Credits
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JB1: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for spring of 2001 and to this session on Staying Current with Web Accessibility. You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and our session today is coming to you with the support of our CREN member institutions.
We have with us today, as always, Howard Strauss of Princeton who is our technology anchor for Tech Talk. Howard, as you know, is a well-known web technology expert and portal expert and a person who never quite made it to Columbus, Ohio, last week! Welcome, Howard.
HS: Right, but I'm here now, despite the snowstorm of the century here that never happened, just canceled a million airplane flights. But thank you, Judith.
JB1: Okay.
HS: I'm Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. Today, we'll engage our guest experts in a lively technical dialogue that will answer the web accessibility questions you'd like answered, and we'll ask those very important follow-up questions. You can ask your own questions by sending e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in the webcast archive.
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In the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, there is a shoe with many eyelets to be laced up. For most people, it is an easy task, and as you quickly accomplish it you wonder why a Science Centre would have such an exhibit at all. But then you are invited to lace up the shoe while you look only at some strategically placed mirrors that turn the image upside down and replace left with right. What looks like your right hand moving to the left is actually your left hand moving right. Or maybe I have that wrong, because it really is so confusing! And that's just the point. This simple task becomes very difficult and often impossible just because one's view of the world has been altered just a bit. Of course, any time you feel sufficiently frustrated, you can step around the mirrors and get the world back the way you usually deal with it.
For people with disabilities, tasks that appear simple to most of us can be difficult or next to impossible and as long as those disabilities persist, there's no way they can just step around the mirrors and make them go away. For people who have dyslexia, words and objects often appear to ignore the rules of right- and left-handedness that most people easily see. For some people with color blindness, red letters against a green background are invisible, even though they might seem as plain as day to you. And to a person who requires the use of a wheelchair, a pretty spiral staircase can be a more formidable barrier than a moat filled with crocodiles and a drawbridge that's up.
Many buildings are now designed to provide access to people with disabilities. Spiral staircases are okay, but not without an elevator, ramp or some other way of getting from floor to floor that can be negotiated in a wheelchair. But people with disabilities need access to more than buildings. They need access to the tools that allow them to work, play and enjoy being productive members of society in whatever way they choose.
Today, access to the Internet is among the most important tools that anyone could have. Everyone needs to be able to access the web, work with e-mail and operate the computers, PDAs, cell phones and web appliances that have become a ubiquitous part of everyday life. There are two billion or so web pages on the Internet. For people with disabilities, many of those web pages might as well contain spiral staircases and shoes that can't be laced. No matter how accommodating we make our web pages, some people with disabilities will still find them harder to use than people without disabilities. We may want to leave in the spiral staircase features of our web page design because they are charming and efficient for people who can use them, but we must provide acceptable alternatives for people who cannot.
Many people are hard at work addressing this important issue. There are standards for web page design and emerging web page authoring tools that consider people with disabilities. There is also software that helps evaluate an existing web page design and helps fix it to make it more suitable for people with disabilities. There are also special devices that make web access possible for nearly everyone when used with web pages that have been designed to be accessible by people with disabilities.
Albert Einstein said that, "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." But what is simple for one person may be difficult or nearly impossible for another. We need to make the use of the web as simple as possible for everyone, including those with disabilities. Judy and Jutta, today's experts, will help us get past some of the barriers to making the web accessible to everyone on today's webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB1: Thank you, Howard, and let me take this opportunity right now to key off of when you said the need for things to be simple, and that is that I just looked at our web page and Terry Calhoun has worked very hard to make certain that our web page for today really kind of exemplifies what we want to see in web accessibility. And I commented to our experts that, gee, it didn't look much different. And they mentioned that much of the web accessibility is really hidden, so in terms of making things simple, we have a lot of complexity perhaps that we don't see. So I think our experts today will tell us how we achieve this without it being too complex. So let me introduce our two experts for today.
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Our first expert is Judy Brewer who is the Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative, the WAI, of the W3C-get all my acronyms here-the World Wide Web Consortium, based in Boston, Massachusetts. In this role, Judy coordinates five areas of web accessibility, all with the goal of insuring not only access to the web, but effective and easy use of the web for all of us, including those of us with limited attention spans and increasingly those of us getting a little older with limited vision and who love large fonts. Judy has a background in management, technical writing, education, applied linguistics and disability advocacy, all of which are very useful in this Initiative.
Our second expert, Jutta Treviranus-oops, Jutta, I didn't pronounce this very well. How do you pronounce it? Let me stop right here and get your input.
JT: Tray-vee-rahn-us.
JB1: Treviranus, all right!
HS: She said that so fast!
JB1: Yes!
HS: Like she's familiar with it!
JB1: And she knows how to do that! I bet you never have to do that, right? Jutta is from the University of Toronto where she is the Director of the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre. Jutta established this Resource Centre about seven years ago to address the accessibility of information technology, and most of her work has focused on issues in teaching and making online curriculum accessible to all learners. Jutta is also Chair of the W3C WAI Authoring Tool Working Group and a major focus of this group is working directly with manufacturers and developers of web authoring tools to design accessibility into web content at the very source. And we'll hear much more about all this in the program. Welcome, Judy.
JB2: Hello, Judith, Howard, glad to be here.
JB1: And welcome, Jutta.
JT: Hello, good to be here.
JB1: Great! Okay, Howard, do you want to make a comment about all the questions we've got coming in already?
HS: First of all, we have had lots of questions come in early, before this. We're going to try to get to all of them, but we still would encourage you to send more questions to expert@cren.net and we'll try to handle as many as we can during the webcast. And again, if we can't handle them during the webcast, we'll get you an answer afterwards. Perhaps we could start by talking about who really needs the web to be more accessible? What kind of folks are we trying to take care of?
JB2: Well, I'd say everyone needs the web to be more accessible, but to start with, a lot of people don't realize how many people there are with disabilities. In most countries, it ranges ten to 20% of any population and many kinds of disabilities, though obviously not all, can affect access to the web. For instance, visual disabilities because the graphics, if they don't have alternative text behind them, could be a problem. Hearing disabilities because the audio, if it doesn't have captions, could be a problem. People with physical disabilities that might affect their ability to use a mouse or a keyboard might need different navigation strategies on a website. People with cognitive disabilities that might include short-term memory loss, for instance, or different kinds of learning disabilities or dyslexia could benefit from sites that are better designed, better structure and so forth, more easily navigable. People with neurological disabilities such as epilepsy, if it's photosensitive epilepsy, they could have a problem with a flashing website, for instance.
So there's a large range of different disabling conditions that can affect access to the web, although many people building websites don't realize that. And then there's also people who are aging and wouldn't consider themselves to have a disability, but still could benefit from many of the same solutions. And then it turns out that many of the solutions we use for accessibility benefit users of different kinds of devices such a mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants, information kiosks that are web-based, WebTVs and so forth.
HS: So your point is that when we do this, really, to take care of people with disabilities, in many cases we're also just getting better web design, making the thing easier for anybody who gets on one of these websites.
JB2: It's better web design, it's a better marketing strategy. I have yet to meet a manager of any marketing department who has told me that they're happy to throw away eight to ten percent of their audience, and usually from solutions that are fairly easily implementable.
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HS: Yeah, and you certainly don't want to do that in a university! You certainly can't afford, I think, to throw away even half of one percent of your audience when that's students or faculty.
JB2: Well, in a university, you have some obligations as well, so obviously there's the marketplace factors among your student body. There's also the factors of making your websites easier to use for all of your students, including for many of the new devices they're accessing. But depending on what country you're in, there may be varying levels of requirements for accessibility of university-based websites.
HS: Yeah. There's one disability that you didn't mention, and I think people don't consider, but I've seen the problem here at Princeton. And that is that folks in wheelchairs you would think don't have any web accessibility problems, but I've seen kiosks on campus that are set so high that somebody in a wheelchair simply can't get to one. So I think that people just really need to consider that there's lots of different people who are going to be using these.
JB2: Well, you're very right on that. I use a wheelchair myself and actually, the accessibility of kiosks, of information kiosks is one of the first types of information technology that was clearly covered by any law in the US under the Americans With Disabilities Act, or the ADA for short. And that first addressed just the approachability of information kiosks, which is what you're referring to. But there's many levels beyond that. Once you access that kiosk, how accessible is the interface? Is it touch screen? What if you have an artificial arm? In some cases, that becomes a problem. Has that been considered in the design and so forth? And if it's a web-based information kiosk, then we help provide the solutions for insuring that the information, the content in that kiosk will be navigable and usable by somebody with any kind of disability.
HS: Are there some laws that apply? You were saying at a university, I thought you said you had to do some of these things, but are there some laws that say you have to make websites accessible? And if there are, what kind of things do you have to do?
JB2: Well, obviously, the situation's going to be different in every country, but yes, there are more and more laws that are requiring accessibility of the web. Now, universities in the US would include Section 504 obligations, which have been in place since-
HS: Now, Section 504 of what?
JB2: The Rehabilitation Act has been in place since 1973 and that requires accessibility of all federally funded programs. You also have some carryover requirements from the US Section 508, again, of the Rehabilitation Act as implemented of the Workforce Investment Act, and that requires accessibility of websites that are in some way related to federal funding. You also have some requirements under the ADA.
In September, 1996, there was a US Department of Justice decision stating that the ADA does apply to certain kinds of sites, of Internet and websites-state and local government, for instance, and certain kinds of commercial sites. And universities, particularly, that have state funding, that's very much an issue. Now, in other countries, we're seeing some requirements for accessibility of university-based websites, and that can include different levels-the Intranets, the Extranets, the different learning environments that are involved in universities and perhaps Jutta can add to this.
JT: Yeah, two notable countries are Australia and Canada, both of which have fairly explicit human rights legislations which state that education has to be accessible or provided in equivalent formats, so there are quite a number of efforts to make educational sites in Australia accessible. And the same is happening in Canada at the moment.
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HS: We have a question that came in, really on this topic, from Daniel Manson at Illinois State. And Daniel says, "I work at a state-supported university and keep hearing about a new law requiring sites to be ADA-compliant, but no one seems to know what this means. Or maybe it's just me! Do you have any insight as to what this will actually require of sites?" Can you tell Daniel where he can get this kind of information?
JB: Yeah, Howard, one of the things that's been in the news very much lately in the US is Section 508 because that has been going through a process of regulatory development where there's actually been a specific set of federal regulations developed for any sites that would be covered by 508 saying exactly what's required. Now, a fair amount of what is in the Section 508 requirements with regard to websites-because it also covers other kinds of information technology-is very similar to what is in the World Wide Web Consortium's web content accessibility guidelines. The W3C's web content accessibility guidelines are generally what's becoming the standard around the world when governments are referencing some authoritative set of guidelines on web accessibility. That's what we're seeing adopted throughout the European Union, at the national government level of European Union member states, for instance.
But my guess is that what Daniel has been hearing about in the US is Section 508 and if he wanted to see the specifics on the 508 requirements, he could actually go to our website and look at the policy reference links there, or he could go directly to the US federal website on Section 508. And I don't have that on the top of my head, but my guess is that Jutta may, or you'd be able to find it from our policy web page. And if I could just mention that resource, if anybody wants to look at it, is w3.org/wai.
JB1: And let me just say that that's practically right under your two pictures on the website, so there's a web link saying "Web Accessibility Initiative" that'll take folks right to that.
HS: One question. When we talk about the W3C content accessibility guidelines, you mentioned many, many different kinds of disabilities and really quite varying kinds of things, from people who have, say, arthritis or something and so they have difficulty using a keyboard or a mouse, to people who have color-blindness, hearing disabilities, vision disabilities, all this kind of stuff. Do the guidelines really cover all that? I mean, if we follow the guidelines, will we have guidelines that make the web accessible to people with all those different disabilities?
JT: Yes, you will. We've done it for you in the sense of we've looked at the requirements of every different group of people with disabilities that have a condition that affects access to the web and woven those together into a comprehensive solution that we've tried to provide something without internal contradictions in it. And in fact, there's often a lot of carryover benefits from one group to another.
For instance, people who can't see a website would have difficulty navigating it by mouse and therefore need full keyboard support of any of the commands in a web-based application such as authoring software or a browser or multimedia player, while people who can't move their hands and are navigating by voice, for instance, or eye gaze, they can't use a physical mouse on a desktop either. And they need the same kinds of keyboard support, so there's actually a lot of complementing among the different kinds of solutions.
One of the things that we do is we break down the accessibility guidelines at the priority levels, and so the Priority One items are the things that, if they're not done, become absolute barriers for people of given disability groups. The Priority Two items are substantial barriers. So we really group it that way, you know, the highest priority items to address and then the middle-level priorities which are also important for insuring good access to a site.
HS: But I think I heard you say that even if we do these web accessibility things, some people are going to still need special equipment to access the web and you're assuming that when someone needs some special equipment, that that's going to be available to them.
JB2: Yeah, not everybody with a disability needs special equipment, but some people do. So for instance, someone who has low vision and needs to enlarge the fonts, the type size on their display on their computer monitor, they can usually do that through the operating system that they're using now or through the browser that they're using. There's ways to enlarge the fonts very easily. But somebody who can't see the screen at all because they're blind or somebody who can't move their hand at all might be using certain kinds of what we call assistive technology or adaptive computing. And yes, they would need to be providing that on their end or, for instance at a university, the university might be helping supply that for them.
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HS: And how does a place like a university find out about those kind of things?
JB2: Well, again, I'm going to address one country first and then broaden this out because I'm more familiar with the universities in the United States. Under our Section 504 which has been around for close to 30 years now, every university has 504 obligations and also ADA obligations to have a Disabled Student Center or some plan or resource for accommodations needed by students and so that might help them get access to certain assistive technologies. I know in the UK, there's similar setups and many of the European countries. Jutta, you could-
JT: For Canada, the same, yes.
JB2: Japan is also doing quite a lot on accessibility of information technologies now. They're looking at some similar provisions for web accessibility. I don't know what they're doing in the universities right now. Hong Kong has also been looking at this issue.
HS: Okay, how can these web authoring tools that we have-I mean, a lot of people actually don't use any web authoring tool. They use Note Pad or something, but if we have web authoring tools, how can those contribute to making the website accessible? Are there some things built into some of these tools that make it so that you almost can't build a site that's not accessible?
JT: Well, that's the idea. The ideal way to address the inaccessibility of the sites is through the authoring tool. You'll be surprised at how much of the web content is actually created using authoring tools. If we have an authoring tool that both encourages you to create accessible content in a fairly intuitive and integrated fashion and helps you to check whether you have created accessible content, then even if you don't know anything about accessibility, if you've never seen guidelines and possibly also if you don't necessarily have great motivation to make an accessible website, you will still make an accessible website. And that should address many of the inaccessible content problems that are out there.
JB1: You had mentioned, Jutta, that in the web accessibility guidelines, you've got it separated in terms of priority levels. I believe you said three?
JT: Yes.
JB1: And the work that you're doing with the web authoring tools, how many priority levels for the most part do the authoring tools address today?
JT: Well, today, we unfortunately don't have any authoring tools as yet that are fully compliant to even the first level, the first priority. We can say that a Note Pad might-there are some very simple authoring tools that might be able to pass, but there are a number of companies that have announced and are planning to release authoring tools which are compliant to Priority Two. So that means that there are no barriers to access, either for an author with a disability to use the tool nor is the tool going to create content that is going to prevent someone from viewing a website and all of the problems that would arise that would make it very difficult for someone to use the website are also removed. There is not a tool as yet that has been released, but there have been a number of announcements and commitments from companies to produce such tools.
JB1: So we'll see some ads, perhaps, for tools saying that they're going to address Priority One and Priority Two level?
JT: Yeah, and I think that the onus is on universities and anyone that's purchasing an authoring tool to insist that these types of things be included and to put some market pressure on the companies to speed up the development of the compliant authoring tools.
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JB2: Judith, if I can just add to that for a moment and talk a little bit more about the work that Jutta is doing since she chairs the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group at W3C. The guidelines that that group has developed are actually very broad and, I think, show very great promise. They address not only the kinds of WYSIWYG tools-what you see is what you get-web design tools that you may be thinking of, but also conversion tools.
For instance, if you're using a word processor and you hit SAVE AS HTML, sometimes right now that's not producing very good HTML. We're trying to improve that situation. Also, database generation tools which more and more websites are designed by, site management tools, image editors and so forth. And we're trying to make accessibility more and more automatic in all those kinds of software. And I would second what Jutta said about I think the software companies really need to hear from people who are interested in these tools. I was hearing from one company that does website integration and very high level web applications, that they are having contracts coming through now from the government, both in the US and Canada, multi-million-dollar contracts where accessibility is a requirement of the site and they are now looking at their own tools and wishing they'd been working on this earlier.
JB1: That sounds like great progress is being made.
JT: And this is especially important as well in universities where the ATAG, as it's called, the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines also addresses courseware tools. So these would be the tools that would be used for courseware management, and there are a number of companies that are working on insuring that their courseware products are accessible. But it would be so much easier if a professor or an educator who is creating courseware didn't have to go through the guidelines manually and check, but that the courseware tools supported them in creating the accessible content and prompted them when there was a problem, checked their content at the end to see that, in fact, they had done the right thing. It would be great if universities who have to be compliant to 504 and have these legal obligations could pressure the developers of courseware tools.
JB1: What about frames? We've got a question that came in from, let's see, it was George Conway. It looks as if he's actually from Canada. And he's talking, saying that frames are generally not accepted by [inaudible] for accessibility and some of the reasons are that older browsers and platforms can't read them. He goes on, "Do you see the technology for screen readers changing in the near future so that they will be able to read frames?" Whence goes frames from now?
JB2: Well, frames actually are allowed, if you want to use that technology, under our guidelines and I want to emphasize first that there are a number of different kinds of evaluation tools for websites. But the issue with frames, as with many other types of structural markup on web pages is how you use them. Do you mark them up well? Do you provide a title for the frame, so for instance, if someone is navigating a frame-based website with a screen reader, that they would hear-if they're using speech synthesis-or feel, if they're using Refreshable Braille, a meaningful name for that part of the frame. For instance, navigation or primary contents or advertising material, whatever. And if you leave a frame untitled, then the user has to guess, and it's sort of like driving down a highway and seeing exit signs that are blank and wondering what town is off down that little exit ramp.
HS: So the accessibility options say frames are okay?
JB2: Frames are usable if you mark them up according to our guidelines. Same thing with tables, if you mark them up according to our guidelines. Now, the person who asked the question also asked, are things going to be changing? And in fact, yes, screen reader technology-and again, a screen reader is something that interprets what's displayed on the screen for someone who can't see that or might have a reading difficulty and redirects it to speech output or refreshable Braille output-is improving. It's becoming more markup-aware, as we say, and more able to get access to frames and tables. And our guidelines do try to keep up with those advances.
HS: One thing that looks like frames but is not frames is the use of web portals and web portals give you a whole bunch of little windows on the screen inside one web page. What about those things? I mean, are those-do your guidelines address those, or are those so new that they don't? Or how do you feel about them? [inaudible] talking about?
JB2: I would say it depends on how a portal is set up.
JT: Yeah.
JB2: There's many different ways to get a framelike effect or to get multiple links. A lot of times you have people using a layout table to set up something that looks sort of like it's frame-based and with regard to layout tables, what you want to make sure is if that table display is linearized, that it will be in some kind of logical reading order, which is also a question that relates to the use of cascading stylesheets.
Cascading stylesheets control the visual presentation of a page. They can also control audio presentation, although very few people are using them that way right now. But cascading stylesheets can be used to create a framelike effect and similar to use of table markup, there's a need to make sure that the page works well with the stylesheet in place because stylesheets, in fact, are an excellent support for somebody with low vision because the fonts are more evenly enlargeable that way, or somebody with color blindness because they can overlay their own color requirements, use their own stylesheet. But some people won't be able to access a stylesheet and therefore the markup needs to be able to what we call degrade gracefully. In other words, the page should render in a linear order that makes sense if someone isn't using that stylesheet. Does that help at all with your question?
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HS: Yeah. What about PDFs? We have a question from Christopher Bundy at University of Wisconsin and he says, "More and more people are using PDFs. Is that an accessibility problem?"
JT: Yes, that definitely is.
HS: Should we not use them? How do we deal with them?
JT: The difficulty with PDFs is, at its core, it is in fact showing a picture of what the page should look like. And one of the primary principles of accessibility is that you should separate the content and structure from the presentation and that you should be able to redisplay the content in various presentations. The difficulty with PDFs is that many of the PDF files that are on the web were created by old Adobe tools and they are basically simply images of the text and the structure. And so in order to extract that, you would almost need to do optical character recognition. There are ways to author PDF files in a more accessible fashion, but it requires that you have the appropriate authoring tool. It's best, if you are going to be using PDF, to also provide another alternative, an HTML file which is more accessible by an auditory browser or by various assistive technologies.
HS: Right. So you're saying if for some reason, you really wanted to use a PDF file, then having an alternative way to look at the thing would be a reasonable way to go.
JT: Right. My understanding is that Adobe is working on accessibility improvements with PDF and better conversion and so forth, but as with many areas of web development, we need to look at what the technologies are currently, what the problems are currently, and web designers need to take those issues into account. And then we need to look at what's coming along down the line. And so right now, we still do hear many concerns about accessibility problems with PDF files.
HS: Tell me something more about these tools. You're talking about some tools that were coming, perhaps, in the future that were going to help us build web accessible pages. Are there tools out there that tell us if our pages are accessible by people with disabilities now?
JT: There's quite a few evaluation tools that allow you to submit your web page to a tool which will then try to detect any access problems that it can detect, and where it requires human intervention it prompts you and asks you some questions to see whether-and you would respond to those questions and that would determine whether there is an access problem. There are a number of tools that are presently available and have been available for quite some time, among those Bobby, which is a very popular tool and that's provided b Cast. And I think you have a link to it from the CREN site.
JB1: Um-hum.
JT: Another tool is A Prompt and that both checks and then helps you to repair the tools. There's another tool by InFocus, so there are a number of tools which both allow you to check to see what the problems are and then assist you in repairing them.
HS: And do those tools really look at all of the W3C guidelines? I mean, if I-
JB2: The tools that Jutta's been discussing to some extent are not, depending on the tool, synchronized with the W3C's web content accessibility guidelines. With regard to the-and actually, I think each of the tools that Jutta mentioned has been making quite an effort to synchronize with our web content guidelines. With regard to our other two guidelines for authoring tool accessibility and for user agent accessibility which includes, for instance, browsers and multimedia players, we are looking at development of test suites or criteria for what would be in a test suite. But it's really a different kind of thing to evaluate. It's evaluating software rather than the content of a website, so it's yet a more involved process than developing even online evaluation utility for a website.
HS: When you talk about accessibility to browsers, is what you're saying that the browser itself, the little buttons and controls and things like that, also have to meet accessibility standards? Are those standards different than the web design standards? Are they the same?
JB2: Well, they're essentially different kinds of user interface standards or user interface provisions. And in different countries, again, there are various requirements in some settings for consideration of accessibility of the user interface, but for instance, if you were using a browser and you needed to enlarge the fonts on it, you would want to make sure that there's an easy way to do that. And let's say you're using that browser for the first time. You wouldn't want to have to go hunting a long time to find out some way to enlarge the fonts. You'd want the accessibility features to be easily findable and easily usable. So enlarging fonts would be one thing.
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Another issue with what we call user agents or, again, browsers or multimedia players and so forth is, does it render, does it display the accessibility information that might be buried in the page? So let me give an example there. If you were looking at a complex-if you were looking at mathematical presentations, thinking again of a university setting, there's ways to make math accessible on the web. Right now, many people aren't doing that. They're just putting up pictures of mathematical formulas and so forth, but you can use W3C's MathML.
Now, does the browser provide a way to render the semantic portion of the MathML? If yes, then you've got some accessibility there. On the multimedia player side, let's say you had an interactive multimedia presentation of a science experiment. Is there a way for the user, through their browser, to get access to the captions, to turn on or turn off the captions of the audio or the descriptions of the video? And Jutta, you might want to ask her a little bit more. I know she's looked at some of the particular areas of interest in university settings with math and science and music, for instance. There's software that's being developed that considers accessibility of all those as well.
HS: Yeah, Jutta, those things seem particularly difficult-math and music-and in fact, anything like that that doesn't just use letters.
JB1: Right. In fact, we had a question that came in from a Russell Diamond from Wisconsin who particularly said that he had apparently spent-he said-let me just read it here. He says he spent an afternoon recently trying to post some MathML and basically just totally failed. And so he wants to know if there was an easy way that he missed.
JT: There is not an easy way. One of the things with math-
JB1: That's not what he wanted to hear, I'm sure!
JT: Right. In fact, I think I responded to him and it's not easy at the moment. One of the reasons why math and music are so difficult is because mathematicians don't agree and musicians don't agree. And so it has taken quite a while to come up with an agreeable language, a notation that everyone can agree to. But there is, as Judy was saying, MathML and MusicML and both of those allow us to-one of the difficulties with math and music is that it has been displayed on the web as images, which of course means that somebody who has a screen reader or refreshable Braille display or anything that can only read text can't detect it. So there's been some strategies that people have used as an interim measure. They've put behind those images the alt text which has an auditorially reproducible version of what is there as an image. And then of course, there's MathML and MusicML which is not an easy solution as yet because many of the viewer/browser technologies and also some of the assistive technologies are not capable of parsing that as yet.
However, there are a number of projects, some of them in the US and some of them here in Canada, which are developing tools. And the tools that you need in order to actually teach a class using MathML involve both the MathML authoring tools and then the viewing or browsing tools and then third of all, the bridge that goes between the assistive technology, whether it's a screen reader or a refreshable Braille display and the browsing and viewing tools.
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HS: When we talk about the browser standards, the truth is, we have really just two browsers out there. We have IE and we have Netscape Navigator out there. Are the current versions of those compliant?
JB2: Well, the user agent and accessibility guidelines have not reached final recommendation yet at W3C, so to some extent, the question is a little bit moot there. We have seen Microsoft working on a number of improvements over the past few years to Internet Explorer, you know, sometimes with glitches along the way. But they're continuing to work on those. And more recently, I believe, AOL with Netscape has begun to look at some of the accessibility issues in Navigator. There's actually probably 20 or 30 different kinds of browsers out there, although many of them aren't as popular or well-known. There's Opera, which is used a fair amount in Europe, and that has a number of accessibility features built right in. And we still don't what the exact compliance level on that will be once the user agent guidelines are finished.
JT: There's also some specialized browsers such as Homepage Reader or E Reader which are intended for specific people [inaudible].
HS: That, I guess, really was my question. If the browsers that most people use are not compliant, is a solution to have browsers that are special? Is that what we want to do?
JT: That's a short-term solution.
JB2: Yeah, I would say that the magic bullet or sort of silver bullet solution usually falls down at some place. I mean, in certain workplace settings, for instance, you may have a situation where a workplace has standardized around one particular type of software and somebody who's using a niche browser or specialized browser may lost out on certain content. Unfortunately, we also still see some content providers that are optimizing their sites for a single browser, which is, I would say, extremely problematic from a perspective of accessibility. But most people I know with different kinds of disabilities use a variety of mainstream browsers and specialized browsers for separate purposes.
HS: And we have a question from Christopher Huggins from Web CT who has another interesting question. He said, "What are your thoughts on the old, non-standard-compliant browsers? The fact is that people are still using the old browsers."
JB2: Well, actually we at W3C looked at a lot of the legacy technologies, the older browsers, when we were developing our web content accessibility guidelines and we tried to insure some backwards compatibility, knowing that many people with disabilities often might be stuck using older systems, sometimes for longer than the rest of the population. And so we've actually tried to address that in our work as well.
HS: When we talked about accessibility guidelines, did I hear you say something about making the tools that build websites accessible?
JB2: Well, yes, this is what we were addressing earlier with the authoring tool accessibility guidelines, some of the work that Jutta's been doing.
HS: Could you tell us something about those? Again, those must be quite different than the web accessibility guidelines.
JB2: The authoring tool accessibility guidelines address two things, really. One is the user interface of the authoring software and second is ways in which the authoring software can facilitate the creation of accessible content. So for instance, if a university were to be looking at its accessibility policies, it might want to reference two things, really, the web content accessibility guidelines as a potential standard for anybody putting content on the web. And secondly, the authoring tool accessibility guidelines as something to look for conformance in future purchases of authoring software and actually to ask questions of the sales representative. Does the authoring software package conform to or will it be, in future upgrades, conforming to W3C's authoring tool accessibility guidelines.
HS: An awful lot of people who generate web pages go off and do things like they'll build a PowerPoint presentation ad they'll save it as a web page presentation. Do you know if Microsoft is planning to do anything with their Office products to make the web pages that they generate be accessible?
JB2: What we hear is that they are doing some things. We're not clear exactly on what they're implementing in which products, and again, I would encourage people in university settings who have an interest in the tools they use being more accessible and supporting creation of more accessible content to be asking Microsoft directly on that.
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JB1: What about the fact that now there's so many universities right now-literally, you probably have hundreds or thousands or even more web pages up right now, and if one were to go back and start re-doing all of those pages to follow your guidelines, that's a serious time and cost. What would you recommend universities do at this point?
JT: What we've recommended universities do is to address with the existing material the Priority One guidelines and to go back and look at what are the most visited sites or pages and start by addressing the Priority One. And then even before that's done, to insure that the templates that are sent out-many universities have standard templates so that there's a common look and feel across the websites of the campus-and insure that those templates adhere to the web accessibility guidelines. And then any new material that is generated using those templates will be accessible.
JB1: So kind of a gradual refresh, then, is one way to go?
JT: And then the other thing is to institute a policy which says that the websites should be accessible, and if there's any standard audit process or any review that a website needs to go through to get onto a university server, to make sure that part of that review process is a review of the accessibility of the site.
JB1: Jutta, you mentioned that. Do you have that happening at your institution?
JT: Yes, we do.
JB1: So the process is that before anything gets posted-why don't you just say again what is the process you have in place?
JT: Well, we have a very, very extensive, large website and on our central server, we had already had a process where any site that went on to the server had to be reviewed to see if it had scripting or various content that might compromise the server, the technical feasibility of the server. And so we've added to that a review of whether the site meets the Priority Two or up to the Priority Two guidelines of the web content accessibility guidelines. And we've also created templates that are accessible and insure that when someone, a webmaster wishes to create a page that will go up on the central server, they will follow the template and by following the template, they're pretty much assured that their content will be accessible.
JB1: Okay, great. Then there's another question from Chris Huggins from Web CT, very early on, which I'm kind of interested. He asks the question whether you've seen the website called, let's see, www.alistapart, a site about web design by Jeffrey Sildman? Said that they've recently begun a new program of designing their site in accordance with W3C standards. Chris is asking if you are familiar with this site, and if so, what you think about it.
JT: I've looked at their site every so often. I know there are a number of sites that track some of both the trends in the web industry and also that are implementing our work. I haven't seen what he's referring to most recently.
JB1: Okay.
JT: But I'll take a look!
JB1: You can take a look, okay. Maybe get back. We've got some other questions coming in, Howard. Have you got a good one?
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HS: Lots of questions coming in! Yeah. Before I read one of those questions, I have a question that I know folks here are going to ask, and I think a lot of folks are going to ask, and that is when we try to build web pages that meet accessibility guidelines, is that going to add any more cost to doing these things? How expensive is it going to be?
JB2: That's always an interesting question because people have a lot of misconceptions, I would say, about cost. And let me break it down a few ways, if I could, Howard.
HS: Sure.
JB2: If you're designing a website from scratch and you're designing it with web standards and W3C technologies and using valid code and so forth, you're going to have a lot of the accessibility built right in. If you use our guidelines at the same time and consider that from the beginning, for many sites, it will not really add to your design time or your costs of development. For very complex sites, for instance one that might have a lot of multimedia, some of that development may be more time-intensive, but really, the cost of the accessibility features or content on that is a small proportion of the cost of developing your multimedia content in any case.
JT: And one of the things that we've found with multimedia that actually is cost-saving is that by doing things like including verbatim caption or video description, it's a very good way to index and archive the multimedia content. And so it makes it much more usable. We can put it into a learning repository. We can index it and archive it and then retrieve it better and that makes it much more amenable to re-use as well.
JB2: We find other benefits from accessibility. For instance, the use of cascading stylesheets makes sites more maintainable, more quickly downloadable and more easily updateable in terms of their visual presentation. If you have an existing site that's got a lot of invalid code on it, you may have more work to do with regard to accessibility but then sometimes it can be effective to use sort of a staged or phase-in approach and address the Priority One items from the web content accessibility guidelines right up front because those are absolute barriers, and then build in some of the other items.
HS: It also sounds like if we can get some of these tools that have the web accessibility things built into them, that's going to make things a lot easier. Right now, it seems like you have to keep checking and looking around and making sure you're doing the right thing. With those tools, it seems like the tool will help you do that, so it should make the difference in cost even lower.
JT: I have a story related to cost, and that is, we work with a large financial institution and they bought up two other financial institutions and one had-
HS: Sounds like what financial institutions do.
JT: Yes, exactly! And one of the institutions had used the WAI guidelines and had a CSS-created site and the other hadn't. And the one that had the CSS-created site simply had to change approximately three to five lines of code to make their site compliant with the new parent company. The other had to completely trash their site and so the cost of re-creating and changing the look and feel of the site was too astronomical, so they had to start from scratch.
HS: Yeah, that's a great story!
JB1: It really is! Do it now or do it later, right?
HS: We have a question from Paul Bowman from Utah State University here. He says, "One notable difference in emphasis between the WAI guidelines and other regulations such as Section 508 is the way in which client-side scripting is approached. It seems that the WAI emphasizes the idea of making an alternative to client-side scripts, at least in Priority One, whereas the 508 guidelines emphasize the need for scripts that are directly accessible. Do you anticipate a change in focus to be more accepting of accessible client-side scripting, or will the emphasis always be on providing alternatives?"
JB2: That's, I would say, somewhat difficult. I have looked at the 508 guidelines, 508 provisions in different stages and I know that there's still a divergence there. I mean, one way for me to apply it is just to indicate that the W3C, as I mentioned earlier, is aware that web technologies change over time and we are looking at ways to change our own guidelines. That's a ways in the future, though. What's there currently in terms of web content accessibility guidelines, we do consider stable and good for use. I think there's some debatability about which is the better provision. We've looked at different versions of their provision, different times, and felt at least with draft versions I've looked at that there was still some concern with believing that the accessibility could be fully built into the script there.
So I would say, to be on the safe side right now, to use the provisions in our guidelines at W3C. We're not a regulatory body. The Access Board that produced the Section 508 guidelines is, so if he's looking for stricter conformance to 508, he should do what's in 508. If he wants to provide accessibility as defined by W3C, he could go a step further and do what's in our guidelines as well.
HS: Okay, I think we're getting close to the end. [inaudible]
JB1: We really are.
HS: But we're just warming up here!
JB1: Sounds like you guys all have just innumerable questions here. Do you want to take any more, Howard, or do you...
HS: Yes, there's one here which-I mean, I was going to ask a question toward the end, but there's a question here that's close to the question I was going to ask anyway.
JB1: Okay.
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HS: We'll let Christine Lisiecki from New Jersey ask it. And you may have answered some of this before, but I think it's a good way to close up here. Christine says, "Many librarians like myself manage the library's web page. We are just learning how to create web pages"-and a lot of people are in that boat, really-"and still have a long way to go to be proficient. Where do you suggest we turn for help in learning how to make our websites accessible?"
JB2: Well, I would welcome Christine to come to the Web Accessibility Initiative website at w3.org/wai. We have an awful lot of resources there, not just the guidelines and the checklist that accompanies them. But we also have an extensive online curriculum where somebody can do an entire course of learning about the guidelines that includes different examples, graphic examples and discussion about how to use them, the different features in the guidelines. And we're also constantly adding different kinds of training materials and explanatory materials and so I actually have got to say that I know a lot of librarians who have really taken web accessibility to heart and are doing the best they can to create websites that showcase their resources, websites that are accessible for all different kinds of disabilities.
JT: And that's the perfect time to learn how to do it right. It's not any more complex than learning how to create an accessible website. It's basically making the right decisions at the right time. And so when you're learning how to create web pages, that's the perfect time to learn how to do them in an accessible fashion.
HS: I assume that you would suggest that universities make it a requirement that the web pages that the university builds meet the accessibility requirements?
JB2: I think it's very helpful for universities to have policies. The policy at the University of Toronto that Jutta's been describing seems to be very comprehensive and I think people might want to look at that as a possible example. I mean, it references what's become an internationally-recognized standard on accessibility and it also provides some timelines for doing that, I believe, and talks about what to do with some of your older pages and I think if university policies also talk about the authoring tools that are used, that that will make it easier for everyone over time as well.
JB1: That sounds just great. Well, listen, do either of you have any other closing notes here? I think it is time to wrap up. We could go on for another 45 minutes, I think!
HS: Easily!
JB1: Easily, right.
JB2: I'm really eager to see what happens with some of the accessible courseware development over the next year or two and so I hope that members of the audience also stay tuned to that and continue to ask questions about it.
JB1: Yeah, I think that's an exciting development. Judy, anything else?
JB2: That was Judy.
JB1: Oh, I'm sorry! Did I mix you up? Okay?
HS: I really can't see them!
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JB1: There was just a final note that came in from one of our audience, from Pat McHugh who is at the University of Illinois at Springfield. She has a note here saying that PDF files can be read with a plug-in from Adobe, so we can kind of look at the Adobe site and maybe find out [inaudible].
JB2: There is a plug-in and it works for some files.
JB1: I see!
JT: And it did cause the student to go through a number of additional steps in order to read it. It's better if the student can read it right off the bat without having to find the tool and-
HS: See how easy it is to get right back into the middle of this?
JB1: I know it! You know, I'm really glad I mentioned that. All right, well, here it is. It is time to close up. Be sure to plan on joining us two weeks from today, on March 22nd, when our special guest expert will be David P. Anderson, talking about the State of the Art in Peer-to-Peer Networking. For those of you who are into it, David Anderson is the person behind the [inaudible] at home project. This new model of computing, i.e. the peer-to-peer networking, is really complementary to the client/server model, but raising lots of problems as well as opportunities on our campuses.
Many thanks to all the CREN institutions who support these Tech Talks and to the Tech Talk folks who make this event possible today. A special thanks to our experts today, Judy Brewer and Jutta Treviranus; to technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, truly a Tech Talk web guru and accessibility expert, almost, now; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit Network; to Susie Berneis, the audio file transcriber; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it's time. Bye, Judy.
JB2: Thank you for having us.
JB1: All right. Bye, Jutta.
JT: Bye.
JB1: Howard, take care.
HS: Bye, take care.
JB1: And we'll see you all in two weeks. Thanks for all the questions. If you still have questions, we probably will answer a few more over the next 24 hours. Thanks much! Bye-bye.
HS: Bye-bye.
END OF WEBCAST
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