Unstoppable Campaign for Accessibility Laws – Latest News David Lepofsky

Data Verbalization Doug Schepers

Finding the Place Where Accessibility and SEO Happily Co-Exist Carie Fisher

Assistive technology: training, UX and design: what devs need to know about UX and Aging Sassy Outwater

Steve Faulkner

Wheelmap.org is an online map for wheelchair accessible places. Everyone can easily find, register and change places on the website or via an iPhone - as with Wikipedia. The platform went online in September 2010. Already after half a year, volunteers have registered over 40,000 places, every day 100 new places are added. Since November 2010, there is also the free iPhone app.A simple traffic light system marks the wheelchair accessibility of the places: Green means unrestricted access. For example, orange marked places do not have a toilet. Locations that are displayed in red can not be entered by wheelchair users. With the help of this traffic light, people with reduced mobility can find suitable places in their environment and even worldwide. Since places are also listed that are not wheelchair accessible, owners of cafés or other public places are made aware of the problem and encouraged to think about wheelchair accessibility in their rooms.

Little project that aims at raising awareness for accessibility in public transport systems. It uses a simple slider to visualize how the public transport system looks like if all the non-accessible stations are erased. There is an elaborate how-to available, suitable for non-coders on the projects github site.

Accessibility of Content

Following inclusive design, we look to make interventions not only to support accessibility for specific types of users, but to make annotation a better and easier experience for everyone.

Regardless of conformance, it is vital for accessibility that there be good contrast for text and that links be discernible.

Implementing UDL on Canvas

Interview with Dr. Richards

Shockingly, the language of “disciplinary landscapes” and “infrastructure” and “free-floating signifiers” does not set the average undergraduate’s pulse a-twittering. Indeed, to assign such a piece to a class of undergraduates is to forget our audience entirely.

avoid digital redlining,[26] creating inequities (however unintentionally) through the use of technology.

Uncertainty About Websites as “Places of Public Accommodation”

Gil v. Winn Dixie Stores, Inc.: The First Digital Accessibility Case to Go to Trial

They now stand out as the only one in the class (or, if they’re lucky, one of two) who gets to use a device while other students wonder just why they get to use one. I have seen a couple of students on social media say that as soon as they see a “no devices” policy on a syllabus they drop the class because of this concern.

Advocates hope educators increasingly see UDL as an attainable standard for course design -- one that penetrates curriculum and student-teacher interaction both in person and online.

Beyond compliance, this effort is a key component of valuing diversity in an educational ecosystem that supports inclusivity and universal design in education.

there should be some way for a blind screen reader user to know exactly which text is being discussed.

there should be notification of the number of highlights of different types, a way to navigate to each highlight and to choose which type of (color) highlight to navigate between

Keyboard access to any notes available at the highlight location is necessary

a standard should be provided for categorizing highlights semantically.

users of smaller screens

can closely mirror highlighting with a highlighter pen in a printed book

Can open educational resources, or OER, truly create more equity and access?

A 4.5:1 contrast between the non-link text color and the background. A 4.5:1 contrast between the link text color and the background. A 3:1 contrast between the link text color and the surrounding non-link text color.

“Technology Allows a Student to Personalize Their Learning Space”

In order to assess and document the level of compliance, completion of this information by an authorized representative of the supplier organization will provide the University of Colorado Procurement Service Center, and the campus affiliates it serves, with knowledge regarding the level of compliance and satisfaction of this policy and related standards with respect to the offered products and services.

If OER is appealing because they can help make knowledge more accessible, then we must care about the myriad issues -- from child care to transportation -- that prevent our potential students from even coming to our classrooms in the first place.

Accessibility Support

We’re working on that. The next supported browser is likely to be Firefox.

The Chrome extension is here.

Bringing User Experience to Education: UDL and Inclusion for the 21st Century" and my keynote address, which I refer to at the conclusion of the post, is about "Universal Learning Experiences: How UDL and UX Structure Inclusion & Transfer in Education for All." 

The accommodations model depends on invasions of privacy to work.

Universal design is a process, a means rather than an end. There’s no such thing as a universally designed text.

Landmarks

Narrator views

For example, with WAI-ARIA, developers can identify regions of pages and enable keyboard users to easily move among regions, rather than having to press Tab many times.

For example, if the content of a Web page changes in response to user actions or time- or event-based updates, that new content may not be available to some people, such as people who are blind or people with cognitive disabilities who use a screen reader.

1. Navigate to the NVDA menu NVDA+N2. Down arrow to preferences, and press right arrow.3. Down arrow to document settings, and press enter.4. Tab through the dialog box. One of the options is report clickable.5. Uncheck that box, and press enter.

Navigating by ARIA Landmarks with Screen Readers In JAWS, use the semi-colon key to jump to the next landmark, or use shift + semi-colon to go backward through landmarks. In NVDA, use the D key to jump to the next landmark, or use shift + D to go backward through landmarks. In VoiceOver, use CTRL + ALT + U to start the web rotor, then, if necessary, use the left or right arrow keys to display the list of landmarks (the rotor also displays lists of headings, links, and web spots), then use the down arrow key to navigate through the list of landmarks.

Accessibility Toolkit is

Use WAVE Tool to Test Web Pages for Accessibility

What emerged was a prototype for a feature that could let blind or visually impaired people put their fingers over an image and have their phones read them a description of what’s happening.

1 am aware it will be said, that written lan-guage is only a copy of that which is spoken, and has a constant reference to articulation; the char-aclers upon paper, being only symbols of articu-late sounds

Those of us who traffic in this word, "rhetoric," have a great deal of experience with the ubiquity of the question "What is rhetoric?" and the countless idioms and situations in which it reappears.

We don't necessarily do an injustice to the diffuse history and conceptual promiscuity of the term by giving a single answer.

Thank you for your query. I'm afraid that while improving the accessibility (particularly keyboard navigability) of Hypothesis is high on our list of priorities, it's still a little rough in places, and we don't have an accessibility report at the moment.

Convivial tools should be accessible — free, even.

universally inclusive and accessible

The EDUPUB Initiative VitalSource regularly collaborates with independent consultants and industry experts including the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), Tech For All, JISC, Alternative Media Access Center (AMAC), and others. With the help of these experts, VitalSource strives to ensure its platform conforms to applicable accessibility standards including Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Accessibility Guidelines established by the Worldwide Web Consortium known as WCAG 2.0. The state of the platform's conformance with Section 508 at any point in time is made available through publication of Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs).  VitalSource continues to support industry standards for accessibility by conducting conformance testing on all Bookshelf platforms – offline on Windows and Macs; online on Windows and Macs using standard browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari); and on mobile devices for iOS and Android. All Bookshelf platforms are evaluated using industry-leading screen reading programs available for the platform including JAWS and NVDA for Windows, VoiceOver for Mac and iOS, and TalkBack for Android. To ensure a comprehensive reading experience, all Bookshelf platforms have been evaluated using EPUB® and enhanced PDF books.

So to sum up: It should be an active design choice whether you want to enable users to change the font size independently to parts of or all layout and graphics. If so, pixels will probably not be your friend. If not, I’d say it’s mainly a matter of personal taste and/or project.

In version 7 of internet explorer that was released in October 2006 there was a very prominent zoom icon on the bottom right of the browser window. And guess what… The zoom function was just modifying the CSS reference pixel in the browsers CSS rendering engine!

This is not true nowadays. Pressing Ctrl+ and Ctrl- in any modern browser will scale the pixel values as well. It has been like this for a while now.

Setting the tabindex of the focused element to "0" ensures that if the user tabs away from the widget and then returns, the selected item within the group retains focus. Note that updating the tabindex to "0" requires also updating the previously selected item to tabindex="-1". This technique involves programmatically moving focus in response to key events and updating the tabindex to reflect the currently focused item. To do this:

descriptively captioned video stills

For mobile we can’t use the desktop adder since Android and iOS present their own popup menus.

This would be good for accessibility as screen readers won’t have to navigate the dom looking for the button.