Web Professional Minute

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

We?’ve been covering the topic of Web accessibility in depth and for today?’s podcast, I am reaching out to Brent Norris, Web developer from the Aloha state for some closing thoughts on this important topic.

Yesterday, I summarized my thoughts on the lessons learned regarding the interviews that we?’ve conducted on this topic of Web accessibility and our own efforts to improve the WOW Technology Minute website. In short, I stated that we?’re making progress in the areas of improving our understanding of the importance Web accessibility topic as a profession and thanks to the community we have tools and resources to address this issue head on.

As a result of our recent efforts to update our own knowledge base on the topic, it?’s also clear that in addition to being the right thing to do, Web accessibility makes great business sense and resources exist to readily document this as a business case.

With our own WOW Technology Minute Web accessibility project in mind for example, we?’ve been able to demonstrate that with a little bit of time invested and some very easy to do processes, we can make small incremental improvements on our site that can have a big impact for those with disabilities.

For the ten minute audio response with Brent and his take on the “Top Ten” Web Accessibility Tips complete with explanations of the SEO relevancy, check out today’s WOW Technology Minute.

Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is sponsored by Concentric offering small business and shared web hosting solutions.

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A transcription of this podcast will be posted within 24 hours.

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

If you?’ve been following along with the podcast coverage on the topic of Web accessibility, than you?’re already aware that we conducted a number of interviews from some of the most respected experts on the topic within the Web profession. The goal of our coverage on the topic was two-fold. The first goal was to provide the members and subscribers of this podcast with some practical resources on the topic of Web accessibility that you can easily implement today. Secondly, our goal was to improve the accessibility and quality of the WOW Technology Minute website.

For today?’s podcast, I?’d like to summarize what we?’ve learned through the process and to share my own perspective on the topic. For the complete 3 minute audio visit the WOW Technology Minute. website.

Thank you for listening and watching today?’s WOW Technology Minute.

Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by WebProTraining.org check it out at: Web Pro Training.

Transcript:

Web Accessibility Project and WOW Executive Summary
Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
If you?’ve been following along with the podcast coverage on the topic of Web accessibility, than you?’re already aware that we conducted a number of interviews from some of the most respected experts on the topic within the Web profession. The goal of our coverage on the topic was two-fold. The first goal was to provide the members and subscribers of this podcast with some practical resources on the topic of Web accessibility that you can easily implement today. Secondly, our goal was to improve the accessibility and quality of the WOW Technology Minute website.
For today?’s podcast, I?’d like to summarize what we?’ve learned through this process and to share my own perspective on the topic. For tomorrow?’s podcast, I?’ll be reaching out to Brent Norris, Web developer from the Aloha state of Hawaii who as you may recall, I asked to consult with me on the WOW Accessibility project.

First, I?’d like to acknowledge T.V. Raman Research Scientist at Google for the inspiration for the in depth analysis and the WOW Accessibility Project. I met and interviewed T.V. Raman at the Seventeen Annual WWW conference in Beijing last month on the topic of Web accessibility and was inspired by his “cup half full” perspective on the topic and his passion to educate others in a very logical and upbeat way about the need for and the benefits of designing with Web accessibility in mind.

Now for my thoughts:

In reviewing the past WOW Technology Minute interviews on the topic of Web accessibility, I?’ve learned the following:

•As an industry we are making progress in the areas of improving an understanding and appreciation of the needs for Web accessibility and as a profession we should be proud of that
•I also learned that the cup is half full but according to the experts its much bigger and that this is a positive thing for our profession in terms of oppotyinty and for the Web in general
•Thanks to wide variety of Web accessibility specialist and standards bodies we have more recommendations (national and international ) and tools to better understand and address the problem
•In addition to being the right thing to do for those that are blind, deaf and otherwise handicapped Web accessibility makes great business sense and resources exist to document that
•With just a little bit of time invested and some very easy to do processes even the busiest of the busiest in the Web profession can make a small and incremental change that can have a big impact

To put those statements into perspective, I?’d like to point out that I recognize that most Web professionals do not have the luxury of working for the enterprise. More than likely, the majority of you have clients and tight timelines and operate within the constraints of a small budget. As a result, Web accessibility although important is only a small part of your over all job responsibility. If you?’re like me, than you?’re most likely the developer, the designer, the content, the security and the marketing guru as well. I recognize and understand how difficult it must be to manage the complexity of your daily lives of managing a wide variety of demanding clients and to do?’s.

That said, I?’d like to ask that you consider incorporating some of the lessons learned into your daily Web professional lives. You?’ll feel better for having done so. I know that I have.

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

Today’s podcast is a continuation of the coverage of the topic of Web Accessibility and the second in a series of interviews with Shawn Henry of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)and Chair of the WAI Education and Outreach Working Group.

Shawn holds a research appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and is the author of */Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design at: UIACCESS.

For the complete four minute audio interview with Shawn on the topic of the W3C’s work on Accessible Rich Internet Applications check out today’s podcast at the WOW Technology Minute..

Today s podcast is sponsored by the Webmaster Survival Guide. Check out all of the great resources and links at: WebmasterSurvivalGuide.

Transcript: WOW Technology Minute Web Accessibility Interviews with Shawn Henry, WAI and W3C

BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the coverage and the topic of Web Accessibility with Shawn Henry of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) World Wide Web Consortium W3C and Chair of the WAI Education and Outreach Working Group. Good afternoon Shawn and thanks again for the continued support of the web accessibility topic and this podcast.

SHAWN HENRY: Glad to be able to take this opportunity to continue sharing information about web accessibility.

BILL: Excellent. Thank you so much Shawn. Can you provide the listeners and the viewers of this podcast an overview of the W3C?’s work on accessible-rich Internet applications?

SHAWN: Absolutely. So this work applies to, largely to, dynamic html, sites with AJAX and other so-called Web 2.0 applications. And basically the issue is that Midas functionality is not available to some users with disabilities, mostly people who can?’t use a mouse and people who can?’t see and use a screen reader. For example, when websites use tree controls for navigation, that is often either not accessible or very tedious to access. So it may be accessible, but it?’s not very useable. Things like drag-and-drop, obviously, very difficult to do without a mouse. And then issues with updating the DOM, with AJAX Live Regions, with updating content on a page based on user actions. So these are some of the areas that we?’re focusing on.

So we have this specification called WAI AIA. It stands for Accessible-Rich Internet Applications. And this specification defines a way to make these user interface controls and dynamic content accessible. It primarily focuses on the, this level of technology. It has some features that are useful for simple sites, such as specifications for marking up regions of a page, like menus, primary content, secondary content, browsers and things like that. It is currently a draft. Many browsers, assisted technologies, Java Script tool kits and others have already begun to implement it. So we recommend that Web developers start now to learn about ARIA so that they can implement it appropriately and be ready and ahead of the game when that is finalized and when it comes out.

And one of the new bits of information, even for those who heard about ARIA several months ago, is that we previously had just the technical specifications and now we have material that developed, for developers. So there?’s a primer and there?’s a best practices guide. And all those are available from the WAI ARIA view, which you can find on the WAI website or if you just go to any search engine and type W-A-I dash A-R-I-A overview, it should take you right there.

BILL: Excellent. Thank you Shawn. Sounds like a terrific resource and we certainly thank you for continued support. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters and the WOW Technology Minute on the phone with Shawn Henry WAI W3C. Thanks again Shawn.

ANNOUNCER: Today?’s minute is sponsored by the Webmaster?’s Survival Guide. When you need professional resources be sure to check out www.webmastersurvivalguide.com. There?’s something there for all skill levels and disciplines. And be sure to ask about advertising opportunities with this PR6 website from the World Organization of Webmasters.

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters, WOW, and the WOW Technology Minute. Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the coverage on the topic of Web Accessibility. To assist me in better understanding this topic from an international perspective, I?’m on the phone with Shawn Henry of the Web Accessibility Initiative, WAI, World Wide Web Consortium and a Chair of the WAI Education and Outreach Working Group.

Shawn holds a research appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and is the author of JUST ASK: INTEGRATING ACCESSIBILITY THROUGHOUT DESIGN. She?’s also presented for WOW in the past and is a great addition to this podcast.

Good Afternoon Shawn and thanks for agreeing to this interview and, of course, for your comments by email. Shawn, you commented on the WOW Technology Minute Web Accessibility Podcast with Brent Norris. Can you summarize your comments and can you provide us with the resources and the links that you mentioned in your email?

SHAWN HENRY: Yeah, first of all it?’s great to hear about your project to evaluate and improve the accessibility of the WOW Technology Minute website. I noticed the mention of Section 508, which is for US government procurement, and so I wanted to share some information about the international accessibility of web content accessibility guidelines. So it?’s an international accessibility standard, and that acronym is WCAG. WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and it applies to websites and web applications. It?’s from the World Wide Web Consortium, or the W3C, and that?’s the group that defines standards such as html, css, etc. Within W3C there?’s a group called the Web Accessibility Initiative, or WAI, and that?’s the group that developed the accessibility guidelines. So WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, just as with other W3C web standards, are cooperatively developed with people around the world.

It?’s a little different from US Section 508. In fact, Section 508 was based largely on WCAG 1.0, but it?’s only a subset. So WCAG covers many more accessibility issues. It?’s much broader. Now WCAG 2.0 is close to being published. As of the 30th of April we now recommend that people start using the draft of WCAG 2.0, as we don?’t expect it to change very much before it?’s finalized, hopefully later this year.

There?’s several benefits to using WCAG 2.0. It applies to more advanced technologies, both current technologies, future technologies and non-W3C technologies like flash and PDF and other things. It has extensive supporting materials that gives you practical how-to examples as what you need to do as developers to implement WCAG and how to, technical implementation details as well as understanding the functionality that users need.

So that?’s just a little bit about WCAG 2.0, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and if you want to get some more information I?’d encourage you to go look at the overview document and that is at http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag20. And that will give you an overview of the documents. There?’s a link to a FAQ, there?’s a really useful resource called “How to meet WCAG 2.0” and it?’s a customizable, quick reference of all the requirements and the information you need. So that?’s a bit about WCAG 2.0.

BILL: Excellent Shawn, thank you so much for that international perspective, as well as those resources available. I?’m curious to know, you mentioned earlier in your email to me regarding valuation tools and business cases. Can you address that?

SHAWN: Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to let you know that we have several, we have a wide variety of resources from the W3C WAI. And Brent?’s comment about evaluation tools and yours about business cases has brought up two of them that I wanted to share. One is, for evaluation tools, we have a database, and that lists over 100 tools, multiple types of tools, languages, etc. And that?’s all searchable. So that?’s a good resource for finding different types of evaluation tools.

Then we also have a document called “Developing a Business Case for your Organization.” And it goes into detail about the social factors, technical factors, financial factors, and legal and policy factors, involved in the business case.

BILL: And this is from an international perspective?

SHAWN: Absolutely. It?’s a very broad resource. It covers whether you?’re in education, whether you?’re in government, whether you?’re in the private sector, a big company, a small company, it covers all these different issues. And it?’s designed so that you as an individual can pick the aspects that are relevant to your situation.

BILL: Excellent.

SHAWN: The business case is a little different for everybody.

BILL: Yeah, fair enough. Sounds like a terrific resource, we thank you for that.

SHAWN: Yeah. So if you want to find that, or any of the other resources, those are at http://www.w3.org/wai/resources.

BILL: Thank you so much for that. Anything else to share?

SHAWN: Another thing I wanted to mention is an interesting aspect about making developers?’ jobs easier and getting more accessibility for less effort. And that is the role of authoring tools. So authoring tools include your html editor, content management system, anything you?’re using to create content on the web. And when those support accessibility, that makes developers?’ jobs easier. So we also have authoring tool accessibility guidelines. And we are encouraging vendors to meet those, to make developers?’ jobs easier. That?’s another thing that developers can do, is to ask their authoring tool vendor if they?’re doing everything they can to meet accessibility guidelines as well. So that we can all get more accessibility integrated into our work with less effort.

For those who are particularly interested in providing equal access to people with disabilities, another aspect of the authoring tools accessibility guidelines, is the fact that things like blogging software, and wikis and photo-sharing sites and things like that, are also authoring tools. So it?’s important that they are accessible, so that people with disabilities themselves can contribute to the web as well.

BILL: Yeah. Good point, thank you for bringing that up Shawn.

SHAWN: Great.

BILL: Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by the Adobe Corporation, where Adobe is debuting Adobe TV. That?’s right, if you haven?’t already checked out Adobe TV, check it out today at http://tv.adobe.com. And also check out their e-seminar series for web professionals for the month of July and August at http://www.adobe.com/go/webeseminars.

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Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the coverage on the topic of Web accessibility. If you?’ve been following a long with the series of podcast that you?’re aware that I?’ve enlisted the support of several industry professionals including that of Brent Norris, Web developer from the great state of Hawaii to assist me with better understanding today?’s Web accessibility best practices and to align this podcast to those standards.

If you?’re listening to this series for the first time, I?’d like to suggest that you visit previous coverage of this series of podcast to better understand the rational, the business case and the Web accessibility tools that are available today.

For today?’s podcast, Brent recaps some of his findings and some of the recommended items for the WOW Technology Minute website. For the complete four minute audio interview check out today’s podcast at the WOW Technology Minute..

Stay tuned for future interviews with additional interviews with Brent and others from the international community.

Transcript:

BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the coverage on the topic of Web accessibility. If you?’ve been following along with this series of podcasts than you?’re already aware that I?’ve enlisted the support from several industry professionals including Brent Norris, Web developer from the great state of Hawaii, to assist me with better understanding today?’s best practices and to align this podcast to those standards. If you?’re listening to this series for the first time, I?’d like to suggest that you visit previous coverage of this series of podcasts to better understand the rationale, the business case, and the Web accessibility tools and resources and links that are available today. For today?’s podcast I?’m on the phone with Brent Norris to ask him for an update of his analysis and his recommendations for the WOW Technology Minute website. Good evening Brent and thanks for agreeing to this call. And of course, for your continued support.

BRENT NORRIS: For sure. So we ran the tests and we found some errors. There were two major errors, form label errors. We also found doctype wasn?’t declared and we found a language attribute that wasn?’t declared and the XML RPC file, which isn?’t necessarily a viewable file or a file that folks are going to look at on the site, so that was pretty good. So we had a couple of goals to remove errors and reduce the number of warnings. So we did that. And the down and dirty method was to remove the search box and to change the pull-down menu for the categories, and this is within the context of WordPress, to a list instead of a pull-down menu.

BILL: Excellent, that?’s a great summary. So sounds like that?’s relatively straightforward. So does that mean we?’re complete with the process?

BRENT: Well, we don?’t have any more errors. You know, it?’s an interesting point. There?’s errors, there?’s warnings, there?’s exclamation points, there?’s lots of different levels of accessibility. Then we?’ve got Section 508 compliance. One of the things that we can still do, of course, to meet that Section 508 compliance is to provide what?’s called a synchronized caption or synchronized transcript that runs along with the video or audio that we provide.

BILL: That certainly seems to make a lot of sense. The Adobe visual communicator product that we?’re currently using has the functionality of adding the transcription service to its functionality in flash that incorporates audio, video, images and the transcription all in one neat product. So certainly that?’s something we could do pretty straightforwardly. And then I suppose if I?’m understanding this correctly, it certainly seems to make a lot of sense, to have a separate, independent, downloadable audio component as well.

BRENT: Good question. Yes, there?’s actually, like you said, with visual communicator there?’s an opportunity to provide transcript, in context, synchronized with the audio. That?’s great. Adobe partnered up with HiSoftware, which is one of the resources that our listeners can find on the site for Section 508 voluntary, it?’s not the voluntary product accessibility template, it?’s an extension for flash that lets you include synchronized captioning. So it?’s like a five-hundred dollar piece of add-on software that folks creating video and flash can use to become Section 508 compliant.

BILL: Well that?’s great Brent. Sounds like another terrific resource. Thank you for that and of course thank you for all of your support. I think we?’re starting to get to the heart of this issue and that is that we?’ve determined the rationale, we?’ve determined the business reasons for this. We did an analysis of the WOW Technology Minute site. We?’ve looked at the tools available. We found the reports. All of these resources are readily available for the average working Web professional. It?’s not to say that it?’s not complex and it doesn?’t need a little bit of investment and time, but it seems to me that we?’ve gone down the path of better understanding this topic. We?’ve gone down the process of incorporating it into our daily life. And it seems like we?’ve actually found some solutions for some big issues that need to be addressed. So Brent I?’m very grateful for that. In future minutes I?’d like to explore other in-depth interviews about how you felt about this process and how you feel about incorporating this kind of activity into your daily Web professional life. In addition, I?’d also to like to point out that for the listeners of this podcast that are outside of the United States, 508 is a particular section that applies to the United States. We will be interviewing other Web professionals from a more international perspective, so we can find out what issues exist internationally and we can also find out what solutions exist. And I know there are many. So with that, thank you for listening and thank you for watching. And of course Brent, thank you again for your time today.

BRENT: Much aloha Bill, and aloha to everyone out there.

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the coverage of the topic of Web accessibility. To assist me in better understanding this topic from a practicing Web 2 developer s point of view, I?’ve enlisted the support of Brent Norris, Web developer from the great state of Hawaii.

If you?’ve been following along with this series of podcast than you re aware that Brent?’s taken project of researching the current status of Web accessibility and the tools that are available today for the Web professional.

For today?’s podcast Brent recaps some of his findings and the specific tools he?’s used, including some SEO tools that lend itself to accessibility by evaluating the readability of your website. For the complete 3 minute interview complete with the tools and resources check out today s podcast at WOW Technology Minute.

Stay tuned for future interviews with Brent as he will be reporting on his findings and am in depth analysis on the WOW Technology Minute website with the goal of aligning it with best practices. Brent will cover the topic from an educational perspective complete with a written report and audio interviews of the process.

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

Today s podcast is a continuation of the coverage of the topic of Web accessibility. To assist us in better understanding this issue from a higher education point of view, I am on the phone with Jon Gunderson, Ph.D. Coordinator Information Technology Accessibility Disability Resources and Educational Services at the University of Illinois.

Dr. Gunderson provides training, developmental tools and is working on publishing a guide on Web accessibility best practices. I asked Dr. Gunderson to share with the listeners of this podcast what Web professionals need to know about Web accessibility and what they can implement today.

To listen to the six minute podcast visit today?’s WOW Technology Minute

Thank you for listening and watching today?’s WOW Technology Minute.
Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by Web Pro Training

Transcript:

BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the coverage on the topic of Web accessibility. To assist us in better understanding this issue from a higher education point of view, I am on the phone with Dr. Jon Gunderson, Coordinator Information Technology, Accessibility Disability Resources and Educational Services at the University of Illinois. Good afternoon Dr. Gunderson, and thank you for agreeing to this interview.

DR. JON GUNDERSON: Thank you, glad to be here.

BILL: Dr. Gunderson, you provide training, developmental tools and you?’re working on publishing best practices regarding accessibility. Can you share with the listeners of this podcast what Web professionals need to know about Web accessibility and what can we do today to provide best practices?

DR. GUNDERSON: Well our approach here with accessibility, when I first got involved with accessibility on campus ten years ago, kind of a standard approach people would take to accessibility would be to find some online tools, I think this is still a model with a lot of developers. They find some tool that will evaluate their website, for accessibility, give them this report, and then they would look at the report and try to fix the problems that were identified in the report. We found that very problematic from a number of different perspectives. One is that it doesn?’t address the inherent mark-up that people use for accessibility. Most of the automated tools out there check for only a very few accessibility requirements. Most of them have lists of what I call manual checks, like there?’s alt texts for images, maybe labels for form controls, but if you don?’t use headers on a page, or not properly, these tools consider that a manual check. So if you don?’t have any headers, hey, your page may be okay. So when we looked at that, we didn?’t think that model would lead to really more accessible websites. People might fix them up a little bit but their time and effort is probably going to be wasted because the overall website still won?’t be very accessible.

So our approach here was what we call accessibility by design, and piggyback that on top of Web standards. So kind of the mantra was, okay, your current website isn?’t very accessible, but when you?’re ready to redesign it, come to us or take one of our training classes that we offer and learn about accessible design, the things you should put in your page, and we piggybacked those techniques on top of Web standards so kind of the overall idea is everybody wins. The Web developers win because they?’re using Web standards. They can more efficiently create and maintain their websites. People with disabilities win because a lot of the accessibility features are just built in to how the website is created. And also administrators win because the cost of putting in accessibility at this time is fairly minimal. In fact I say to people, it probably saves them money.

We have an example on this campus, Dr. Brigett works for our office of publications, public affairs, and when he got involved, when we got involved with him on accessibility and making the campus home page accessible, his idea of creating a web page was drawing a picture in Photoshop or Illustrator and using the save to Web feature, which basically just broke up the image to little, bitty pieces so it could be sufficiently downloaded as a picture. Well, it?’s very difficult, if not impossible, to make that process accessible. So we tried to talk to him about Web standards and using css and the structural mark-up of html. It took a little time to learn those skills, but his next version of the home page was, you know, 100 times more accessible than the previous picture version. It was also faster to download, easier to maintain. But it was after he did that, what he said, I think that really made an impact on me, he said, “I learned these skills because of accessibility, but I use them because they?’re better Web design.”

BILL: Interesting, great story. I appreciate that. And in effect that long-term saves time, saves money.

DR. GUNDERSON: Right. That?’s the big issue now. When the Web was a wild, wild west everybody was just dumping money into it, but now that it?’s become more of a commodity and a production, people are more concerned about cost.

BILL: Fair enough, and good point. And well said Dr. Gunderson. I appreciate that. What specifically, can you give us one tip, you know, if the listeners of this podcast wanted to know, “What can I do today to start this process and make my sites more accessible?”

DR. GUNDERSON: Well, I think one of the first things that we ask Web developers to do is to look at heading structure on their webpage and use headings in a hierarchical manner. So we reserve the H1 tag to uniquely title a page, so that people as they move between webpages can navigate to the H1, especially if I?’m a speech user, and know how this page is different than another page. And that if you have navigation bars, that you use header marks, header level 2s, either right before the list of links. And there are techniques in css to hide the header if you don?’t want the visual rendering to have it. But that allows people using speech especially, to be able to find where the navigation bars are. And then if you can use header levels 2s and 3s structurally within the page people can, especially speech users, can now go find the main topics easily. And keyboard-only users can also use those headers to navigate, so to, more efficiently to links on a page. So for example if I?’m using the Opera browser, it has a built-in header navigation function, the W and S keys. I?’m a keyboard-only user, I?’m not a screen-reader user, but I can?’t use the mouse for some reason. If I have headers on my page, I can use the S and W keys to navigate close to the link I want and then use link navigation to get to the specific link under that topic. So you can go from having to type 40 to 50 or 60 keystrokes, tabbing through a page, to maybe 5 or 6 using header navigation and the tab.

BILL: Very interesting and I appreciate your perspective on that Dr. Gunderson. Great information, great resources. We appreciate your time today. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) on the telephone with Dr. Jon Gunderson, Coordinator Information Technology, Accessibility and Disability Resources and Educational Services at the University of Illinois. Thank you so much for your time today Dr. Gunderson.

DR. GUNDERSON: Thank you.

BILL: Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by webprotraining.org, offering a complete solution for all your Web professional training needs including WOW certification options. Check it out at webprotraining.org.

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

Today s podcast is a continuation of the coverage of the topic of Web accessibility. To assist us in understanding this issue from a “what can we do today” perspective, I am on the phone with Professor Mark DuBois, from Illinois Central College.

Mark, good afternoon and thanks for agreeing to the interview. Mark, as you know thousands of Web professionals are tasked to manage a number of complex technical, designs and Web business topics everyday. In short, they are not always going to be Web accessibility specialist. As a result, can share with the listeners of podcast a couple of specific examples that Web professionals need incorporate when considering Web accessibility for their clients?

Mark. you also serve as the Director of Education for the WOW organization and we are collaborating yon the development of a short course on the topic of Web accessibility the listeners what that course might entail and how much will it cost?

To listen to the four minute response check out the WOW Technology Minute at: http://www.webprominute.org

Today?’s WOW Technology minute is sponsored by the “Voices That Matter” series of Conferences. This years Voices That Matter Web Design conference is a unique event brought to you by New Riders, the leading publisher of Web design books and resources—and home to the most popular Web design authors, trainers, and speakers. This year?’s Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference will take place June 10-13, 2008, in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

Today s podcast is a continuation of the coverage of the topic of Web accessibility. While researching this topic a bit this week, I stumbled across a Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia from IBM that I’d like to bring your attention. Check out: WOW Technology Minute

The Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia is a tool that enables multimedia content on the Internet to be enjoyed by people with visual impairments.

As you know first hand the use of multimedia content has increased dramatically over the last few years, but people with limited or no vision have not been able to fully enjoy the benefits of these advances. This new multimedia browsing accessibility tool provides people with visual impairments a level of control more comparable to a sighted person using a mouse. For example, while enjoying a streaming video, visually impaired people can now select the play button by simply pressing a predefined shortcut key instead of searching in the content for buttons that control the video.

According to IBM, users can also adjust the volume of an individual source in order to identify and listen to different sound sources without losing track of the screen-reading software because of the sound of a video. If a content creator wants to provide a voice narrative for a video, he can write a text script as a piece of metadata; the tool adds the audio descriptions by using text-to-speech engines. Future plans for extending this technology include enabling flexible audio speed control and contributing this work to an open-source development project. Such contribution will accelerate development and adoption of tools that make Web-based multimedia content accessible to the visually impaired.

How does it work? (Compliments of http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/aibrowser)

Usually, people with visual impairments browse Web pages using either screen-reading software (such as JAWS for Windows) or a voice-enabled browser (such as IBM® Home Page Reader). However, these tools cannot handle multimedia applications properly. Visually impaired users cannot see the multimedia control buttons that appear on a screen. In addition, the audio of a streaming video — which automatically starts playing after the page is loaded — interferes with the synthesized assistive voice generated from screen-reading software, a vital assistant for visually impaired users. Furthermore, most multimedia content operates only with a mouse rather than a keyboard, making it virtually impossible for visually impaired people to appreciate multimedia content.
IBM Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia is built on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, and it works as a stand-alone application. After a user opens a Web page, the tool automatically analyzes the multimedia content embedded inside the page. Then the tool lets the users control the multimedia content — letting them play, stop, or pause the videos, change the replay speed, adjust the volume, and so on — by using simple predefined shortcut keys.

The tool also has a function for providing an alternative text-based interface for the content based on XML metadata. By using metadata, the tool can reorganize or simplify the original content and can provide additional information or navigation methods. Although someone must create the metadata manually, once created, the usability of the site is drastically improved. Usually, multimedia content is designed only for sighted users with mouse operations, so it is impossible or difficult to understand the visually rich content with a voice interface and or to control it by using a keyboard.

This tool also provides functions for adding audio descriptions to movies based on XML metadata by using text-to-speech engines. Audio descriptions are usually created by content creators as an additional sound track for a movie. For example, we are presently using an existing text-to-speech engine to add audio descriptions. Not only developers and creators, but also volunteers are able to add audio descriptions easily and cost-effectively.

The system can also provide additional information or navigation methods, thus allowing users to enjoy the content using their preferred methods.

The tool can work with screen readers (JAWS and Window-Eyes) by making it speak as well as it might work as a self-talking browser.

1. Is IBM® Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia available on Linux®?

No; it runs only on Windows® XP or above.

2. Can I change the text-to-speech (TTS) engines used in IBM Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia?

This tool supports Windows Speech API(SAPI)5. After installation of additional TTS engines, please select your preferred TTS engine in the preference dialog box.

3. Can IBM Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia work with screen-reading softwares?

The tool supports JAWS screen reader versions above 7.10 and Window-Eyes versions above 5.5.

4. Which language does the tool support?

Currently, the messages and descriptions are available in English and Japanese. Users can read the target content based on the languages of the TTS engines or screen-reading software.

5. What kind of multimedia content embedded inside Web pages does the tool support?

This version supports Flash (Versions 5-8), Windows Media, RealMedia, and Quick Time.

Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is sponsored by the Adobe Corporation and the “Getting Started with Dreamweaver and CSS Seminar Tour”.

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 Web Accessibility Interview with T.V. Raman, Research Scientist at Google: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Web Accessibility Interview with T.V. Raman, Research Scientist at Google: Download

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere!
Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

If you’ve been following along with this months podcast, than you?’re aware that we’ve been covering the goings on at the seventeenth annual WWW2008 Conference in Beijing. In addition to delivering WOW education and training and covering the keynotes, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing a handful of the delegates attending the conference.

For today’s podcast, I have the distinct pleasure of covering the topic of Web accessibility with T.V. Raman, Research Scientist at Google.

T.V. is legally blind and in addition to being a truly nice guy T.V. has a real handle on the topic of the need for Web accessibility and its business benefits as well. In fact, as a result of this interview, I?’ve decided to dedicate the remainder of this month?’s podcast to the topic and will be interviewing a wide variety of Web professionals for the remainder of the month of May.

Here are the questions that I asked T.V. Raman:

•Are we progressing as an industry with respect to Web accessibility?
•Why is this issue important and significant?
•How can we explain the benefits to Web accessibility to our customers and can you explain the benefits to business?

Make it point to turn up your speaker volume and hone in on this must listen to interview with T.V. Raman from Google. Check out additional resources from T.V. Raman at the Google Webmaster Blog located at: Google Webmaster Blog

Thank you for listening and watching today?’s WOW Technology Minute.

Today’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by WebProTraining.org check it out at: WebProTraining.org

Transcript:

Transcript of WOW Technology Minute – Interview with T.V. Raman
Located at – http://webprominute.org/429/Web-Web-accessibility-interview-with-tv-raman-research-scientist-at-google/
Aired – 5/8/2008
Length – 10:02

BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. If you’ve been following along with this month?’s podcast, then you?’re aware that we?’ve been covering the goings on at the seventeenth annual WWW2008 Conference in Beijing. In addition to delivering WOW education and training, and covering the keynotes, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing a handful of the delegates attending the conference. For today?’s podcast, I have the distinct pleasure of covering the topic of Web accessibility with T.V. Raman, Research Scientist at Google.

T.V. is legally blind and in addition to being truly a nice guy, T.V. has a real handle on the topic of the need for Web accessibility and its business benefits as well. In fact, as a result of this interview, I?’ve decided to dedicate the remainder of this month’s podcast to the topic and as a result I will be interviewing a wide variety of Web professionals for the remainder of the month of May. Make it a point to turn up your speaker volume and hone in on this must-listen interview with T.V. Raman from Google.
Good afternoon T.V. and thank you for agreeing to this interview.

T.V. RAMAN: Thank you for inviting me to this.

BILL: You bet. My question to you, T.V., you specialize in accessibility issues and that’s an area of strong interest to you, I’m curious to know, have we progressed as a profession, as an industry, on the topic of accessibility? Are we making any specific headway?

T.V.: I believe we’ve made a lot of progress. The fact that someone from your field, who is mostly focused on the webmaster field, actually does an interview on accessibility, tells us how far we’ve come. Because ten years ago if you had said accessibility we would?’ve probably said, you know, is the website accessible from some corner of the world versus another. So I believe it’s come a long way. And the way I look at it you can always ask, is the cup half full or half empty? But we as an industry should all congratulate ourselves on the fact that, first of all, the cup is a lot bigger. So if the cup is a lot bigger, if it’s half empty, there’s a lot more to fill. And if it’s half full than there’s a lot we‘ve already filled. So, I tend to be an optimist about such things and so I think we’ve come a long way. We also created challenges as the Web evolved, but that’s part of, that’s part of me working in this field fun. There are more things to solve.

BILL: Yeah, I appreciate that. Excellent perspective. I’m really pleased to hear that we’re making progress. WOW is a Web professional organization that has a focus on education and it’s been our goal to educate individuals, teachers, those that create design, make websites today, the importance of that. And that leads to the next question. I represent a lot of practicing professionals that are certainly already aware or understand, but I also represent the thousands of individuals that consider this a brand new field. And those that teach them, that are not necessarily aware of the significance and the importance of accessibility for that audience. Could you address accessibility from your point of view and why is it significant to consider in the first place?

T.V.: So, I used to say this before I went to Google, the world’s most influential that I knew is actually the Google search bot. And accessibility today is made extremely complicated by people who do that field for a living, with lots of guidelines and “you must do this and you mustn’t do that.” And so at first flash it might appear to be an extremely intimidating prospect, to answer the question “Is my large website accessible?” Or “What should I be doing?” But if you’re going to boil it down, it actually, accessibility of the Web goes back to taking the Web to its basics. The Web as a [indecipherable] term and professed by a lot of us, was all about when you put out your information, you shouldn’t be making any assumptions about the user who is going to come look at it. You shouldn’t be assuming that he has a color display, you shouldn’t be assuming that he has a large monitor, you shouldn’t be assuming that he has broadband, whatever. What has happened, and because the Web has created a lot of accessibility challenges, is in our rush to sort of deploy to the Web and get what we think of as the immediate goals that we want to achieve, sometimes we lose sight of that larger perspective, which is where a lot of accessibility challenges come from. So my advice to people in this field who are interested in looking into accessibility, yes the field is complex when you sort of investigate it and ask, for the deaf user, for the blind user, for the [indecipherable]-impaired user, for the reading disabled user, what should I do? It can get rather intimidating. But if you go back to basics, the Web as designed, is intrinsically designed to be viewed by everyone, used by everyone, accessed from everywhere. And as long as we stick to that popular goal, when doing the next level detail of what you need to do, it actually becomes a lot easier.

I like to point people in your field on some of the articles I’ve been running on the Google webmaster blog about accessibility and crawl-ability and sort of kill two birds with one stone. What can you do to both ensure that your site is useable, viewable by a widest possible audience and at the same time also make it easy to search. Because one of the reasons I started doing this was I realized that people were spending a lot of money on search engine optimization. And as someone who has special needs and has a vested interest in accessibility, I looked at it and said, “Can we actually start explaining to people, not accessibility in terms of laws and guidelines, which are important, but also accessibility in terms of the bottom line?” So if people really cared about optimizing their sites for search engines, they’ll go out, and I’m not making this up, a lot of those optimizations also positively impact what I call the long tail of users. So, you know what the long tail of content is as a webmaster, it‘s those 80 percent of pages that are accessed by 20% of users. The long tail of users I think of as users with special needs because each one of us is different. And so if you start optimizing your site for that long tail, you make it more crawl-able, more useful and ultimately a better site.

BILL: Excellent, very well said. And thank you for expanding on that because I represent, that was one of the questions I had, I represent a lot of Web professionals that have customers that they need to educate as to the value proposition of accessibility and I think you’ve done a very good job of explaining that. The other side of that coin is there are certainly, just to summarize if I may, there are certain business reasons why small business people that have an interest in developing sites, or medium or large enterprise websites for that matter, is that it provides with better search capabilities hence providing them with a better indexing of, a more marketable website. Would that be a fair way of summarizing that?

T.V.: Yes, absolutely. The site becomes more discoverable. So if you sort of again, come down to brass tacks as a webmaster, when you put out content, why are you putting it out? You’re putting it out so that it gets viewed. How are people going to view it? They’re going to come with whatever user-agent they use, whatever technology they use. And so the fewer assumptions you’ve made, you are better off. The next level, let’s say you create your wonderful masterpiece, but then you hide it behind a flashy front page, say done in Macromedia flash or something. And so people come to the front page of yours, know about your site, click on that, see this nice animation and then see your content. But, today most people search on the Web and if it’s hidden behind a piece of flash content it’s probably not gotten crawled and so the person typing a bunch of keywords into any search engine is probably not going to find your site, which means you sort of lost something. And so, the example I give people is as webmasters we sometimes think of our sites as this fancy building that we are putting together and we create this really nice front lobby with this beautiful set of stairs going up with marble pillars everywhere. But most people on the Web are likely to jump in through the 15th floor window. So I’m not saying don’t provide that beautiful façade for your site, do put on a good front, but be aware that most of the visitors to your site will not come in through the front door. They will parachute through the ceiling, that is they?’ll come in through the 15th floor window, make sure that you’re providing them as well an equally good experience and overall make sure that they can actually parachute into your site, through some search engines.

BILL: Excellent. Makes a very good business case and I appreciate the perspective on that. In addition to being the right thing to do, for accessibility, for those that are hearing or visually impaired. So I certainly appreciate your perspective on that. T.V. thank you. This is Bill Cullifer with the World Organization of Webmasters WOW here at the 17th annual WWW Conference in Beijing, China. Thank you so much T.V. Raman from Google.

T.V.: Thank you.