trip report from the eighth World Wide Web conference in toronto, canada developers day (fri 14-may-1999)

accessibility: software and design

why an accessible design:

• legislation establishes purchasing requirements (it's the law)
• 750 million people with disabilities world wide - about 10% of the market
• all users have a range of disabilities (we all get older)
• accessible design benefits all (e.g. new devices)

solutions / products:

• IBM alphaWorks, a self voicing development kit to enable speaking of Java applications
• Bobby, an accessibility testing tool
• IBM home page reader, multi-lingual voice reader supporting english, french, german and japanese

IBM special needs system guideline

web accessibility considerations:

• people with physical disabilities
• slow modems
• slow computers
• small screens

accessibility in HoTMetaL Pro:

assist physically disabled people in creation of web content and assist authors in creating accessible web pages:

• keyboard shortcuts
• visual dynamic keyboard (VDK)
• word completion predictor
• screen enhancer - functional magnification achieved through larger fonts, not enlargement bit maps
• includes accessibility checker
• includes on-line accessibility guidelines

an accessibility guarantee plan:

accessibility is right - not priviledge !

accessibility without compromise:

CAST Center for Applied Special Technology - a non-profit organization: "expanding opportunities far all learners"

• multiple modes of presentation
• meaningful and consistent navigation
• meaningful alternative representation
• it does not mean doll, boring, plain text
• Bobby: analyzes web pages for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility. beside the on-line version, which checks only one page at the time, there is a downloadable version which checks a whole website. future enhancements: check for meaningful ALT-text, color checking, etc.

incorporating universal accessibility:

1. test with different browsers including character based and voice browsers
2. include accessibility in the contract with your web developer
3. senior management does not understand universal accessibility and the level of effort to redesign the web site

keyboard only access:

the author basically showed a number of problems in the Windows operating system when one tries to use it without a mouse. i think most of these problems are also present in one way or another in other operating systems, such as Motif based systems.

authoring tool support:

there are accessibitlity issues for authors and for readers - authoring tools have to be accessible for authors and they should produce accessible documents. this talk concentrates on the second issue.

• the author needs to know why he or she has to following certain guidelines, what the guidelines are and what the results will be
• the authoring tool needs to ensure the accessibility of all output, treat accessibility as a core feature rather than an extension, address accessibility throughout the authoring process, allow the author to configure the timing and nature of the accessibility feature
• the authoring tool should perform automated checking for accessibility problems, provide correction assistance, manage alternative content and automate as many repetitive accessibility related tasks as possible
• A-Prompt, an accessibility verification and repair tool (currently available for Windows only, a Java version is on the way)

to main document

production note:

this trip report was written on a Vadem Clio C-1000 running Windows CE with Pocket Word. It was then transferred to a DELL Latitude notebook and modified as needed. this document is supposed to be HTML V4.0 compliant.

this page conforms with the WAG

dev_day.html / 17-may-1999 (ra) / reto ambühler