Categories
Accessibility Technology

Accessibility at the BBC

Presenter:  Ian Pouncey, @IanPouncey

(Be sure to look at Ian’s Feb 23 retweet of theVine video of a guitar playing with a dog drumming.  It’s awesome.)

This is the third presentation I attended on Wednesday, March 4 at the #CSUN15 conference.  Ian’s presentations have been entertaining in the past, so I’m looking forward to this one.

Ian shared a couple quotes from BBC higher-ups:

  • “Everyone deserves the best” quote from Tony Hall, BBC director General, 2013
  • Hugh Huddy quote on the iPlayer

BBC Accessibility Team

  • 3 people responsible for: training, standards & guidelines, techniques, framework support
  • Not responsible for accessibility of sites or apps.  We have 7,000+ content producers, our team would need to be enormous to cover all this!

Training

  • Accessibility for web developers:  this is an online course that takes about two hours and shows how real people with disabilities use their products.
  • Introduction to screen readers:  one-day workshop that provides hands-on use of screen readers, including iOS and Android OSes.  It’s primarily for front-end developers.
  • Question:  is it for Jaws?  Yes, but if the users have NVDA, we provide guidance for them as well.
  • Question:  can you make this training publicly available (laughter ensued).  For the web developer course, we’d really like to, but we may not be able to for competition reasons.

Upcoming training

  • QA
  • UX
  • Product Management
  • Mobile application development

Standards & Guidelines

  • Mobile Accessibility
  • HTML
  • Assistive Tech

Mobile Accessibility Standards & Guidelines

  • Technology agnostic, but platform specific techniques
  • All have success criteria

HTML Accessibility Standards

  • Minimal set of expected standards for our products
  • Standards are unambiguous so there can be no arguing when we engage with content partners

 Assistive Technology Testing Guidelines

  • Currently for screen reader only
  • Not support guidelines
  • Showed a very long list of guidelines that they use for testing

Question:  How do you choose/define your “window of support?”  We have a standard approach for screen readers and browsers.  Generally, we use “current version minus one,” with an exclusion for some versions of Internet Explorer.

Question:  do you have any tools for automated testing?  Yes, I’ll discuss that shortly.

Standards vs Guidelines

A standard is:

  • Must or must not
  • unambiguous
  • Unambiguously testable

Guideline

  • Should or should not
  • Must or must not that is:  open to interpretation; testing requires judgement

Anatomy of a well written standard

  • Short description:  a document must have exactly one H1 element
  • Rationale:  must be useful, i.e. “Users should be able to use the document’s <h1> to identify its main content.  Documents should have one main subject”
  • Examples
  • Testing Criteria:  Procedure, i.e. “Use WAVE toolbar or similar to generate a document outline, there must be exactly one <h1>”

Secret bit

  • bbc-a11y ruby gem

Standards vs Understanding

  • Understanding is more important than standards, but organizational awareness is more important than understanding
  • Goal is to enable people to do their jobs as easily as possible
  • We don’t want accessibility to be a checklist activity, but we realize that sometimes it does work that way
  • It should be embedded into everything we do so that the knowledge gets “locked in”

Accessibility Champions Network

  • Extends our team’s reach
  • Spreads knowledge and understanding
  • Our eyes, ears, and voice in products
  • Not just for developers
  • Don’t have to be an expert
  • Not responsible for accessibility
  • Shares knowledge

Benefits of being a champion

  • Additional training
  • Closer contact with accessibility team
  • Work with other teams
  • 10% time project
  • Prestige!  Fame!  Glory!
  • There will

Question:  do you do any assessments of the work the developers are doing?  Occasionally, but it’s often more about the frameworks and components that are used in a product.

Question:  How often to accessibility champions answer to their team?  It’s a new thing we’re starting.

UX:  Roles and Responsibilities

  • Visual design
  • Semantics
  • Markup and content order
  • Hidden content

Design is Critical

  • Development may not be the most important part of the project!  This one looked painful for Ian to say 🙂

Beyond Design & Development

  • Product Owners:  encourage training; make the accessible decision, not the easy decision; plan for testing with disabled user
  • Content producers:  understand alternatives, plan for audio desc, subtitling, etc.

Global Experience Language:  GEL

  • Similar to Google’s, but not as well maintained.  It’s a bit out of date
  • Showed an example of an overlay/carousel panel

Document design knowledge

  • Enable design iteration
  • prevents repeated mistakes
  • encourages evidence based desing
  • educates

Code Based GEL

  • Production quality code
  • White labelled
  • Acceptance tests included

 

 

Categories
Accessibility Technology

Digital Accessibility: 2015 Annual Legal Update

Presenter:  Lainey Feingold & Linda Dardarian

This is the second presentation I attended on Wednesday, March 4 at the #CSUN15 conference.  Thankfully, it’s in the same room as the 9:00 AM session, so I didn’t have to pack up my stuff and rush off to another room!  I have not attended this session in the past, as I tend to favor the more technical sessions.  However, I hear great things about this annual session, so I decided to see if the good press would bear out.  As we’re about to get started, this is truly a “standing room only” session…a good sign? Anyway, this session covers only the last 12 months.

Lainey:  Linda Dardarian could not appear because she’s covering a case of hardwood floors that have too much formaldehyde in it (!)

“Toolbox” metaphor was used liberally throughout this presentation

US DOJ

Slow bureaucrats or Accessibility Champions?  I say, they are accessibility champions in the realm of digital accessibility!  The law is but one tool in the accessibility champion’s toolbox.  The question at issue is really a civil rights question:  do people have the right to access digital content?

Accessibility Champions

Here’s just some of the work by the DOJ around the country:

  • National Museum of Crime & Punishment
  • Nueces County:  project civic action
  • DeKalb, IL (+3) online app accessibility
  • FL County Court records
  • FL state police
  • Peapod grocery delivery
  • Lucky stores

DOJ:  web sites have long been considered covered by the ADA.

 

DOJ Requires…

  • Apply to web and mobile
  • WCAG 2.0 is standard
  • Web accessibility coordinator
  • Independent consultant
  • Train all staff
  • POst a policy
  • Home page AIP (Accessibility Information Page)
  • Add to performance evaluations (this is interesting)
  • Usability Testing

Regulations?

  • 508 (Access Board finally issues 508 refresh)
  • Applies to purchases by the Federal government

What

  • Broad application of WCAG AA as standard
  • Covered electronic content [public facing +8 categories of non-public facing content]
  • Expanded interoperability reqs
  • Real time text functionality

When

  • Feb 27, 2015 (published in Federal Register)
  • May 28, 2015 (open for comment until)
  • Final Rule Published
  • Becomes effective +6 months after Final Rule publishing

ADA Web Regulations?

  • We just don’t know exact dates…
  • We’re waiting for Title 2 (public sector) and Title 3 (private sector) dates of publication.  They never hit these deadlines.
  • See www.ada.gov for more info

Legal Advocacy

  • DOJ is not the only player in this space…
  • Toolbox metaphor was used liberally throughout this presentation

Watch (streaming video/education services)

  • NAD (National Association of the Deaf) & VUDU
  • NAD and Netflix
  • NAD and Apple
  • Harvard and MIT (edX open courseware)

Learn

  • Math in Seattle (online education services)
  • Student loans (department of education and loan agencies)
  • Youngstown State/University of Cincinnati (course, registration materials).  This applied to both public and private institutions!
  • LSAC (similar to SAT; testing accommodations).  As of now, they are fighting this.

Read

  • Scribd (unlimited online books – “the Netflix of books”).  This was filed in Vermont because the Netflix case was brought there.  They tried to get the case thrown out of court.  Judge seems to understand the issues involved, so I’m hopeful…
  • HathiTrust:  the authors guild sued a collaboration of educators for conversion of materials for educational purposes.

Stay Healthy

  • Communicating print information to blind people via “talking pill bottles”
  • Caremark
  • Walgreens
  • Sutter
  • Kaiser

So much of this information is still inaccessible, including web sites, applications, and more.

Work

  • ACB v GSA
  • Marriott case (software inaccessible to employees)
  • Homeland Security (employee not able to access online content)
  • Montgomery County (NFB handling for employee who can’t use software)

Be Prepared

Digital content is really important for emergency preparedness, and it MUST be accessible to people with disabilities.

  • New York City
  • Washington DC

Bank

  • Cardtronics:  ATM (Automatic Teller Machines)
  • NY banks (settlement with 12 New York banks)

Travel

  • SoCal Taxi case
  • Airline Kiosk case (rules don’t kick in for 10 years after case won, which was 2 years ago)

Shopping

  • eBay (web 2.0 sustainability agreement)
  • RedBox case wrapped up this year

Wrinkles

  • 9 circuit court of appeals will hear digital access cases
  • Cullen v Netflix
  • Earll v Ebay (verification process that used phone – obviously this doesn’t work for Deaf / Hard of Hearing)

CVAA

  • Captioned Clips
  • Extended Waiver for ereader

International

Lots going on around the world, we don’t have enough time to cover that here!  We really need to have a three hour session for this…

Start and End

Phone calls and feedback from the customer.  You have to make your voice heard!

Other Sessions at CSUN, be sure to look up these sessions!

Q & A

 

Categories
Accessibility Technology

The Implementation of PDF/UA and Standardized Access to PDF Content

Presenter:  Karen McCall of Accessibil-IT, Head of Quality Control and Training.  @accessibilit

This is my first post of the CSUN 2015 conference, and the first presentation I attended on Wednesday, March 4 at the #CSUN15 conference.  I have a particular interest in this topic because the latest round of accessibility remediation and content updates my web team and the folks I work with at CSUN are addressing is the vast number of Word and PDF documents posted on the CSUN web site.  I’ve also read a little bit about the PDF/UA ISO standard (thanks @WebAIM list serve!) and am interested in seeing how – or if – this has any impact on the work my colleagues will be doing where “the rubber meets the road.”

Accessibil-IT swagAccessibil-IT folks handed out some “accessible IT swag” just before the presentation:  a key-shaped USB stick.  Nice 🙂  They claim it’s the best swag offered at the conference…we’ll just have to see about that!

This session is divided into two parts:  brief powerpoint slide presentation, then a demonstration of an Adobe Acrobat Pro document that is PDF/UA compliant with Jaws screen reader.

Karen has been working with Adobe PDF for about 15 years, and has written books, given training sessions, contributed to the standard and much more during that time.  She’s also a Canadian delegate to the standards committee.  Contributes to both user experience perspective and technical standard.

This is written into the newly published US section 508 refresh:  documents will conform to all Level A and AA success criteria in WCAG 2.0 or ISO14289-1 [PDF/UA-1].

PDF Accessibility 101

  1. if a PDF is not tagged, it is not accessible
  2. Just because a document HAS tags, doesn’t mean it’s accessible
  3. Read out loud text-to-speech tool is NOT A SCREEN READER

What is PDF/UA?

  • Initiated by AIIM (association for information and image management and adobe systems in 2004
  • Responsible for establishing a set of standards for crating accessible PDF
  • A technical standard for software developers
  • An implementation strategy for achieving accessibility within a PDF
  • designed around the same barrier-free principles behind the methodology of WCAG

Why do we need PDF/UA?

  • To achieve a reliability of expectations from one PDF to the next
  • PDF/UA success criterion are broken down into three parts:
  1. File conformance [ISO 14289-1]; file conformance [ISO 32000-1]
  2. Reader conformance
  3. Viewer conformance

Having a published standard will make machine-readability much easier for vendors like Google, Microsoft and others (think creation & conversion).  Human QA is still going to be needed, but to a somewhat smaller extent.

Question:  will book publishers be required to adhere to this standard?  Not at this time, but we are notifying publishers that there actually IS a published international standard now.  This is part of the reason why we come and give presentations like this at #CSUN15.

Question:  Does the standard cover forms?  Yes, but there’s a distinction between XFA forms and forms created Adobe Acrobat.

As of today, NVDA is currently the only AA-compliant PDF/UA reader.

What’s Different with PDF/UA?

  • It provides developers a framework to build accessibility into their application or output file from the start
  • It eliminates perceived “best practices” or “user preference” from organizational document accessibility practices
  • It’s based on semantics and established document authoring logic

PDF/UA compliant documents will provide a more consistent user experience, which is important for users

  •  Provides a prescriptive PDF interaction model which addresses a broad range of disabilities and facilitates the use of many adaptive technologies.
  • Leverages the applicable WCAG principles for the best in general usability.

Question:  Does it allow for reflowable text?  Yes.

Question:  How does it provide for tagging diagrams?  There is an implementation guide published by AIIM that describe how to do this.  I recommend you have a look at the “Matterhorn Protocol,” which provides a checklist that describes how document remediators should do this.  The PAC (PDF Accessibility Checker) does something similar (note:  PAC developer is xYMedia, their web site is in German) .  Neither of these tools eliminate the need for human quality assurance.  A comment from the audience highlighted the usefulness of the PAC for people who are new to PDF remediation.  The PAC tool is not itself accessible with JAWS (the devs know about this and are working on it), but it’s actually a great “in your face” way of showing you mistakes in the document.

Demonstration of a PDF/UA-compliant document showed some of the useful features for end-users.  This included use of keyboard shortcuts for document navigation by headers, images, links, tables and more.

 

 

 

Categories
Technology Uncategorized

Why email is the devil

Email is the devil, I’m sure of it.  Unfortunately, it’s the official form of communication for many institutions, including my own.  I’m inextricably tied to it, and somewhere over the last few years, it turned me into something I never thought I’d be:  a hoarder!  Well, the devil doesn’t work alone, you have to give him the power.  Let me explain the whole sordid tale, and what I did after I saw the light…

TL;DR

  • Gmail is awesome
  • Saving every email you get is a terrible idea
  • There are better tools than email for most work-related communication tasks
  • My email “rules of engagement”

I like to keep my communication organized; always have.  Over the years, I’ve used a range of email programs including Outlook, Mac Mail and Thunderbird.  Of course, I’ve used web clients for almost as long, but I always found it comforting to store everything locally.  No matter which program I used, I carefully created folders to neatly store everything for future reference.  And I do mean EVERYTHING.  I had literally hundreds of folders that broke things down by project, organizational affiliation, function, you name it.  It got to the point that my folders were so granular, it became a more-than-once daily conundrum about which folder to store my email in…not to mention the mileage I was putting on my trackpad!

Several months ago, one of my staff members introduced me to a better way of managing Gmail that literally changed my life.   Yes, literally.  The article that describes “the way” is here:  http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more  In simple terms, it takes advantage of the multiple inbox extension, activation and actual use of keyboard shortcuts, filters and labels.  While I got used to doing things this way, I kept my Mac Mail client running for a couple weeks.  After only three days, I knew there was no turning back.  I was able to fly through my email in minutes per day, not hours.  This was the nice “clean break” I needed.  However, I still had about seven years of email I felt obligated to do something about.

While I used Mac Mail for my work email account and Thunderbird for my personal email account, thankfully I did not have to worry about manually exporting and importing .mbox files.  Way back in 2007, I created a Gmail account that I used exclusively as a repository for both my personal and work accounts.  After seven years of forwarding from two accounts, I had over 75,000 emails stuffed in that account.  I had to figure out the best way to move it all into the Gmail account I use now.  I found a great article that explained how to do exactly that here:  http://email.about.com/od/gmailtips/qt/How-To-Move-Mail-From-One-Gmail-Account-To-Another-Using-Only-Gmail.htm  Once set up, the transfer process happens automatically (that took about four days, in case you’re wondering).  Of course, none of THAT email was organized, so I had a ton of email sitting inside an “archive” label to sort through.  This was a challenge, even with my newfound Gmail-fu.  A number of custom filters – some of them used only once and then deleted – eliminated about half of the mail I knew I didn’t need, leaving me with about 40,000 emails.  I’m committed to going through these, 1,000 per day until they’re all gone.

Digressing briefly, I have to mention some of the other work-related communication tools I’ve been using a lot recently.  What these tools have in common is fitness of purpose:

  • Basecamp:  an extremely popular online project management and communication tool.
  • Pivotal Tracker:  an agile project management tool used by software development teams.
  • Slack:  this is the tool that really helped me see the light and redeemed me.  Slack aggregates all communication associated with a project.  It combines the best parts of instant messaging with twitter, and – most importantly – has integration hooks into literally thousands of tools that developers use, like github, basecamp, errbit, pretty much every bug/feature tracker, and more.  There’s no better tool out there that lets teams clearly see who’s doing what and when.  It’s amazing and I can’t imagine working without it.

Anyway, as I was going through those 40,000 emails last weekend, I had an epiphany:  the vast majority of this email just doesn’t matter anymore.  Many were critically important at the time they were written, but they’re basically worthless now.  This fact doesn’t change the reality that I still have to go through all that mail, but it made deleting things so much easier.

It’s now painfully obvious to me why storing every email is a bad idea:

  1. Not every email is equally useful (duh)
  2. Finding important stuff gets harder over time
  3. “Inbox zero” becomes more elusive
  4. It’s a liability (maybe even legally)
  5. It’s a heavy psychic weight to carry

Here are my new not-quite-perfected email “rules of engagement:”

  1. Use email only for official communications that have a shelf life greater than one month.  This includes:
    • Budgeting
    • Contracts
    • Staffing, i.e. hiring, firing, merit increases
    • Strategic things that directly affect the bottom line
    • CYA (we all have our unique reasons)
  2. Delete everything more than one year old, unless it fits into rule #1 (even then, it’s probably less important than you think).  I’m shocked at how few of my precious old emails contained any information worth keeping.
  3. Inbox zero, ALL THE TIME.  There’s no good reason to keep anything in your inbox.  Waiting on an answer from someone? Tag it and archive it.  Need to schedule a bill payment on the 24th?  Tag it and archive it.  Delegated a task to your staff?  Tag it and archive it.
  4. Use the right tool for the job.
    • Got a sensitive topic?  Pick up the phone!  Or better yet, pay that person a visit.
    • Collaboratively riffing on an idea in real-time?  Use Google Hangouts, Skype, Face Time, or GoTo Meeting.
    • Need to communicate with a project team?  Use Basecamp, Pivotal Tracker, Slack, etc.
    • Got to write something short for the world to see?  Use Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, RSS, etc.
    • Got to write something long-form for the world to see?  Use a blog or an old-fashioned web site.
    • Editing a document with colleagues?  Use Google Drive (docs, spreadsheets, presentations) or Box.  There are lots of options in this space.

Email is still a great tool when you want to send someone the equivalent of a memo, but for most of the work I do today, email is the wrong tool for the job.  Don’t let email steal your life!

 

Categories
Accessibility Technology

CSUN 2014 Web Track Mega Post

As usual, I like to make a post that sums up my entire conference experience…I call this the “Mega Post.”  As you may have guessed from the titles of the sessions I attended, I’m interested in the web track.  If the web is your bag, you just might find all this helpful.

Enjoy!

 

Friday, March 21

 

Thursday, March 20

 

Wednesday, March 19

 

Tuesday, March 18

 

Monday, March 17