AccessibleWeb@U - January 24, 2008

• UW Accessibility Web Site - Terry Thompson
  • New site will soon be located at http://www.washington.edu/accessibility/
  • Much more work to do, you can help
  • Related to C&C's name change coming out next week to UW Technology, redefining role at the univesity (http://www.washington.edu/uwtech/)
• Feedback from you
  • What would you expect for a centralized resource on IT accessibility?
    • Tool recommendations, what they are good at, what they do not do so well
    • Vetted information
    • Comments, what is not good, why is it not good. We are sometimes reluctant to give negative feedback on products.
    • UW specific information
    • Discussions of practices relevant to our situation
    • Controversies, open questions
      • "We want drop down menus" - how to respond, what methods to use if you have to do drop-down menus
      • Can dynamic menus,interactivity be done with CSS, will it work on all browsers?
      • How do you deal with clients who know next to nothing about accessible design?
      • What do we need to know about commercial packages such as code libraries, relevant to what we are obligated to do
      • Do you have to avoid Javascript? If we use it, what are the best ways to ensure accessibilitys
  • Are we on target?
  • What other features would you like to see?
  • Collaboration is at the center of what UW Technology sees itself to be
• Discussion
  • Is there a recommended way to do a dynamic menu system?
  • We should present accessible sites, or sites where people have consciously considered accessibility in their design process
  • Strategies and tactics for creating and managing accessible sites.
    • Design templates so that content providers only have to know simple html - keep presentation entirely out of their domain.
  • Questions to ask outside consultants
    • When hiring an outside consultant, what should you be looking for in terms of knowledge about accessibility?
    • Could include boilerplate language in "Procuring Accessible IT" that should be brought up in negotiations or included in contracts? Current RFPs include accessibility language, but with variable language.
    • External developers often have a process they are committed to or stuck in, and may not have any idea how to address accessibility aspects of the design they produce. We need interview methods that bring out their limitations and flexibility.
    • For acquisitions that will affect large parts of the community, such as SharePoint, products should be carefully evaluated for accessibility.
• Step by step walk through
  • Home page
    • What is the relationship to the /computing/accessible/ site? Should the latter evolve to be the home for the SIG on accessibility
  • Policies and Standards
    • In addition to current overview, do we need more specific UW related statements of goals and commitments
  • Web Accessibility
    • Currently a lot of stuff from the ./computing/accessible site, is it out of date, what else is needed?
  • Procuring Accessible IT
    • Hope for involvement by Purchasing
  • Disability Resources
    • Much to add
    • Should be a selected list of the best, how big should we let the list get?
  • Featured Web Site
    • How would we manage this? Does some guru committee select a series of sites? Do we have a competition? What criteria should we use?
  • Products and Practices
    • Web authoring tools, document creation, content management, Catalyst tools
    • Need subject matter experts to identify and evaluate products
    • Wiki might be better tool, should it be limited only to UW people?
      • We need to learn how to participate in the Web2.0, social networking wiki/blog environment
    • We need to connect to other venues where relevant discussions are taking place
      • Guild of Accessible Web Designers has active Web site http://www.gawds.org/)
      • ATHEN - Access Technologists Higher Education Network (http://athenpro.org/) has active discussions and resource lists
  • Tools and Resources
    • Got input from discussion last month
    • Only a few links to groups outside the UW so far
    • Could link to lots of stuff, but which of the sites are most relevant and useful to us. Some sites are developed in different management/authority environment. European resources often assume rule-based approach. Texas has a strong rule-based approach. Within the UW, not always the best approach.
    • We are moving more toward systems of required templates with presentation controlled separately with CSS, which allows accessibility aspects to be addressed independent of the content creation process.
    • Need to think on a local level. We have local issues and local questions.
    • How can we determine what are the best resources for our local needs. How do we have that discussion. Could have a wiki to develop questions, issues.
    • Featured Web Site could be tool for building knowledge
  • UW Accessibility Blog
    • Opportunity to talk about issues, stuff that does not fit in elsewhere
    • Could be a primary source of new information and ideas
• Omissions, What more is needed
  • Interactive interfaces using AJAX, AxsJAX, DojoKit, or others to create more usable interfaces but which create accessibility problems in the process. Much info out there, but we need to explore and sort out where things are going and what to recommend.
  • Visual widgets, such as Google Earth, - when functionality is primarily visual, what is reasonable to expect to address accessibility
  • What is the nature of the application and is it truly visual. A campus map is often considered visual, but braille and tactile alternatives have been developed. Can an alternative, like an audible interface, be provided.
  • How can we help people with disabilities find the widgets available to meet their needs. How can we help them connect to the developer communities making tools to address their needs.
  • We need to learn about using interactive environments such as wikis, blogs, social software. We are used to the logic of us collecting all the answers and putting them on a static page we contain. Some general answers should be provided. Can we connect it to an active interaction on accessibility themes out there in the social networks and blogosphere.
  • Flash - Adobe provides accessibility hooks in Flash, but they are very limited. Aimed at making Flash productions work for screen reader users, which is a problem of figuring of what should be verbalized and what should not. Takes a lot of work to make it work for the small population of people equipped and skilled int accessing it. Has Flash peaked?
    • Flash is very good for embedded video. Can be connected with MagPIE. IE7 and FireFox have become much more robust. AJAX makes possible most of what we were trying to do with Flash.
    • Don't use Flash for required content
    • Why use Flash if you can achieve the same thing with CSS and AJAX?
  • How important is it to make PDF accessible?
  • Changing guidelines. Both 508 and WCAG are being updated. Europe is developing its own version of 508 standards
    • WCAG2 - http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20071211/
    • 508 Update - http://teitac.org/wiki/EWG:Draft_Nov_27
    • European 508 - http://portal.etsi.org/STFs/STF_HomePages/STF333/STF333.asp and http://www.verva.se/english/it-procurement/accessibility-conformance/
  • Explore the Usability/Accessibility relationship
    • You can make a site that passes accessibility criteria, but is difficult to use.
  • Testing and evaluating
    • How do you interpret validation results? Much of what you get is boilerplate that may not be relevant. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff.
    • 508 guidelines are only a place to start now. We are interested in IT accessibility, which has a much wider scope that the only static page, html only criteria.