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Additionally, as a result of the increasing paradigm shift by the publishing industry toward Internet and WWW-based document delivery systems, the importance of producing accessible information using electronic document mechanisms has increased immeasurably.
The primary focus of this paper involves the production of electronic documents for people with disabilities. However, the key principals involved in the design, production, and delivery of information apply regardless of the document medium.
The paper will attempt to:
For temporarily able bodied (TABs) persons, the shift has resulted in increased availability to a global information set never before achieved.
Because of this apparent increased availability of information the publishing industry has wrongly assumed that "what is good for the goose, is good for the gander".
The sad truth is that the proliferation of information does not guarantee its accessibility. Availability does not equate to accessibility.
Where people with disabilities (particularly those with print disabilities) are concerned, thoughtless barriers to information are being constructed by electronic publishers. The barrier factor is increased by the magnitude of inexperienced on-line businesses and organizations who have correctly assessed the inexpensive cost of delivering information on the Internet, but have inaccurately assumed that because it's "on the Web", it must be easy to read...or access.
What are the key issues involving information accessibility for people with disabilities? Do solutions exist to assist publishers in the design, production, and delivery of accessible publications? Can publishers increase the accessibility and availability of their documents without sacrificing additional time, creativity, quality, personnel, and money?
The answers to these questions and available resources are discussed in the sections that follow.
The blind may require a document output of braille or synthetic voice
Those with low vision or dyslexia may need large text or spatial adjustments
Individuals who are deaf or the hearing impaired may require visual cues for electronic documents that include sound or audio events
The physically or mobility challenged may require the ability to use the document viewer or browser without being able to use a keyboard, mouse, or input device that requires a part of their body other than just their eyes or mouth
Access systems for people with disabilities include (but are not limited to): screen magnifiers, refreshable braille displays, screen readers, synthetic speech, caption-ready monitors, or alternative keyboards. The important point here is that the designer of the information need not worry about producing several versions of specialized documents. Rather, the focus should be on designing the source document with a rich set of characteristics can be subsequently rendered or viewed by a wider audience.
To emphasize, this is not a new technology. Those involved in on-line publishing know that a source document can be coded using, for example, symbolic reference tags that are recognized by the document processor and then rendered to plain text, postscript, or browser-compatible output. The same pre- and post-processing capabilities can be refined to produce braille, large text, and synthetic-voice output documents. No doubt, with the advent of publishing mechanisms like HyTime and Digital Audio, natural language voice documents (NLVDs) are possible. Therefore, access is not only achieved for people with disabilities, but language barriers also diminish. Indeed with the W3C and SGML consortium support for style sheets and link process definitions, the ability to produce accessible information for all people, disabled or not has never been greater. This is the essence of universal design.
Design
In the design phase, consider that the most common issues related to document inaccessibility involve complex notation, image rendering, multimedia features and navigation.
Complex notation including math and science is extremely difficult to render in an acceptable format, especially for the blind. Note that most blind persons require an alternative format of the information. Likely the alternative is either ASCII text, Grade II Braille or synthetic speech. Therefore, the proper rendition of the notation is critical to the reader. However, the challenge of rendering complex notation that tends to be graphical in appearance often requires a transformation process. Subsequently, few information publishers are interested in making the investment.
Image rendering provides similar problems. Because the blind or low vision user is likely to be using alternative output (access systems), certain design considerations should be implemented. For example, using meaningful descriptive text in conjunction with figures, images, or other graphical entities within a document. Descriptive or alternative text has become a standard for web based documents. In fact, some authoring tools like HotMeTaL Pro, HotDog Pro, and Corel Web.Designer have built-in prompts for alternate text.
Ideally then browser providers should be able to properly display alternative text. The best implementation of alternate text display (are you listening Bill?) is Microsoft's Internet Explorer which automatically displays alternative text using bubble-help type notes as the user passes over the image with the mouse cursor. What will it take to get Netscape into the picture?
Electronic documents that contain multimedia features, including sound or video clips require additional attention. Keep in mind that anything that emits sound cannot be heard by the deaf. It may not be heard by the hard of hearing or, for that matter, anyone viewing the document in a noisy environment. If you believe this to be an impractical example, consider the current industry move to WebTV and public kiosks. While a specific solution for providing web captioning does not exist today, this should be considered an important feature of the document. Logic dictates that if consumer electronic manufacturers can produce televisions and monitors that support internal captioning controls, browser manufacturers and server protocol developers can design the means for delivering captioning through browsers.
Descriptive video provides a blind or low vision user with additional narrative that is useful, sometimes critical to their comprehension of an electronic document. The process simply requires the interjection of descriptive narration during the spots within the video that are not otherwise filled with sound effects or dialogue. As a result, the blind or visually impaired viewer achieves increased comprehension of the video event.
The National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) in Boston, Massachusetts currently provides a service that implements descriptive video for the motion picture industry. Descriptive video and captioning are perfect examples of how the power of markup should be used to enhance the richness and accessibility of a document. They have recently grants to assist them in the research, design, and delivery of of web-based information for public television.
Navigating an electronic document, particularly a hypertext document is a challenge for anyone. Keeping track of where you've been, where you want to go and then getting there can be a cybernightmare. Still, being able to visually navigate through a document has obvious advantages the blind or low vision user cannot easily imitate. A navigational cue as simple as providing colored text provides meaning and definition that the non-visual user cannot see.
Therefore, there is a need to design solutions that implement audio cues in concert with visual cues.
Remember too that navigation is often closely tied with memory and consistent design. People with cognitive limitations simply require visual memory aids and simplified page design. An example of this can be found at the WebABLE! website (http://www.yuri.org/webable/). The designer, Colin Moock, implemented a system of visual cues consisting of opened and closed doors. The concept is basic to most people and simple to learn and remember.
Navigational difficulties clearly present challenges to every user. Consider the difficulty a visual user has today and then imagine doing the same thing with your computer monitor turned off! Or try navigating through a multi-columned table or an on-line newspaper that contains multiple columns on a single page.
Without a doubt, navigation requires acute sensory awareness.
Navigation is not just a document roadmap; it is not a linear link Rather, good navigational design includes a combination of seeing, hearing and "feeling" your way to a specific destination in a comprehensible way.
1. Authoring tools that are themselves accessible and also enforce accessible design tags, semantics, and protocols.
2. The ability of the processor to receive a single source document and build accessible or alternative outputs.
For example, the IBM Bookmanager can build documents for the blind to use with their screen readers and voice synthesizers. This is because IBM Bookmanager supports the ICADD (International Committee for Accessible Document Design) DTD which was designed to produce accessible documents for the print impaired.
Documents produced for the World Wide Web are gradually becoming more accessible and require less "massaging" by a post processor or other intermediary actions because some web browsers contain access features that enhance the readability of a document to persons with disabilities.
Additionally, they are rarely designed to allow assistive product manufacturers to easily link their products to using software "hooks".
A classic example is pwWebSpeak (The Productivity Works, Inc.). This GUI browser was designed with synthetic speech and large text functionality built in. It also supports the HTML 2.0 specification which includes the ICADD SGML
Document Access attributes
Ensuring electronic document delivery through a browser could be significantly enhanced if developers included assistive preference options that allow a user to "turn on" captioning, descriptive video, sound cues, synthetic voice, keyboard mapping, screen magnification and other accessibility features.
The Productivity Works, pwWebspeak Web Browser
pwWebSpeak is an Internet browser designed for users who wish to access the Internet in a non-visual manner. This includes users who cannot be tied to a keyboard or monitor, blind or visually impaired users, users with dyslexia or other learning disorders, and users who are learning new languages. The intelligence built into pwWebSpeak understands the HTML constructs and automatically bypasses those constructs that have no relation to the information content of a document. Both speech and large character interpretation of the Webpages are provided so that all classes or users can use the software effectively.
pwWebSpeak is designed specifically to interact directly with the information on the Web pages and to translate the information content into speech. The user may navigate through the structure of a document based on its contents, paragraphs and sentences, rather than having to deal with scrolling and interpreting a structured screen display.
Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) "Bobby" Web Site Accessibility Verifier
Bobby is a program which finds common accessibility problems on web sites.
It was created to help web designers insure the greatest possible audience for their web sites and especially to highlight common accessibility problems that make using the web difficult for those with disabilities. When Bobby analyzes a page, it provides detailed information on:
Problem HTML tags and constructs that make it difficult for people with a variety of disabilities to access a web page
Image and document load times to insure quick page acess on slow modems.
A comprehensive analysis of how the page's HTML might be incompatible with those versions of HTML implemented by the major web browsers (including NetscapeNavigator, Internet Explorer, Mosaic, and AOL).
Both UCLA (http://www.ucla.edu/ICADD/html2icadd-form.html) and the University at Dresden (http://elvis.inf.tu-dresden.de/html2brl/) provide an HTML to Braille transformation service. These services allow anyone who has an HTML coded document to send that document to the server which then:
SoftQuad together with the University of Toronto are presently engaged in a project to make SGML and HTML authoring and browsing tools accessible to people with disabilities and to guide SGML and HTML authors in creating accessible documents. The user who is reading hyperlinked multimedia documents using access technology such as screen readers, Braille displays or screen magnifiers, faces three challenges:
Organizations:
Environment Canada's Adaptive Computer Technology Centre: Accessible Web Page Design (http://www.igs.net/~starling/acces.htm).
Environment Canada's Adaptive Computer Technology Centre was one of the first web sites to include guidelines and on-line examples of accessible web pages and HTML implementations.
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto (http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/).
The Purpose of the ATRC is to:
Providing services for nearly half a century, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D) is a national nonprofit organization that serves people who cannot read standard print because of a visual, perceptual or other physical disability. RFB&D is recognized as the nation's leading educational lending library of academic and professional textbooks on audio tape from elementary through post-graduate and professional levels.
Trace Research & Development Center's Designing an Accessible World (http://www.trace.wisc.edu/world/world.html).
The Trace R&D Center is one of the leading assistive technology research facilities in the world. This section one their web page is a classic example of accessible design. Additionally, Trace provides several on-line reference documents.
WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (http://www.wgbh.org/ncam).
NCAM develops strategies and technologies to make media accessible to millions of Americans, including people with disabilities, minority language users, and those with low literacy skills.
For 85 million Americans with little or no access to media's sights and sounds, the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) is working to remove the barriers to communication by:
The Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation is dedicated to bringing together workers from a broad spectrum of disciplines to stimulate research and development of technologies which will ensure equality of access to information of all kinds. The YRIF is dedicated to commemorating the genius of the late Yuri Rubinsky. The YRIF is also the new home of the WebABLE! disabilities information repository (http://www.yuri.org/webable/).
World Wide Web Browser Access Recommendations (http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund/access-browsers.html) By: Jon Gunderson, Ph.D. Mosaic Accessibility Project, Usability Access Chair, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
World Wide Web Accessibility to People with Disabilities A Usability Perspective (http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund/access-overview.html) By: Jon Gunderson, Ph.D. Mosaic Accessibility Project, Usability Access Chair, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
Universal Accessibility - A Matter of Design (http://www.prodworks.com/ua_9606.htm) By: Ray Ingram, The Productivity Works, Inc., Princeton, New Jersey
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