Webstandards, Accessibility and Usability at Penn State

With the spread of mobile computing devices (e.g. iPhone, Blackberry, and others), users of these devices are encountering issues similar to those encountered by those with various disabilities.

Adobe has recently posted information about creating accessible documents in Adobe InDesign CS4 at
http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/indesign/

Within InDesign, there are options for
* Adding ALT tags to images
* Matching styles, tags with HTML tags (e.g. your header style can be tagged as H1 in a conversion)
* Instructions for exporting an accessible PDF file to Acrobat as well as more information about touching up with the file in Acrobat

The following message came from the Second Life Educators Listserv
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The 24-hour event PDT will be held all day Saturday, June 27 at the four
The Ye, Olde, Supporte, Faire sims. ((http://slurl.com/secondlife/Faire/20/222/38)

Linden Lab is collaborating with and assisting Virtual Helping Hands and a
coalition of community volunteers who are proud to announce Helen Keller
Day in Second Life. Helen Keller Day is a community-event exploring how and
why to employ, educate, entertain, and engage everyone through virtual worlds.

Bill Welsh from the Office of Disability Services (ODS) walked through how an accommodation request works. It wasn't quite what I expected.

1. Students requesting official accommodation must register with the Office of Disability Services....but not all students choose to do so (because they want to be more independent).

2. When ODS sends an accommodation letter to faculty, the accommodation is identified (e.g. a captioned video), but not the "condition" behind it - this is to maintain student privacy.