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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

For the past several months I have been the proud owner of an Apple iPod Touch. As you know from reading this blog, I am far from being an “applefanboi” and have tended towards the “I’m a PC” side of things. But I have been dutifully impressed by this device and the technology behind it.

Perhaps what has impressed me most is the “touch screen” that is the main user interface. Like the move from the keyboard to the mouse – which Apple also perfected more than 25 years ago – the touch screen, I believe, is the way we will interact with computers in the future. I probably should expand that to include the fantastical 3D user interface that Tom Cruise’s character used in The Minority Report even though in that futuristic fantasy the interaction is between hands and holograms as opposed to actually touching a screen. But the concepts are the same – a more direct connection between human physical movement and the actions of a computer.

I think what I like best about the touch screen is how, almost intuitively (and I hate to even admit this), I was able to navigate the device. Being the typical red-blooded-American-male, I didn’t bother to read the directions until after I had given the device a good spin. I found it easy to navigate and move between apps and generally work the browser. The less intuitive stuff related to moving the badges around on the home screen or how to remove them from the device (I still don’t know how to do that on the Mac OS), I had to study to learn. But even these make sense if you think of it (unlike ejecting a CD by dragging it to the trash can – huh?).

The movement of dragging documents around on the screen to view them, squeezing and stretching them to zoom in and out and even the “flick of the finger” action of moving between pages is very close to the “feel” of hands and paper.

Well, it seems everyone has gotten into the “touch screen act” these days and yes things are getting ratcheted up dramatically with the recent release of the new Palm Pre – another touch screen dependent smart phone - in addition to the pending release of the Apple iPhone 3G S. Add to this is Microsoft’s announcement that touch screen capacity has been added into Window 7 (additional hardware required), and it is pretty clear that within a couple of years we will see more and more people engaging their technology “by touch” rather than using a clunky piece of hardware like a mouse or keyboard. Or will we?

Of course all of this creates many new challenges for people with disabilities. How does this new technology work with people who cannot see?

I am sensing that solutions to some of these issues may already be on the drawing board – well at the very least, on Apple’s drawing board. We’ll have to wait and see if the solutions become widespread.

Apple’s solution is the inclusion of the native VoiceOver screenreader into the new iPhone O/S. By the way, I was a little miffed by Apple’s insistence that the iPhone O/S is actually a version of Mac O/S X – bit of stretch if you ask me, Cupertino.

In addition to VoiceOver – which at this point apparently only works with the iPhone’s Safari browser and “native” apps – the new iPhone has Voice Control which will make dialing calls, choosing music and even announcing music titles accessible to people with visual impairments. As demonstrated, Voice Control is a universally designed feature which give heads-up control to all users and allows those who cannot see the device better ability to engage it.

But the clincher may come with the issue of the touch keyboard. If people who are blind or have visual impairments want to use the iPhone 3G S to send text messages or otherwise input text into the device, they are going to have to learn how to “touch type” in a whole new way. And the success of that remains to be seen – sorry no pun intended.

Of course, the next iteration of the iPhone (4G?) might have voice-to-text built in, but since we haven’t mastered that on desktop computers, it might not be that soon. But those Apple people are crafty.

It’s only been 48 hours since Apple made their big announcements at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference – WWDC (which I affectionately have referred to as the “Apple-Love-In”). It is clearly too early to gauge how this new iPhone will work with folks with disabilities. So, I am waiting patiently for the final verdict from my screenreading colleagues who just can’t wait to get their hands on the new toys when they are release to the public next week. I am assuming that Apple live tested these new accessibility features extensively before now – at least I hope they have – but I want to hear from my friends about what they really think about these tools when the phone is released and in the hands of real users.

So to answer my own question, it is pretty apparent that touch screens are the next big thing in personal technology, but maybe just a temporary thing.

Your thoughts?

~j

PC Magazine has been a denizen of the Information Technology world for over 20 years and has been delivered to my doorstep for almost that long a time. Through thick and thin I have enjoyed reading this monthly publication and have used its website religiously to find reviews of IT products and services.

Last December they announce – quite suddenly – that they would no longer be publishing a print version. Ostensibly PC Magazine was falling victim to the same hardships that other print media were experiencing – fewer readers and rising costs. And with the pending decline in the economy and the obvious reduction of advertising dollars, it was probably their only alternative.

I am not real happy with their decision to move to a digital-only format, but I am frankly irate with the way they went about this transformation.

Following the surprise announcement of the change, I had expected to hear something explaining exactly how PC Magazine – or specifically Ziff Davis,  the publisher – was going to fulfill the balance of my paid subscription. One month went by, then two, then three. I would think about it and then forget. So last week, a full four months after the last paper issue crossed my threshold, I decided to visit the PC Magazine website to see if I could find out what was going on. This was almost a complete waste of time as ultimately I needed to send them a digital request for information.

To their credit, the PC Mag folks did reply promptly to my query and explained that they had sent the notice to the e-mail address they had on record. This particular e-mail address was the one I used when I first subscribed to the magazine over 10 years ago. It has been out of use for at least 10 years. Needless to say, I never got the notice.

After three or four e-mails back and forth, I now have access to my three past issues. In the new digital system, the magazine content is apparently converted into a proprietary format requiring the use of a special reader software package provided by a company called Zinio. The glitzy “reader” presents the content in a format that mimics the paper copy complete with faux ability to “turn pages” using your mouse. On first blanch, the text is almost impossible to read, but by clicking on the screen, the focus is zoomed in and the text is then too big to allow easy viewing. The whole experience quite frankly sucks – sorry, I could not think of another word.

I just penned an e-mail back to the Customer Service folks at PC Mag and I am sharing it with you here (see below). It summarizes my experience and my next steps.

As you will read in this blog, I have been heavily involved in the movement to make digital content accessible to people with disabilities and have strongly advocated for the creation of universally designed websites. The Zinio/PC Magazine experience is very far from universal design.

So, as we all deal with the forthcoming changes to news and media industry, we will no doubt encounter more of this. I for one will be keeping watch and providing my opinion.

Here is my e-mail to the PC Magazine Customer Service folks:

Thank you for the resolution of this subscription issue. I have now been able to successfully download the past issues of PC Magazine and begun reading them. I must however express my disappointment and dissatisfaction in the process that I needed to engage in order to find out what had happened to my paid subscription.

At the very least, it seems to me that as you folks were planning to move from a printed to a digital version of PC Magazine you may have warned your subscribers of this eventuality and asked them to update their contact information. I apparently first subscribed to PC Magazine over 10 years ago since the e-mail address you have on record has not been used by me for at least that long a time. I have, over this time used the on-line updates from the website to send me some of the various special reports (e.g. Daily News Alert, etc.) and you had my correct e-mail address for those. Due to having the wrong e-mail information, I was missing my subscription for nearly four months.

I understand and can empathize that this has been a difficult time for many in the print publishing business, but I think you need to be more cognizant of your subscribers and work harder to keep the ones you have. Simply switching to digital from paper without notice was not a good move in my book (no pun intended).

Lastly, I must let you know that I will likely not be renewing my subscription to PC Magazine when it expires. I am very sad about this decision and I would like you to understand my reasoning.

Personally, I don’t find reading periodicals online at all satisfying. I tend to read my magazines and newspapers in location where I do not usually have – or want to have – access to a laptop or other digital device. That has been the beauty of paper! That was what I was willing to pay for. As for the content – you currently offer all of the magazine’s content free of charge on your website without needing to use any silly readers which are cumbersome to use and not universally-designed.

Until someone can find a way to digitally replicate the paper-reading experience, I regret that the publishing industry will continue to die, and I will continue to cling on to the last remaining pieces of paper.

Sincerely,

John E. Brandt
Web Design, Development, Consultation
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com
jeb@jebswebs.com
207-622-7937