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trip report from the eighth World Wide Web conference
in toronto, canada
developers day (fri 14-may-1999)
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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:
- test with different browsers including character based and voice browsers
- include accessibility in the contract with your web developer
- 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
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