Webstandards, Accessibility and Usability at Penn State

Google has added a tool to generate automatic captions on videos based on automatic speech recognition. As with Dragon Naturally Speaking, you have to check output captions for accuracy, but it's free (or at least cheap) and it's a start if you post content to YouTube. This would be especially helpful for student project videos.

See info and demo at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.htm...

If you're on the Penn State Webstandards Listserv, you may have seen that WebAIM has published its results of a screen reader survey. You can see my summary at http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/tlt/2009/11/webaim-screen-reader... or go directly to http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/.

What happens if you have a series of images with no ALT tag...then the image fails to download?

You can see what happens on my blog post ALT Tags Benefit Everyone.

You can watch the Oct 12 presentation on accessibility live on Adobe Connect at
https://breeze.psu.edu/accessibility/

It will also be recorded.

From ITS Tech News
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In recent years, Pat Besong of ITS had developed and offered a captioning tool for the Mac called "Parity." This tool has now been released as MovCaptioner from http://www.synchrimedia.com.

It is still free for Penn State users. You can contact Pat Besong (pzb@psu.edu) for information on how to obtain a license.

The cost for users outside of Penn State is approximately $40, but it does support a wide range of caption types including Quicktime, Flash, YouTube, video poscast and more.

Below is a partial listing of EASI online seminars being offered this fall. Seminars are free unless otherwise noted

* On August 26 at 2PM Eastern, a seminar on creating accessible tables in HTML, Word and PDF will be offered.
* On September 1 at 2PM, a seminar on creating captioned videos in Camtasia will be offered.
* A series of for-fee seminars on accessbile PDFs and Web 2.0 tools will be available as well as a series on Second Life.

Please check the EASI Web site for updated listings of free and for-fee online seminars.
http://easi.cc/clinic.htm

From the EASI Mailing List
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Three Webinars (or online seminars) on accessibility checkers will be offered in August on AChecker (University of Toronto) and

Open Now
The first Webinar in the series is this Thursday August 13 at 2 PM Eastern and
demonstrates the newest of these accessibility tools – AChecker from the University of Toronto.
Register now at http://easi.cc/clinic.htm

Coming Soon

The second Webinar is on September 15 demonstrating the Firefox
accessibility extension from the University of Illinois

The Web Blog "Dingo Access" (http://www.dingoaccess.com) has a great video of a refreshable Braille display.
http://www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/refreshable-braille-and-the-web...

A Braille display is a row of 32 blocks (or cells) of pins. Each pin can be raised to represent a dot in a Braille character or lowered as needed. When connected to a computer, it reads 32 characters at a time raises the appropriate combination of pins for each character.

Despite our best intentions and attempts to train Web developers and designers in accessible Web publishing, progress in making the Web accessible has been disappointing, at best. While it's important to increase awareness of the barriers to access we unintentionally build, institutions cannot guarantee the accessibility of their Web presence through the collective effort of individuals alone. Institutions generally meet technical challenges with responses at the organization, or process, level. That's what I propose here.

[ read more at my blog site ]