[Tektalkdiscussion] Fw: Mikesmess2 Web accessibility no longer an afterthought | RelevantResults

[Bob Acosta]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Linda Gehres" <ljgehres at comcast.net>
To: "Michael Gorman" <mikesmess2 at mikesmess.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2009 8:21 AM
Subject: Mikesmess2 Web accessibility no longer an afterthought | 
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Web accessibility no longer an afterthought by  Tom Krazit CNET News, Dec.
14, 2009

Yahoo's Victor Tsaran knows how much time Web designers spend agonizing over
color and font-width choices when laying out an application. So when he
started Yahoo's accessibility push two years ago, he had a tough time
arousing sympathy for engineers grousing about how much extra time was
needed to create accessibility features.

Fortunately for Tsaran, Yahoo's accessibility manager, he's running into
that problem less and less. Web designers are starting to take accessibility
as seriously as button placement or heading layout when they develop their
products, improving the Web experience not only for people like Tsaran--who
lost his sight at the age of five--but for Web users in general.

"We're seeing a lot more awareness and involvement in Web accessibility than
we did a few years ago, particularly among big companies," said Judy Brewer,
director of the  Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web
Consortium. "It's becoming a solid business expectation that Web sites need
to meet the needs of all users."

At the two biggest Internet companies in the world, accessibility is seen as
an increasingly important part of what they do. Yahoo requires every new
hire to receive accessibility training from Tsaran and Alan Brightman,
senior policy director of special communities. And it books engineering
teams for tours of their Accessibility Lab.

Google recently rolled out a service that will let YouTube users add
captions to their videos, and believes that as the Web moves more from an
era of presentation to an era of two-way "data-driven" communication,
accessibility becomes even more important, said Jonas Klink, accessibility
program manager.

Web accessibility has come a long way in the decade since many of these
proposals were first floated . It's still a challenge, however, for the Web
community to remember that as it pushes forward with exciting new
technologies like HTML5 that could reinvent the Internet experience, it must
keep in mind the needs of those who can't type 60 words per minute, operate
a mouse like a scalpel, or see the unobtrusive pop-up windows that point to
the next destination on the page.

"As the Web gets more and more dynamic, the accessibility requirements get
more and more interesting, and sometimes challenging, to implement," Brewer
said.

The challenges
There are about 60 million people in the U.S. who can't use a computer to
get on the Internet in the normal fashion, said Yahoo's Brightman. For those
people, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and
even motion-sensing Web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY
keyboard.

special computer input software

Sites that don't play nicely with special input methods cause accessibility
problems that can easily be avoided.

That can cause problems for Web designers who rely too heavily on mouse
navigation, or who design pages with special multimedia whiz-bang effects
that look cool only to the people that can see them. "There can be an
assumption of homogeneity on the Web," said Naomi Bilodeau, technical
program manager for Google.

Users of screen readers--software that essentially reads out loud a
description of text, links, and buttons on a page--are confounded the most
by  Captchas and Flash Web pages, according to a recent survey of
screen-reader users conducted by WebAIM.

But simple things like photos or images can also create problems if the Web
publisher doesn't add alt text to those photos, or relies primarily on
images as a way of explaining what is happening on the page. And as Web
designers push forward with Javascript  and AJAX-based technologies that
overlay Web content over the primary Web page, there's great potential to
confuse screen readers.

The good news is that most of these problems aren't as much technology
issues as design issues; content created with things like Flash can be made
accessible if designers start off with that principle in mind.

"There are a bunch of things (in Web design) that are not features," said
Nicholas Zakas, principal front-end engineer for Yahoo's home page, meaning
that while you can jazz up a page all you like with additional features,
there are certain things that should be standard fare. "Performance is not a
feature, internationalization is not a feature, and accessibility is not a
feature."

However, features can make the Web more accessible. As mentioned, Google
recently rolled out automatic captioning software for YouTube videos, making
it much easier for deaf people to enjoy the world's largest collection of
cute cat videos.

In all seriousness, the automatic captioning technology is being rolled out
first on YouTube's Educational channel, allowing deaf or hearing-impaired
people to take advantage of distance learning programs or other educational
systems. It's most definitely a work in progress, (check out this YouTube
video  of a lecture by a University of California at Berkeley professor by
clicking on the "cc" tab, the left arrow, and then "Transcribe Audio") but
with refinement could really add to the amount of knowledge that can be
consumed by disabled people.

"I wanted this so badly (that) it's good enough, I don't care if there are
some bad captions," said Google's Ken Harrenstien, a deaf software engineer
who played an instrumental role in bringing the project to life.

The reasons There are no explicit laws that companies design Web sites to be
accessible to the disabled, but many disability experts and Web companies
believe that portions of the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 do
apply to the Internet, despite having been written several years before the
Web emerged as a mainstream phenomenon.

And in order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply
with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act , which insists that electronic
and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed
with disabled employees in mind, and that government services produced by
contractors consider disabled citizens in equal measure.

But these are businesses, after all: Yahoo's Brightman estimated that
there's about $220 billion in discretionary spending available to disabled
people. Making a Web site accessible to as many people as possible isn't
just the right thing to do, it also makes business sense, he said.

Also, with a rapidly aging population in many parts of the world--notably
the U.S.--accessibility requirements will become useful for today's crop of
baby boomers as they grow older. People over 65 are increasing their use of
the Internet, according to Nielsen , and features designed for accessibility
could aid those who aren't technically disabled but wouldn't mind a little
extra help.

46.3 percent think Web is getting more accessible

The Web is becoming more accessible for people with disabilities, but it's
far from complete: 46.3 percent of screen reader users think the Web is
getting more accessible.

The future
The immediate challenge for those working on Web accessibility is to ensure
that accessibility standards are not trampled in the rush to finalize the
HTML5 collection of standards that Google and other Web browser companies
are currently debating. Brewer said it's "extremely important to be sure
that HTML5 can support accessibility fully," and her group is working
closely with the other parts of the W3C to realize that goal.

But beyond that goal, Web accessibility advocates have reason to feel
optimistic about their cause. Long-awaited technologies like sophisticated
speech recognition are finally coming to fruition after decades of joking
about how such capabilities were just two years away. And 46 percent of
respondents to the WebAIM survey reported that Web content has become more
accessible in recent years.

"Anybody should be able to use anything on this page," said Yahoo's Zakas,
keeper of the all-important Yahoo.com page. "If anybody can't use it, it
shouldn't be there."

Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search,
including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the
evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC
companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three
years covering Apple.


<http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10414041-265.html>Click here: Web
accessibility no longer an afterthought | Relevant Results - CNET News



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