the capacity to add Alternative Descriptions to image and works completely with VoiceOver. That said, when converting your LibreOffice documents to other formats, you will need to test them to make sure all of the accessibility features have been carried over.

Link to download LibreOffice

Why Alternative Descriptions for images are important in all digital document

Images present the most difficulty to persons using screen reader technology. These assistive technology (AT) devices convert the written text into spoken words or into Braille so that persons who are blind or who have visual impairments can “read” the document presented on their computer screen.

While many, if not most, images in documents are “pretty pictures,” there are times when a document contains an image that is vital to the understanding of the document. Without the Alternative Description of the image, the screen reader generally will alert the user that there is an image but cannot communicate anything else.

Since modern communications between and among people are increasingly done with the sharing of many forms of office documents – including word processor, spreadsheet, presentational (e.g., PowerPoint) and PDF documents – it is imperative that all of these documents be made as accessible as possible, particularly if the intention is to share the document publicly.

I had this feeling today when I read a series of articles from this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education about accessible and universal design in college websites (links to all articles below). The cover story for the series tells the story of Darrell Shandrow, a senior at Arizona State University at Tempe. Mr. Shandrow is a journalism major who at age 37 would be considered a “non-traditional” student. But what makes Mr. Shandrow all the more non-traditional is the fact that he is blind student who isn’t afraid of making a few waves.

The right place, right time comment has to do with the fact that I had just blogged a few days ago about this exact topic. It’s nice to see some supporting documentation for my position.

If you are interested in the stuff I write about here you should absolutely read these articles. And like most on-line news stories today there is a place to make comments. I find reading the comments to often be more informative than the article. In this case, the comments made by a few people prove the point of why we need to be advocates for accessible and universal design and why we need to be vigilant.

After reading the articles the first thing I did was send the links out to a half-dozen colleagues and put links on Twitter. Then I went and testing the home page of my alma mater. St. Francis College of Brooklyn would probably score in the lower third.

As someone who started their web design career as a university webmaster, I have a particular affection for this topic. But to me web accessibility for a college/university website is a no-brainer.

The series:

Chronicle of Higher Education article “Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online”

Sidebar: About Cal State’s success

Sidebar: Chart ranking the best and worst college web sites

Universal Design, Usability, and Accessibility

It was clear to me at the outset that the iPad will be a great asset to teachers as a personal learning tool for students of all ages. Given Apple’s commitment to universal design in all of their products, I was eager to hear a presentation given by Sarah Herrlinger at the ACTEM MAINEducation Technology Conference this week. I could easily spend this whole blog entry talking about all of the information that Sarah shared, but I wanted to get the word out about this particular resource.

Authored by Eric Sailers, the resource called “iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch Apps for (Special) Education” was compiled from a list developed by Samuel Sennott, David Niemeijer and Sailers. You can access this on Scribd and save it, print it, or simply link to it. If you are like me and have been looking for a list of apps that can be used with students with disabilities in the classroom, this should be your first stop.

Spread the word!

Addendum: I just discovered that Eric Sailers has another, more recent, list that has some additional information. Check that out too. Here is the link on Scribd. And you may want to check out Eric’s blog Speech-Language Pathology Sharing. He has a list of links to other websites with even more information.

The cleaning involved the removal (to the recycling center) of several months’ worth of accumulated newspapers which I store on an old cardboard box sitting in the living room. It’s one of those boxes that contained items I had transported here on the last move (almost 15 years ago) and put down at that location never to be moved again. Since it soon disappeared under the endless pile of used newspapers, I had long ago forgotten what the box contained.

From the markings on the outside I suspected that box housed some of my prized LP record albums. For those below a certain age, LP’s are “long playing” recordings made on vinyl and played on a “record player.”  And indeed, upon opening the box I quickly discovered a bounty of popular 70s vintage LPs including a copy of the first King Crimson album and some early Cream. But what caught my eye was not the two dozen or so dog-eared recording, but a slightly-curled magazine jammed in the back. It was easily recognizable as being a copy of Wired Magazine, not a surprise since I have had a subscription to Wired for years. I initially presumed that it was a recent issue that I had added to the stack of “to be recycled” newspapers and had somehow mysteriously fallen into the box of LP records. But since the box had a closed top, I thought about the possibilities with more care.

Now anyone who has read Wired Magazine knows that it is a pretty funky publication with wild colors and design features. It is one of a few magazines where the differences between the articles and the advertisements are almost indistinguishable. Another feature is the fact that they rarely cite the date of the volume except through the use of some cryptic code. So I was very surprised, and actually kinda excited, when I noticed a date on the top of the magazine of November 1994.

Apart from the date, there was no discernible evidence that the magazine was that old. The cover story, “Rocket Science: Videogames get Hollywired; The first digital supergroup,” is sufficiently vague so as to be ageless to the common man. The photo on the posterized yellow and red cover of four geeky-looking middle-aged guys is unremarkable. Even the ad for Absolute Vodka on the back cover was not unusual.  I am not sure if this is necessarily complimentary of Wired Magazine tendency to be ahead of its time or a statement on how so little has changed in the last 14 years, but it is pretty amazing. Once I was inside the magazine the fun began.

My first discovery was a neatly preserved Xerox copy of some directions on how to use something called “Mosaic.” The copy was placed in a section of the magazine called “Netsurf” edited by Kristin Spence (I wonder where she is today). The article is entitled “Authoring HTML for Fun and Profit.”

It all came flooding back to me. It was the fall of 1994 and I was at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where I was filling in for a colleague who was out on sabbatical. That semester, I was invited to a faculty symposium in the basement of the library where the IT department was hidden. In their lab were the only two PCs on campus powerful enough to run Mosaic, a newly developed application called a “web browser.” The two PCs were running Windows 3.x on a Pentium chip with 2MB of RAM. Awesome. The presentation made by the IT guys was impressive and in the days that followed, I told everyone who would listen about how “I had seen the future.”

The downside of the evening came when I asked one of the techs what I had to do to be able to “make a web page.” In return I received a look of disgust and scorn and was quickly told that it was not possible because I was just a lowly faculty member in the educational psychology department. Little did that snotty geek know that I was writing Fortran IV and COBAL code probably before he was even born. To spite him, I did learn HTML – perhaps with the help of Spence’s article – and within two years I was the webmaster for small Maine college; within five, had started my business, jebswebs.com.

The Netsurf article is rather humorous. The content focuses on the importance of the <HEAD> and <BODY> tags of the document. It also refers to the use of the common tags <H> and <A> and alludes to “two dozen more uncommonly used” tags.  Ah, the days of HTML v1; life was so simple then.

The Wired issue also features ads for The X Files, Apple’s introduction of Macintosh System 7.5 and an AST subnotebook; all are charming in their simplicity. BTW, the AST Ascentia 500S runs a Intel 486SX processor, sports a 340 MB hard drive (3.5” floppy drive included) and has a NiMN battery that will last 2-3 hours. The Mac OS “lets you swap files with PCs and allows you to open Macintosh, DOS, and Windows documents – even when you don’t have the applications used to create them.” Oh, and the price for a one year subscription to Wired in 1994 was $39.95. Ouch.

The November 1994 issue of Wired is actually rather amazing in some of its vision. Yes, there is a Wired Top 10 list of favorite LISTSERV mailing lists, favorite “ASCII art,” and an article by Nicholas Negroponte discussing “Digital Etiquette” and chiding those who allow their secretary to print out e-mail messages and then have them type up a dictated reply. Hilarious. But there are also stories about hacking, the use of the internet by gay teenagers, and the urgency of stopping the government from taking control of the internet that could easily have been written today.

The trip down memory lane was a delight and fortunately, Wired has this and all of their collection in their online archives (try searching on Kristin Spence’s name to begin). It speaks volumes about where we have been in this short digital history and about how some things still remain the same.

I will continue to read my Wired relic and perhaps will report more in the days ahead. In the meantime, I’m going to boot up that King Crimson album if I can remember how.

The article notes that at this year’s E-Access ’10 conference in London, participants heard terms like are “revolutionary” and “game-changing” in the descriptions of Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices.

As quoted from the article:

Kiran Kaja of the RNIB Digital Accessibility Team told a mobile phone workshop that while accessibility applications are available for other smartphones – such as the ‘Eyes Free Shell’ for Google’s Android phone – the iPhone 3G is a “game-changer” because its accessibility features are built in across all its functions.

Using the standard touch-screen you can move your fingers along and the phone reads what is underneath them; and if you swipe down with two fingers it reads from that point to the end, Kaja said. A double-tap with three fingers will magnify the screen.

“A lot of people say they can’t use a touch-screen, but when I show them this it really changes their perspectives,” he said. “People have started asking why they should pay extra money for accessibility on mainstream devices. So slowly we are seeing changing expectations. When Symbian [an operating system for mobile phones] was released in 2000, it was two or three years before assistive technology was developed for it, so phones could be out of date before assistive technology appears. With the iPhone, I could use it the same day as my sighted friends.”

Accessibility features that are built in by the manufacturer are also more stable than added extras like screen-readers running on top of an operating system, Kaja said.

The article goes on to praise the new Apple iPad as well noting, “The iPad’s size…was a ‘revolutionary’ improvement for partially-sighted users, who could use it at a normal distance like a more visible smartphone, with applications and the keyboard feature all viewed larger.”

One of the features in both the iPhone and iPad are the built-in gyroscopes and accelerometers. The article refers to “the free ‘Dasher’ app which allows the user to tilt and move the phone with one hand to select items, a feature of use to many people with impaired mobility.” Information about the Dasher app can be found here.

To subscribe to the E-Access free monthly bulletin, email eab-subs@headstar.com with ‘subscribe eab’ in the subject header.