In addition to the hyperlinked resources at the bottom of this page, our guests referred often to the Web Accessibility Initiative at the World Wide Web Consortium, as well as the W3's WAI Authoring Tools Guidelines Working Group.

This was a great interview. What kinds of accessibilities policies does your campus need? How is the easiest way to start? Where can you look for help? Is there more involved than just html tricks? Which Web authoring tools do the best job? What could be better about this event page? Who benefits when you go more accessible? You might be surprised! How about people who are color blind? What about elderly users with arthritis?

Guest Experts

Judy Brewer is Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative at the World Wide Web Consortium. She coordinates five areas of work for W3C with regard to Web accessibility: ensuring that W3C technologies (HTML, CSS, SMIL, XML, etc.) support accessibility; developing accessibility guidelines for Web content, user agents, and authoring tools; developing tools for evaluation and repair of Web sites; conducting education and outreach on Web accessibility solutions; and monitoring research and development which may impact future accessibility of the Web. She was named in the August, 2000 issue of Internet World as one of the "Net's Rising Stars."

Prior to joining W3C, Judy was Project Director for the Massachusetts Assistive Technology Partnership (MATP), a US Government-funded project promoting access to assistive technology for people with disabilities. She worked on several national initiatives to increase access to mainstream technology for people with disabilities, and to improve dialog between industry and the disability community. Judy has a background in management, technical writing, education, applied linguistics, and disability advocacy.

Jutta Treviranus is the Director of the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto. She is also the Chair of the W3C WAI Authoring Tool Working group. She established the ATRC in 1994 to address the accessibility of information technology for people with disabilities through direct service, education, research and development. Jutta is also the chair of the Web Accessiblity Initiative Authoring Tool Accessibility working group.

Through research and development, Jutta and the ATRC are tackling such issues as: making on-line curriculum accessible to all learners; designing web authoring tools that create accessible web content and can be used by any author with a disability; creating on-line science, geography and math learning material that you can see, hear and feel; designing public workstations that adapt to any user's needs; and building converging technologies that are inherently accessible. The ATRC takes a proactive approach by working directly with information technology manufacturers and developers to influence the early design stages of tomorrow's computer based technologies.

Among the Web services provided by the ATRC are SNOW, an award winning website supporting teachers of students with disabilities, Web Savvy, a service to evaluate and repair the accessibility of web sites, the Learning Disabilities Resource Community and an assistive technology outcome measures site to objectively document the efficacy of access technology. She is the author of many related publications, a partial list of which can be found here.

This Event Sponsored by CREN Member Institutions

Co-Hosts

Howard Strauss (above, left), Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.

Judith Boettcher is the Executive Director of CREN.

Together, Howard and Mark will ask the really tough questions—and relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.

Background & Resources

Web Accessibility for People With Disabilities, by Michael G. Paciello, is recommended by this Tech Talk event's guest experts.

A really neat accessibility technology for sites like this one which serve up streaming audio (or video) is Remote Real Time Captioning. Here's an article about how the University of Iowa uses that technology, and here's another good related resource. A group at Minot State University in North Dakota can provide this service at reasonable costs. We were unable to get them set up with us for this event, but CREN may use their service for future Tech Talk events.

Jutta's Adaptive Technical Resource Centre's "Technical Glossary" is a wonderful resource which provides descriptions of broad categories of adaptive technologies with links to various products and their vendors. She also recommends some evaluation and repair tools:

• A good WAI link that gives a full list of a large variety of tools available is here.
• Bobby is a well-known evaluation tool that lets you assess your web site's accessibility.
• A-Prompt both evaluates and assists you in repairing the access problems on your site.
• At www.ssbtechnologies.com there are some promising tools that assist in evaluating and repairing sites, although at this stage they are not as comprehensive as the other two tools.

The HTML Writers Guild (HWG) supports a Accessibility Guidelines Implementation that provides useful online resources and a place where your work might be able to make a contribution.

Here's the Top Ten Accessible Web Authoring Practices from Web-Savvy.

CREN staffer Sheri Castro spent some time digging up resources related to Web accessibility. A partial list of those she found is here:

• The FEDERAL WORKFORCE INVESTMENT ACT OF 1998, Section 508: Accessibility Requirements for Federal Departments and Agencies
• The New York State Office for Technology Policy 99-3: Universal Accessibility for NYS Web Sites (The State of New York has adopted the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as a means to provide optimal access to State agency web sites and the content therein.)
• The University at Albany School of Public Health - Adopted State Guidelines for Building Campus Web Pages
• A program of the TLT Group, EASI: Equal Access to Software and Information, provides information to the education community in the area of adaptive computer techology for people with disabilities
• Guidelines for Blind People's Interaction with Graphical Information using Computer Technology by Martin Kurze
• The Trace Center at the University of Wisconsin, has as its mission: "To prevent the barriers and capitalize on the opportunities presented by current and emerging information and telecommunication technologies, in order to create a world that is as accessible and usable as possible for as many people as possible."

We're gathering recent and pertinent hyperlinks for you right now! Got a resource to add to our list? Send suggestions to Event Page Producer Terry Calhoun at tcalhoun@scup.org. We welcome your contribution to our resource listings. Please share a useful URL and/or your description of the resource to be found there.

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