Assistive Technology

Here you'll find articles about assistive technology and web accessibility.  to read each article, click the link under the title you want to read.  The last article on the page is written out in full.  Enjoy!

Orator: The New Screen Reader for BlackBerry Phones

Read this article at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1593655/orator_
the_new_screen_reader_for_blackberry.html

Mind Games:  Computer Headset Lets Brain Control Action

Read this article at http://www.canada.com/cityguides/hamilton/info/story.html?id=67e33933-e16c-4d7b-9a05-9612439fd5b9

Are PDAs Accessible?

Read this article at http://www.washington.edu/accessit/articles?1062

IBM and Excendia Join Forces To Deliver Speech-Enabled Mobility & Unified Communication Solutions

Read this article at http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/08/17/2871272.htm#

Can Google's Guide for the Blind Do More?

Read this article at www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3627896

New Assistive Technology Opens Doors

Read this article at www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060128/COLUMNIST09/601280350

Making Your Website Accessible for Everyone

by Maria Carmen C. Cruz

The internet has huge potential to make life easier for people with disabilities.  The ability to shop, bank, learn, work, chat, and do so much more online can bring important aspects of life within the reach of many disabled people.  The internet can help us do many things independently that we needed assistance to do before.  But it can also have the opposite effect when websites are inaccessible to us, or to the assistive technology we use.  As someone who’s blind and physically disabled, I can attest to the fact that a lot of websites out there have major accessibility problems.  Many people have felt the sheer frustration of trying to use a site that’s unreadable, plays havoc with their assistive technology, or is inaccessible to them in some other way.  Below I’ll try to outline some of the main accessibility issues faced by people with disabilities online.

Animated Flash movies are one website feature that can stop screen readers dead in their tracks.  For example, I’ve visited websites where the Flash clip interrupts my screen reader after less than a minute of reading, then my screen reader jumps back to the very top and starts over again.  This aggravating problem can be solved by hiding from screen readers any animated Flash objects and any objects where text is constantly changing.  As well as hampering screen readers, Flash clips with a strobe effect can be harmful to people with photo epilepsy.  So in order to make sure your site won’t cause seizures, avoid the use of blinking or strobing content that flashes twice or more per second.  People with motor difficulties can access Flash content better if you ensure that the clips can be accessed via the keyboard, and that no fine motor skills are needed to access the content. Other aspects of Macromedia Flash can be made more accessible, and some of these will be mentioned throughout this article.

Realtime captioning is essential for making your website accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.  If your site has any audio content, including Flash or videos with a voiceover, deaf people need web captioning in order to know what’s being said.  Web captioning can even be useful to people whose computer doesn’t have speakers or a sound card, as well as people who decide to mute the sound on their computer.  WebAIM at www.webaim.org and Computer Prompting and Captioning Co. at www.cpcweb.com are a couple of companies who offer web captioning products and services.

Graphics can be a source of entertainment or information, but if you don’t tag them with alternative text they’re absolutely useless to blind people.  Both HTML graphics and non-animated Flash graphics can be tagged with alternative text.  Alt text is just a brief description of the graphic that gives information to people who use screen readers, or even those who use text-only browsers.  Preferences vary, with some people wanting alt text to be as descriptive as possible, and others wanting to just skip over graphics altogether.  Then there are people like me, who are somewhere in the middle.  Large chunks of alt text can be tedious, but if you can create one short and descriptive sentence about your graphic I think almost everyone will be happy.

Navigation buttons with drop-down menus are also a pain for people who use screen readers.  First, there’s no indication telling a screen reader that a navigation button is actually a drop-down menu, so nothing happens when the user presses the ENTER key to click on that button.  Second, even if the user knows a certain navigation button is a drop-down menu, there’s no way for her/him to access that menu using the arrow keys.  This means that your visitors using screen readers may miss out on large chunks of information.

Tree-view links are a more accessible alternative to drop-down menu navigation buttons, since people using screen readers can access these with the enter and arrow keys.  If it’s possible to add alt text to these links I’d suggest tagging the top level, to make it easier for people using screen readers to know that link is the beginning of a tree-view.  For example, if the top level of your tree-view link is "Services", the alt text could say something like "Services - use arrow keys to navigate and Enter key to click".  It would also be good to tag the end of your tree-view list with alt text, so that if your bottom list item is "Web Design", for instance, your alt text might say something like "Web Design - end of tree view".  This will give people the information they need, and help them to make use of everything your site has to offer.

Time-sensitive content is an accessibility issue affecting people with various disabilities. Although time-sensitivity may be necessary in some cases, like online banking or an online test, it’s much better if each user can have some control over the time limit given. People who are blind, physically challenged, or have cognitive disabilities, may take longer to do things than people without these disabilities. And believe me, there’s nothing more frustrating than when you finally finish entering a lot of text, filling out a survey, or doing some other task, only to lose all your work because your time ran out! But time-sensitivity can be a pain for anyone, disabled or able-bodied. If you leave your computer to grab a snack or take a short break, you may have to start all over again when you come back to your computer.

It’s always a good idea to test your website to make sure it meets W3C’s Web 2.0 accessibility standards, as well as the US government’s Section 508. There are several ways to test your site for accessibility to disabled people, but the following seem to be some of the better-known resources:
- LIFT is a website accessibility and usability test that will tell you how to fix any issues it finds, LIFT has various solutions available depending on what applications you use to develop your site - www.usablenet.com
- WebAIM has products, services and articles to help you make your site more accessible, and also offers a service to test and monitor your site’s accessibility as well as telling you how to fix accessibility issues.  They're at www.webaim.org

For more information on website accessibility check out the guidelines and resources from the Worldwide Web Consortium(W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative at www.w3.org/WAI/.  You can also go to Microsoft’s accessibility resources page at www.microsoft.com/enable/.