jebsblog

The good folks at the DO-IT Center at the University of Washington have a YouTube channel with a bunch of videos regarding people with disabilities and technology. Just bumped into one today Called “World Wide Access” which speaks to the importance of accessible and universal web design. It is very well done.

If you have a client or boss to needs convincing as to why you need to build accessibility into your web design, have them take a look at this video.

DO IT on YouTube

Just read a good article by Tony Bradley called “Is it time for the Web to Abandon Flash.” In it he notes the controversy about Apple not allowing Flash on any of its handheld products, including the soon-to-be-released iPad. Millions of viewers of Steve Jobs’ announcement last week no doubt saw him demo the NY Times website where Flash content was missing and a nasty little icon appeared telling you you need to download a Flash extension for your browser.

I have disliked Flash for a long time, primarily due to its problems with assistive technologies; it often does not play well with screen readers, especially if it has not been developed correctly. In my mind, many Flash developers are graphic artists, illustrators or animators, and don’t really understand web design.

Add to this the fact that more people are now accessing web content via a non-traditional user agent (i.e., not a traditional browser) and you see why I agree with Bradley that Flash may be past its prime.

It’s ironic that Adobe developed Acrobat to find a way to share documents at a time just prior to the “invention” of HTML. Flash, build on the same business principles, was developed for the same reason. And once again, a new standard (HTML 5) may usurp their position. And, I should point out that the new standard will be accessible to screen readers.

But just as those who predicted the demise of Adobe Acrobat 15 years ago were wrong, I suspect it is not quite time for Adobe to throw in the towel and hire the undertaker. Look for Flash to be around for some time to come. But at least for some of us, there will be other options.

This will be interesting to watch.

The good folks over at WebAIM have announced the availability of a new Dreamweaver extension that tests for the accessibility of web pages while still under construction. Using the architecture of their popular WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool, the WAVE Dreamweaver extension is installed inside of the Dreamweaver application and resides as a toolbar. When activated, the extension will review the currently opened file for basic accessibility errors but does not provide an explanation of the errors or necessarily how to fix them. Some knowledge of accessible web design is thus required.

I have been using the WAVE tool for years to do quick and dirty reviews of web pages for others and always use it to check my own work once it has been published to the web. The advantage of this new extension is that I will now be able to check the accessibility of my pages before publishing them live on the web.

The WAVE Dreamweaver extension (still in Beta) is free and works with Dreamweaver CS3+.

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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.

As a web designer with some high mileage on the odometer, I can scornfully remember the days of ole when the “browser wars” forced us to add all kinds of goofy code to make our web designs appear consistent – let alone appear at all – on various browsers and browser versions. There are still some designers out there who fuss about making their sites work on IE6. I say, let them eat cake!

But I have been watching the development of many of the new hand-held technologies and realizing that the time is coming when more people will be viewing websites on small 2-3 inch screens than on the 27-inch monster like the one I have on my desk. In fact, there is some evidence that day has already come.

I have prescribed for some time that the solution to all this was good coding – and by that I mean standards-based , universally-designed coding. My rationale has been that the new devices and their tiny browsers would eventually regress to the mean and adopt the W3C standards. This is turn would allow for an “efficient” transition from the big screen to the small.

With my purchase of an iPod Touch last spring and a Garmin GPS several months earlier, I have recognized that simply making a website that looks okay on the small screen is less than ideal. These small devices are much more interested in your content, not how it is displayed on the screen. When I access web content on my tiny Safari screen, I want to be able to read it clearly and navigate to the things I want. I don’t care about your “pretty pictures” and fancy Flash animation. In fact, I can’t even see your Flash!

Over the past month, I have started noticing certain blogs that, when I access them with my iPod, magically appear as though they were built inside an iPod/iPhone apps. The look, feel, buttons and controls familiar to iPod/iPhone users are all there and, more importantly, work. The first of these I notices was my local NBC affiliate WCSH-6 TV in Portland, Maine. A couple of months ago they introduced a new iPod/iPhone-friendly interface that appears when one accessed their website with a hand-held device (you can still access the “full site” by activating a button at the bottom of the screen). The effect was stunning to say the least, and joyous in that I no longer has to resize the screen repeatedly to read the content. I needed to get me one of those!

This morning I found a blogger who had a similar iPod-enhanced Word Press blog site and at the bottom I found the magic word WPtouch. A few minutes later my jebswebs blog was sporting the new look and I must say, I am very impressed.

The WPtouch Mobile Plugin by the BraveNewCode folks is an easy-to-install script that loads in seconds. Once activated, the settings page gives you all kinds of options and choices. And, once installed, my WordPress blog site instantaneously looks like it was built into an iPod app. Tres cool.

At this point, WPtouch is all I could ask for and more. But, I suspect that as time goes on, I will want more. Maybe a similar plugin for my Joomla! and Drupal sites! Maybe they already exist.

Gotta go, I feel quest coming on.

Last word, if you are looking for a great plugin that makes your WordPress blog look great on a mobile device, check out the WPtouch Mobile Plugin!

~j

The Maine Learning Technology Initiative – affectionately known in these parts as MLTI (pronounced “Milty”) – has unveiled their new professional development blog called Maine121.org.

Apart from the fact that it is built in WordPress and just happens to use the same template as this jebswebs’ blog, it should be a welcome addition to the program and to Maine educators.

Most noticeably the blog will feature a section discussing “accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL).” We are pleased that this “theme” is important to the MLTI program and look forward to the potential for collaboration.

BTW, a little background. The MLTI program is Maine’s “laptop program;” designed to get laptop computers into the hands of students and teachers. The program started in fall of 2002 with Apple iBook G4s deployed to every student and teacher in Maine’s middle schools. Eventually the program was expanded to include administrators and support staff and most recently, it was expanded into Maine’s high schools. About 64,000 Apple MacBooks were sent out this summer making it one of the largest 1-to-1 educational technology programs, of its kind, in the country. Read the MLTI history

~j