Webstandards, Accessibility and Usability at Penn State

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 ]

I am taking Stat 200 online and just wanting to know what people recommend for work books, CD, Help guides other than the text book that’s needed. Any ideas?

From the U.S. Department of Labor press release:
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WASHINGTON - In conjunction with the 19th anniversary of the Americans with
Disabilities Act, the U.S. Department of Labor has re-named and re-launched
DisabilityInfo.gov as Disability.gov (http://www.disability.gov/) . The site offers comprehensive
information about programs and services to better serve more than 50 million
Americans with disabilities, their family members, veterans, employers,
educators, caregivers and anyone interested in disability-related
information.

Second Life poses many interesting opportunities for new methods of learning. Any time a new technology comes along that can be used for education, accessibility is not generally a topic of discussion when deciding whether or not to put the technology into use, but it should be. Equitable access to the learning environment for everyone is something that federal laws protect. Online course designers may perceive that such considerations present barriers to innovation.

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.

With the release of the Kindle 2, Amazon has added new features and is promoting the Kindle’s use in the educational environment. The features and improvements may indicate some of this push is to get the reader in students’ hands. Features like highlighting and note taking seem to be more suited for the study environment than they are for the casual reader.

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.

YouTube does support caption files (specifically the SubViewer/.sub and SubRip/.srt). You can find information about searching for captioned videos and reading captions at

http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about

More information about the specific caption format is at

http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=100077

P.S. Pat just confirmed that Parity can create the correct caption format for YouTube.