AccessibleWeb@u August 14
  1. Attending: Rick Ells, Melody Winkle, Nancy Weiner, Becky Smurr, Mary Waters, Jeff Muller, Harry Love, Anne Barry, Melody Ivory-Ndiaye, Pat Smith-Major
  2. Jason Taylor - UsableNet.com
    1. designs tools to fit inside of Web publishing tools
    2. Built for production
    3. Jason goes around country speaking to evangelists for accessibility
      1. Universities are often the most proactive, even more than federal gov.
        1. PSU, MSU
      2. People want to do it, but do not know what to do or do not have time to do it
    4. Jason will be giving talks at Boeing, Washington Mutual, and Seattle U
    5. Bobby, AcuView, - tools that take the guidelines, boil them down into rules, scan pages to see if code conforms to rules
      1. Parsing HTML against the rules
      2. Reports can be frustrating and annoying
        1. Absolute test - specific things missing that will cause an accessibility problem
        2. Best practice tests -
          1. Using color incorrectly
    6. LIFT - enterprise-wide Website testing
      1. Server product
        1. Everyone gets a username and password
          1. Each project is defined by what pages you want to test and what standards you want to test it against
          2. Each person can have multiple projects defined in the server product
          3. Can edit your test criteria
          4. Define instructions to spider to do page visits
            1. Set URL where to start
            2. Can have it send you email when report is ready
            3. Can define which paths it should follow, and which not to
            4. Can create your own starting page, then instruct the spider to search only one level down from your page - provides a way to scan a specific set of pages such as departmental home pages
            5. Gives you list of pages that "failed"
              1. Can breakdown list by specific types of problems
              2. Can customize lists - show URL of page or title of page
            6. Evaluates problems by characteristics and context using "smart-rules"
            7. Objective is to give feedback to designer on what specifically needs to be done
            8. Educating people is a basic obective of LIFT design - learning how to do it right the first time
            9. Can also view page "linearized" to get an idea of how it will be experienced by a person using an assistive or adaptive device
            10. Can be used by two categories of people:
              1. Higher ups who can run a report on any site and send the site manager a report
              2. People actually maintaining sites
          5. Anybody can use tool to test their site
          6. Can be used to set benchmarks - are we making progress?
          7. Runs on Red Hat Linux
      2. Tool product - LIFT can also be used within tools such as DreamWeaver
        1. Once installed, everything is done within the tool
          1. Show list of pages identified as needing fixes
          2. Click on the page and the HTML page is retrieved, and displayed at the point where fixes are needed
          3. ALT Editor - scans site for all uses of images
            1. lists where each image is used - identifying which are likely invalid
            2. Select the ones you think need changing, apply a batch fix
          4. Can view pages without color
          5. Table editor - does smart evaluation of each table and offers batch fixes
          6. Fix wizards available for each element that needs fixing
            1. If get lost, click on question mark to get to contextual help
      3. Development of both products focuses on minimizing the number of false positives
    7. Discussion
      1. Can smart rules be changed?
        1. Can customize by using exception lists
        2. All rules are built in Python, customizable
          1. Not formally offering STK service because of support problems
          2. You can customize your rules
          3. NASA wanted to add rule to check every page for security statement
        3. Have worked with people on how to make it fit in better with the workflow at the institution
      2. How can you warn people that adherence to rules will not necessarily improve usability or accessibility of site?
        1. Main issue of Web accessibility is to have a compliance program for tools - who checks the checking tools?
        2. Someone is needed to certify the tools as something that works.
        3. LIFT is as powerful as spell-check and grammar-check, but no more
          1. These tools in the hands of a novice can help them learn the right things to do
      3. Have you moved beyond coding issues, such as to page layout, flow, etc.
        1. UsableNet has worked with Jacob Nielsen's group on some aspects
        2. PSU got things up to accessibility standards, but found that pages were still complex because of complicated HTML - UsableNet developed a tool to convert pages into a text only view
          1. Not text-only pages - call to a CGI that creates a text-only version of the page
          2. Looking for way to give assistive user a way to customize content
          3. Once in the text-only page, can navigate without going back to the visual page
            1. http://transcoder.usablenet.com
            2. Runs on linux server
            3. Should be available in about six weeks as a product
            4. Can be done through UsableNet or you can run your own
            5. Requires some standardization of HTML - just shows what is actually there
            6. Still learning what it works with and does not work with
            7. Not commercially selling transcoder yet
              1. How can it support annotations so user can manipulate the information
              2. Looking at features to add, such as auto skip navigation
      4. Who is the market for accessibility evaluation software?
        1. Not the pony-tailed techies from Boeing
        2. Often people with limited technical background, doing it as a part-time job
      5. Is text-only good enough?
        1. Digital version of segregation
        2. If manually created, always going to be second-rate
        3. Want a dynamic system that creates text-only view of the same content everyone else uses
        4. How much do assistive devices deal with the situation and how much do you have to do?
          1. Layout tables can be linearized, if they are not too complicated
      6. Which guideline to follow?
        1. Use 508
          1. Its written into law
          2. Its stable in its explicit
          3. More testable
          4. Different tools use different rules to test for compliance to standards
            1. Manual evaluation aspects are the hard ones to test
        2. Italy is creating its own version of 508
          1. explicit, testable
        3. Real objective is whether the content is really as available to a handicapped person as it is to a non-handicapped person
          1. No tool can really validate content - a thinking person has to do the validation
      7. Are you phasing out of FrontPage?
        1. FrontPage users tend to have limited technical skill
        2. DreamWeaver users tend to be more experienced technically
          1. Have more use for LIFT
          2. More willing to pay
        3. GoLive penetration in education and government is minimal
          1. Popular in commercial world
          2. Not a strong market for LIFT yet
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