Webcast Series

"Providing Student Services to Distance Learners"

Transcript of Improving Web Accessibility for Individuals with Disabilities Webcast

Slide: WCET Presents a Webcast Series: “Providing Student Services to Distance Learners

MATT WASOWSKI: Okay, I want to welcome everyone to another edition of the HorizonLive Desktop Lecture series and, of course, again today you're all here for WCET's monthly meeting held on HorizonLive and today we'll obviously be featuring Cindy Roland.

PAT: Okay, Matt, thanks very much. This is Pat Shea, the Assistant Director for WCET, and today I am in our home office in Boulder, Colorado. This is unusual for me. I'm usually in Summit, New Jersey, where I telecommute to our office here in Colorado. But also joining me today in Boulder is my colleague Sue Armitage. Welcome, Sue.

SUE: Hello, Pat, and Matt, thank you for your kind introduction. Yes, I'm just down the hallway from Pat and I'm really looking forward to today's presentation.

PAT: And our special guest is Cindy Rowland, the project director of WebAIM, which stands for keeping "Web Accessibility in Mind.” Dr. Rowland will talk with us today bout improving Web accessibility for individuals with disabilities. Welcome, Cindy.

CINDY: Oh, thanks, Pat. I'm very excited to talk to everyone today. This is just going to be a great time.

PAT: Great. Sue, did you want to talk a little bit about the asynchronous nature of the slides with our audio.

SUE: Yes, why don't we get started. I hope we have some repeat visitors in the audience today and so they know that there is somewhat of an asynchronicity between the voices that you hear over your speakers and the content that shows up in the HorizonLive window. We're working on improving our technique to have them closer and synchronous. If you in the audience feel a little lost over what you're hearing, what you're seeing, well, hopefully, it'll all come together.

I also wanted to mention some of the plug-ins that we have requested everybody download onto their computers for this webcast: the Flash Player, the Media Player and the Opera browser. If you did not have a chance to download, I encourage you to do so after the webcast and then visit the URLs that Cindy will talk to us about. She has set up for us some wonderful simulations and you do need those plug-ins to experience what it's like for people with disabilities to use the Web. So all the URLs are listed on the WCET website. Now, I am going to launch a brand new browser window that has the link to all the URLs. You can see, it says “Student Services Webcast Series Today,” and there's that link to the URLs. There's a bunch of them and I know that people in the audience are going to want to bookmark, or will put in their favorites folder, many of the URLs. So you go ahead and minimize your window, so you can come back and see the HorizonLive site and we'll take it from there.

PAT: Okay, thank you, Sue. And during today's session, we invite those of you who are in the audience to chat in using the message box. Most of you are experts in this field as well, and this is an opportunity for you to share your knowledge and experiences.

“Improving Web Accessibility for Individuals with Disabilities” is the fifth in our webcast series on providing student services to distance learners. Each month through June we will have a webcast on different student services and we have a number that are on our website, that are archived that you can refer to as well. This series is part of WCET's work on its Learning Anytime, Anywhere Partnership project, which is funded by the US Department of Education. The project involves three partner institutions and a corporate partner in creating Web-based student services for our online learners. And our sincere appreciation goes to HorizonLive for making it possible to bring this series to you electronically. And for those of you that are not familiar with WCET, you'll see some information on your screen. It is a cooperative of higher education institutions, agencies, non-profit organizations and corporations involved in distance learning. And our focus is on advancing the effective use of technology in higher education, and I hope that you will visit our website to learn more about some of our activities.

And now it's time to tell you a little bit more about our special guest. Cindy Rowland works at the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University where she directs WebAIM and other technology projects and a distance education program in Utah. She understands the issues that surround distance education, the importance of technology applications, and the need to ensure that all individuals can access online materials. We're delighted to have you, Cindy.

CINDY: Well, thanks a lot, Pat, and, as we get started, I'm very interested in just getting a quick poll from everyone that is out there. I'd like everyone to use their little yes/no buttons and let me know if you've been working on Web accessibility at your institution or within your program. So if everyone would just take a quick second to poll, then we will see of course, now, I'm thinking here, Sue, as they're polling, do we have the total number of how many are here? I know that there are just three yeses and one no, I guess we'll find out in a second, huh?

SUE: Well, the answers are pouring in.

CINDY: That they are. Wow, it looks like an overwhelming number of you are in fact working on accessibility efforts on your campus. I can't tell you how exciting that is. And as we go through, I hope the material I've picked for today isn't going to be a review for a lot of you. But I do hope that as you have questions, you write them, you send the message. I may not be keen enough to pick them up, but I know Sue and Pat will. And they'll just stop me in my tracks, and ask me to field questions. The other thing that I'll say is, we had planned for, oh, about an hour. And I know that we've got about forty-five minutes here to do a lot of content, but then — and correct me if I'm wrong here, Pat — but I believe we'll stay on for about an additional twenty minutes just to have more of a conversation, a question and answer period, beyond the presentation, is that accurate?

PAT: That is correct. And we're looking forward to some good questions from our audience.

CINDY: Okay. Well, this is exciting that you guys have been working on this as long as you have. The other thing, too, is, certainly don't hesitate if you have a differing answer to a question that I might field, to go ahead and put that in as well. Well, I just want to tell you a little bit about the project that I am representing. It is also a Learning Anywhere, Anytime Partnership program, called WebAIM, and you can see we have a variety of partners that are working together to help mitigate the enormous problem of the inaccessibility of the Web for students — and, might I add, staff members — in post-secondary ed who have disabilities. We've got a website, and let me go ahead and put a shameless plug in for that first off, because I know you'll all want to bookmark our website, which is www.webaim.org.

PAT: And there are tons of resources there, so it's important.

CINDY: Well, we do and I think all of the stuff we cover today will is on the website, but even a lot of the questions that may come in, we may have some resources there as well.

Well, I've got three goals for today and it's an ambitious project to think that I'm going to get through all three of these in the next forty-five minutes, but I'm going to do my darndest. The first is, I would really like to make sure that everyone goes away with a good sense of what Web accessibility is and what it isn't. I have set up a variety of simulations covering each of the major disability categories and I'd very much like to go through some of those to get at my second goal, which is that I would like you all to come away with an understanding of what it is that students themselves experience when they come to a website that is not accessible to them. Now, with that said, I know we're not going to be able to go through everything, so when we get to that spot, we'll do some polling and see what you guys would be the most interested in. I would also like to spend some time talking about the legal picture with respect to Web accessibility. I know a lot of people have questions on that and I'm certainly willing to have an extended conversation on the legal aspects.

But here is a quick question that I would like to throw out to all of you: Of all of these goals that I have just stated, which are you the most interested in? Because, frankly, I think I can kind of squeeze more or less time out of some of these topics. So if everyone would just take a minute here to vote, then I'll have a better sense of how it is that I might be able to direct the time that we have together. And I know that this is on a tiny bit of delay.

PAT: I'd like to make a correction of the text on the slide — the second bullet item is supposed to say "understand what students with disabilities experience."

CINDY: Okay.

PAT: And do make sure that you are voting on the yellow box in front of you and not the yes/no polling buttons. Of course, I guess that's just saying who has voted, is that correct, Sue?

SUE: It should be telling us who has voted.

CINDY: Okay, good.

SUE: Okay. Cindy, I want to let you know that Michael N., in the audience, wanted to know how you are defining disability in this context?

CINDY: That's an excellent question. Certainly there are individuals that have a variety of impairments that are not disabling to them in the least. I can even look to my own family. My father has a macular degeneration which is an impairment, and yet at this point in his life, it is not a disabling condition. It is likely will be at some point in the future. But I think that's an important distinction to make and we need to be looking at times when people cannot fully participate at the levels that other peers are able to participate. And I hope I'm answering that question in the way that you intended it.

CINDY: Okay, well, it looks like most folks are, in fact, it's pretty much a three-way split though, isn't it? There's a tiny edge on what students are experiencing, but it doesn't seem like any one category is a category that folks don't want to go through. So, I'll just try to keep all this in mind as I move through. And please do, if I didn't answer your question in the way that you were hoping that I would, just send it in again. Maybe I just needed to understand it in a slightly different way. Well, let's move ahead here.

I want to start by defining some quick terms. And we are going to start with what accessibility is and this is a fabulous definition that's provided to us by Cynthia Woodell. And as you read it, you can see that what we're talking about here is just creating information in a way that's going to be available to the widest array of individuals. Now, that's not disability access, that's accessibility, period. If I had you all in front of me, I would ask a question of the group, and I would say, “What is something that a Web developer does every day of the week to enhance the accessibility?” — not disability access, but the overall accessibility — of their site? And I'm sure one of you in the room would raise your hand and say, and one of the tricks that Web developers use is to put in some code that into what they're doing on a page to make sure that that page looks as beautiful and renders as beautifully in Internet Explorer as well as in Netscape. And that is exactly the kind of stuff we're talking about here.

Now, we are going to focus on disability access, but, we're not talking about rocket science; we're talking about small little tricks of the trade, that developers can use to broaden what others can see. And in this context, and for this next hour or so, we'll be talking specifically about broadening all the information that developers create so that individuals with disabilities have access to it as well. There is — and this kind of goes back to the question — who does this affect? What groups are we talking about here?

We've got several major categories of individuals that can be disadvantaged by coming to a site that is not designed with their needs in mind, and let me just run through what some of these are. And certainly this isn't an all-inclusive — but it I think it's pretty inclusive of all the groups we're talking about. First and foremost, there are students — and, again, I'm going to remind everybody — and faculty and staff members — because we're not just talking in post-secondary ed just about the students, we're talking about, community members and a whole array of consumers that are coming to these sites. But people who have vision problems may have problems in an array of ways. The first would be those that are blind. Those folks are going to be using software that's going to read the screen to them. It's called a “screen reader.” And it's not going to read everything that you and I see. It'll read basically what's right behind the page, the code. It'll read the intelligent parts of the code that it can.

There are folks that have low vision. And those individuals typically will enlarge their screens so that they can get a better sense of, what content is on the screen. There can be some difficulties with that because, if folks have created an absolute width there may be relentless side-to-side scrolling. If people are creating with text that came from images instead of real text when it's blown up, it gets pixelated and it's almost unintelligible. So even in the low vision category, there are some really easy fixes for Web developers.

And then, finally, in the vision category is the largest category of individuals with vision problems in the world. And those are folks with color-blindness, and I bet you guys knew that before I even said it. Sometimes, and I shouldn't just pick on the developers, because as faculty members or whatever, we could all be guilty of this. For any of us that might use color alone to denote content, we could put people at a disadvantage that can't distinguish colors, one from another. So that represents the group of people with vision problems.

The next group are those with hearing impairments. And clearly, anyone, these days, that is placing multi-media content on the Web, they're likely placing in audio content as well. And you can understand if you were someone with a hearing impairment, if you just turned off your speakers, and tried to participate in a physics lecture or in fact, on our campus here, we have a new president who did an inaugural address and posted the video stream right off the front page of our site. If I was a student with a hearing impairment, I would've seen our president in his wonderful academic regalia and his mouth move, and that's it. There wasn't even a link to a transcript. So, here at Utah State, we even have a ton of work to do to do to make sure that our stuff is accessible.

PAT: And, Cindy, you're going to tell us about some software or some ways a little later in the conversation that can help people present transcripts.

CINDY: Absolutely. Yes. And yeah, this is kind of a very, very long and lengthy introductory screen, but it is important for folks to have a sense of what these groups represent and, at least, in terms of my conversation. But you're right. We'll come back to that. How folks can easily help students that — and staff members — that have hearing impairments get the content that they need.

PAT: Right.

CINDY: Another category are those with motor impairments, motor skills challenges. And again, with all of these categories, I'm not saying that everyone that has a difficulty, for example, with their motor skills will have problems on the Web. It's always a subset within that. There are folks, for example, with vision impairments that can do fine with just some minor adjustments. And same in this category. But this is a huge range of folks. I mean, here we're talking about anyone from, let's say, at one end of the spectrum you have people that don't have voluntary movement of any of their extremities, quadriplegics, like, let's say, Christopher Reeve, who, by the way, uses voice recognition and some other fantastic assistive technologies. You have individuals with cerebral palsy, who may not have the accuracy to use a mouse. You have people with neurologic conditions, Parkinson's, and other conditions where, again, accuracy may be a problem. They may not be able to hit a specific key or use a mouse. They may fatigue easily. So there is just an incredible array. We have a gentleman I work with that does not have functional use of his hands, and so he uses a mouth stick, a stick placed in his mouth and a track ball and that's how he gets around. And there are some things within that that make it very easy for him to search the Web, and others that are kind of pesky for him.

The next group is a group, I think, in post-secondary ed that is quite controversial and those are individuals with cognitive disabilities. And, in a way, this category is a very broad category and I'm even including in it individuals who probably would not say that they have cognitive disabilities, so much as they have different learning styles. Individuals with learning disabilities may just learn in other ways. But there are some ways that we can either make it easier or harder for folks that have traumatic head injury, that have true developmental delays, have learning disabilities, an array of problems. There are things we can do to help them get through our content on the Web and there are ways that we can really confuse them. Which, of course, is what we don't want to do.

I bet you guys may not have known that the content you place on the Web could actually send someone into a state of seizure, of course, with is something that none of us would want to do. There is a particular type of epilepsy — it's called photo epilepsy. And we would want to make sure hopefully, none of you are creating those nasty, annoying, flickering flashing banner ads or, flashing content on any of your pages, just because it's a disgusting practice to begin with; it has nothing to do with disability access.

PAT: Do you really strongly about this, Cindy? <laughing>

CINDY: I do feel strongly. And if I use a PC, I understand that, if you hit the escape keys, you can make things stop flashing, which is a cool tip for the rest of you. But I'm on a Mac, so that doesn't help me. But if you're flashing elements more than two cycles per second all the way up to fifty-five cycles per second, you could actually induce a seizure. So that's a real quickie. We probably don't have to say almost much more about that.

The last category, in a way, is a combination of all of these. As we age, guess what, kids? We all get vision problems and hearing problems and motor problems. I like to say that we have an opportunity right now to fix the problems of the Internet and its accessibility before we are eighty or ninety. And can you imagine? I mean, look at your own use of the Internet over the last five years. Can you imagine if we continue on this logarithmic scale, what a powerful influence it's going to be in your personal life by the time you're that old? And can you imagine all of a sudden not having the ability to use it? It would just be devastating. So we've got a chance right now to fix these problems, and we also have a chance, frankly, to help senior citizens in our community participate in some of the offerings of our programs or institutions on the Web.

Okay, now I've done this very extended introduction to the group. And I have prepared some simulations. And I know we're only going to probably have the time to go through, oh, one or two groups. So I'm going to ask everyone to look at this little quick slide poll that we have. If everyone would just go ahead and pick, if we did some simulations and you only could see one group of them today, what will that be? And go ahead and hit your “vote” button and we'll tally those. And in the meantime, I do want to make sure that everyone understands that all of these simulations are contained on the WCET site.

So most of you guys probably have this particular page minimized somewhere and you could bookmark that. So if we don't end up by going through the category that you're most interested in, please don't get disheartened or, leave this conference. We'll hopefully get to some other material that you'll find equally interesting.

We have a very clear winner. See, here in Utah, we're going through the Olympics and, everything's in terms of, how far off the mark you are. And we've got over half of you guys, 52% of you that want to see simulations on visual impairment. So we are going to do that, and then we'll see how our time is. And I can, kind of, speak to some of these others. All righty. Wow.

PAT: That's great. Well, Cindy, what's so wonderful about having this presentation today is that distance education makes higher education accessible to a population that may not have had access to the campus. And it's really important that we make sure that what we're doing in distance education is not locking people out.

CINDY: Absolutely. I spoke with a woman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and she had had, some early insult to her spinal column, she was in a motorized wheelchair and had quadriplegia. She said it was almost impossible during the winter months for her to get out independently because of the snow and the ice, and just the freezing temperatures. It was so much easier for her, not that she would necessarily want to lock herself away for months at a time, but it was certainly convenient for her, when she could participate in distance ed or in online offerings. So, that's certainly something that we've got to consider, that that population is out there, that those consumers are out there and they are wanting the educational opportunities that we have to offer. But certainly we have to make sure that they can all access them in a way that doesn't make ‘em nuts. So thanks for that comment. I couldn't agree with you more.

Let's cover the visual impairments. Now, when I linked a bunch of these simulations together I failed to think of one very important thing, which was, a lot of these simulations have audio content. And the problem is, as fabulous as this HorizonLive technology is, it is not possible for them to blend two audio streams into the same presentation. So let me talk to you a little bit about what I wanted to show you and then tell you where it is. You can go to get it yourself. Actually, Sue, if you can go ahead and pull up the University actually, wait a minute. I can do this within this, can't I, Sue? We've we talked about this.

SUE: So do you want to look at the screen reader simulations?

CINDY: Yes. What one of the simulations I have is, we created at WebAIM, we created this fake University of the Antarctic, and we have a screen reader simulation and the best thing that I can say is please do on, as you have the opportunity to do so, go back and play around with it. All the instructions are right there. But let's see.

SUE: Well, shall we just go ahead and launch it?

CINDY: Let's launch it. I'm not so sure that any of you guys are going to be able to hear the audio with this. But we'll give this a quick test. Okay.

SUE: Hmm. I'm just clicking away here, and I don't see it launch.

CINDY: Well, as you're trying to launch that, Sue, let me just keep kind of yabbering away here. What's important to keep in mind is that a screen reader is going to do its best to pull out the most intelligent information it can. But there are sometimes that it is totally confused about what it should read. So let me give you an example of that. Designers will typically design some beautiful pages that have navigation systems where the navigation itself is an image. Or, I should say a series of images.

SUE: Oh. Sorry, that didn't work.

CINDY: Okay. If the designer will go in and give that image a name, an alternative text tag, then the screen reader knows what to read. If it doesn't, sometimes it'll just read whatever it can. It might read "image," it might read the name of the file, "GIF.32," or it might read a coordinate, or a series of coordinates, off of the server. So let me give you a quick example of what a student might experience, and it looks like this isn't going to launch, huh, Sue?

SUE: I tried it both ways. Matt, are you listening? Can you think of another way to launch the WebAIM simulation?

MATT: You tried launching in a separate window?

SUE: Yes. Let me try it that way. I'm trying for the default window.

PAT: Cindy, for example, where we have buttons here, but they're also labeled, that would be a good solution.

CINDY: Well, actually, I don't know what these buttons are, probably, for example, the button that says "Lobby," that's probably all one big fat image. So a screen reader would not read "Lobby". The developer would have to go back and actually add in the alt tag for the screen reader.

PAT: I see.

CINDY: Because it's probably all one big fat image. And when that happens, it's very disorienting to users. You can have situations where the screen reader will say something like, “You're at the University of whatever, where would you like to go today? Image, image, image, image, or image?” Now you get to figure out what that all means. But sometimes, people will go to all the trouble of adding in an alternative text tag and they don't do it in a way that makes any sense. Clearly, you want to follow the function of the tag. So if it's a navigation button, you wouldn't want to tell the people where that link is going to take them, not necessarily, this is a green button that's done in 3-D that has the word "Home" on it. I mean, that's probably gratuitous.

CINDY: We had in our state one agency that will remain nameless, and bless his little heart, the developer went in and added alternative text tags into the main navigation of the site. In every instance, he was replacing a picture which was their navigation with the word "picture." So now the users to that site went in and they got to choose across these links, "picture, picture, picture, picture, and picture." You can see that that would not help an individual with vision problems figure out where to go.

SUE: I’ve been looking at the chat box, and it's come up for some people, but not others. So what I have done is I've just put in the chat box the URL for the WebAIM screen reader simulation.

CINDY: And of course, if you actually launch it, it'll probably throw you out of our broadcast, because it has its own audio element. I would encourage you to follow the instructions there. You will find links that just are disorienting to you. You'll also find places where, at a college campus, there would traditionally be long tables, like course catalogues, things like that, and as a table is read, in a linear fashion, it's a nightmare, it's a mess. So you just hear numbers being read one after another without any relationship to a column header or a row header. Which, of course, is how we orient ourselves as visual users. But go on your own time, go through some of those simulations, follow the directions. And you will need Flash for that. But I think it is a good simulation of what someone whose using a screen reader has to go through. Let me move on to “some sight” and so I'm wondering if, Sue, if we are unable to launch any of the simulations within the windows, because we have the low-vision simulation as well.

SUE: Right. People in the chat box are saying some have opened, others have not. Finally, it did open on my monitor so maybe I can continue to push out the sites, in the new window. If you're using a PC you can see what windows you have open. You may have a new window with the WebAIM site.

PAT: And in the chat box I see that we have someone who actually opens a workshop with the particular, I think, simulation that you've just been discussing, Cindy, and it appears to be very effective at getting participants frustrated.

CINDY: Well, we do our best here at WebAIM to make sure everyone's frustrated. <laughing>

PAT: Great.

CINDY: But we do have another simulation for folks that have low vision. Again, you can just follow the content, follow the information that we give you there and do the tasks that we outline and I can guarantee you that you will get frustrated. <laughing> But let me tell you another fabulous way to simulate having some sight. Now, oftentimes, with people with low vision, all that they need is to enlarge the screen. There is some assisted technology, ZoomText is one piece of assisted technology that will do that.

But there is a free downloadable browser, and that's Opera, and I know a lot of you guys pulled up, downloaded Opera. If you open just about any page in Opera, you have an option at the top right hand of the Opera window is a percent box. It should come up at 100%. But you could blow up your page to I think it's almost 1200%. Now, a rule of thumb, I heard once from a colleague that beyond about 600% enlarging a student would have the recommendation to be using a screen reader, so you don't have to go, like, to 900% or anything like that. But put one of your own pages in that and blow it up. And then scroll around. And if you have to scroll a lot from side to side, as well as up to down, you probably can understand how frustrating and disorienting that information is.

In addition, there are lots of times that we have choices as developers of using real text or using image text. And any time you blow up any kind of an image, whether it's image text or just an actual picture it's going to get pixelated and, after a while, you can't interpret what in heaven's name's all those little dots are. So some quick workarounds to help accommodate individuals that have vision, make sure you're not creating in fixed proportions, that you've got proportional width. Make sure to the extent possible, using real text, rather than text that's going to become highly pixelated when it's enlarged. So those are some things.

And let me just say, because we can't launch Opera right now, it is a fabulous little tool. Let me tell you a couple of other things I love about Opera. On the left hand side of Opera, right next to the address bar, just to the left of the address bar, are some little icons. And it will actually let you turn off images, turn off style sheets, and turn off colors. So if you hit all of those buttons, you'll actually see what your page would look like to, really, someone that's having to use some very stringent assisted technologies. And if you are losing content or if the content is not understandable under that format, that's going to tell you right away, really quickly, that you need to go back and fix it or have someone fix it for you. I love Opera. I know it's a browser, but around here, we actually use it as a quick testing tool for accessibility, because it does so much between blowing things up and turning off images and colors and style sheets. So check that out. I think people will be very, very interested in using that.

PAT: Cindy, one of the questions from the audience was do you have to use Opera to view the simulations or can you use other browsers?

CINDY: No. You can open the simulations in any browser.

PAT: Okay.

CINDY: You have to have Flash. You have to have MacroMedia Flash Player to play the simulations. And then you can get the free download at Opera.com and it's just a browser, so you just open a page in it and then play around with it. And I can guarantee you you'll go, “Oh, my, that's a mess. That's just not the way that I want it to be.”

PAT: Now, can you do that in Netscape and IE? Can you turn it off?

CINDY: I know that there are some preferences to enlarge things, but it doesn't have the functionality that Opera has.

PAT: That's one of the great things about Opera, then, that people that were concerned about accessibility need to look to Opera to use, right?

CINDY: Well, I think it's a great way to test your pages. I mean, you certainly wouldn't want to say to students with disabilities, “You have to use the Opera browser, because that's not the point.” But the point is, is that Opera allows people to have a real quick and dirty and cheap test of their own site. If they'd load their own page into that browser, into the Opera browser, and basically turn everything off that they can, then they're going to see what their site would really look like to, or what it would sound like, for example, to someone with a screen reader, or what it might be like to someone that is using a refreshable Braille display, things like that. So, let me move on now to color blindness, another simulation. And I don't know if this one will launch in the window or not. I wonder why this is getting so goofy on us, Sue?

SUE: I don't know.

CINDY: Well, let me tell you all what it is, okay? You just try to launch it. And what it'll do, it'll take us to a place within the University of the Antarctic, our pretend — hey, look at this, it works — our little pretend site, where we've got faculty and staff resources. Now, I think, as I scroll, you guys are all scrolling, and if not, everyone can scroll down to University holidays. Now, let's pretend that you don't have that red/green discrimination as many don't. In fact, I bet someone out there in our audience right now is color blind. But let's say that you need to figure out whether tomorrow, February 14th, is a day that you have off. You can see where the problem is. You can see that these folks which let's remember that's us here at WebAIM, these folks use color alone to denote content. Now, what would be other ways to do that? Well, we could have had an asterisk next to one of the two. Faculty holidays would have an asterisk, and the other ones wouldn't. Faculty and staff wouldn't. Then we would clearly know, because of the use of something other than color where the content is changing.

On subway maps, they don't just say — or I should say, good subway maps — don't just say “red line, green line, blue line,” in the key and then have a colored map. If so, people that are color blind are really toast. Most good subway maps actually right on the line itself would say “green line,” so that you can see where it's going, or they put in the key with triangles and circles and squares. So again, the easy fix for individuals that have color blindness is just make sure you don't ever use color alone to denote an important content item. And I'm excited that that one loaded, Sue.

SUE: Some people may find that the site is open by looking down in the toolbar at the bottom of their screen.

CINDY: Well, I do hope that people have an opportunity to go to the simulation for the screen reader and the simulation for the low vision. I am very aware of the fact that it's about quarter to now and I am going to have to clip along and go all the way to the section that begins with legal implications, Sue.

SUE: Yes.

CINDY: I'll push forward. I would reiterate, I prepared a variety of simulations that cover each of these categories. So please, after the presentation, go to that site, go through those and I do believe that you'll have an opportunity to feel the frustrations that our students and faculty and staff feel when sites aren't designed with their needs in mind.

Now, before we start in on this section, the legal section, I would really just want to ask people to think about the reasons that they would design accessibly other than legal. Now this is a rhetorical question, so I'm not going to ask you to poll, but I do want you to think about that for just a second. Now, hopefully, in your thinking, what you're saying to yourself is, “Well, you know what? I would design accessibly because it's just the right thing to do. It’s fair. You know, we want to treat everybody as equal as possible, we want as many individuals as possible to fully participate in everything that we do.”

Now, to me, that kind of ethical/moral argument is the trump card: it's always going to be the reason that I would choose to do that. For other people, that may not be the reason that they design accessibly, however, they might do so because they recognize it's the smart thing to do. That economics are such that if you design with people with disabilities in mind, you end up with more tuition. You end up with greater student credit hours. You end up with people that can use new and emerging technologies, for example, handhelds, Palm Pilots, Hand Visors, things like that, to get content. Or maybe even wireless Web cell phones. That's the next wave of what's going to happen, and the fact is, is that those sites, those institutions, that have figured out how to create their content in an accessible way, will now be compatible with these emerging technologies.

So there really are a ton of reasons to design accessibly above and beyond the legal aspects. However, that's what we're going to be talking about right now, is how the law supports accessibility. I've got a slide here that just briefly covers some of the major aspects of the law. What I want to mention is that we've got two important sections: Section 504 and Section 508 of the Rehab Act that support this. Now, I'm going to talk about this in a minute, so hang on to any questions you have about this. We've also got the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now, let me tell everybody that, at this point in time, we do not know for a fact whether the ADA supports accessibility of the Internet. The word Internet did not appear in the statutory language, and we have yet to have a federal court ruling on that aspect of the law.

Now, with that said, I can tell you that there have been a number of lawsuits that have gone in for example, the National Federation for the Blind sued America Online for its failure to provide an accessible platform. AOL smartly settled out of court and a lot of other people are settling out of court, too. Which is a problem, because we're not ending up with final case rulings of how this is all going to play out.

With that said, I can also tell you that we've had responses, for example, Senator Tom Harkin wrote to the Attorney General to ask if they believed that the Internet would be subsumed under ADA. And the response was that if it meets the public accommodations definition, which is part of Title 2 of the ADA, and that talks about — a public accommodation is a place of employment, a place of entertainment, a place of commerce — if it meets that definition, then they would assume that it would be. And again, it's not been tested, but you can't tell me that the Internet isn't, at this point in time, a place of public accommodation. I have a feeling, and it's just my opinion, but it is also the opinion of a lot of other people, that once this actually hits the federal court system, it will be supported under the ADA. But it's imperative that all of you out there listening today understand that it is not currently the law. So if someone were to come to you with an ADA complaint, you'd have a lot more latitude.

The others that I have listed there: the Telecommunications Act supports it under Section 255 in terms of hardware; and we've also got some responses out of Department of Education Office of Civil Rights that would support this, as well. Let's move real quickly into Section 504 and 508 of the Rehab Act, which I think is where an awful lot of you would have some questions or comments. As you read the statutory language out of Section 504, you can see that it is very clear the intent of the federal government would not be to or it would be to make sure that everyone can participate and that no one is going to be disadvantaged in terms of their education from any program receiving federal financial assistance. So to be quite frank, although there has been a lot of press recently on Section 508, which we'll talk about in a minute, Section 504 has always — always — been there to protect students' access to online classes.

Now, with that said, those are students that do need to make sure that they make themselves known to the Disability Resource Center on campus; they can't just wander into a class and say, "Hey, you know, this isn't accessible." But campuses do have an obligation to make sure that they are working ahead of the curve on that stuff, and not leaving someone behind. And might I add that we're not just talking about classes in this context. Think of all the things that students do at your institution. Do they register online? Can they get transcripts online? How about financial aid? What about housing? Do they have opportunities to buy athletic tickets or cultural event tickets online? Think of all the places where you may have discriminatory practices and you may not even be thinking about it in that vein. I would say that we need to press forward to make sure that the entire architecture of our institution or our program's website is fully accessible. And it's not that tough of a road to hoe. It's more an organizational and coordination nightmare than it is an actual technical one.

PAT: Well, now that people are creating so many new student services on the Web, that this is an ideal time to look at these issues up front.

CINDY: Absolutely. Absolutely. You're right. Because if they're thinking about it on the front side, then they're not going to be in a place where they're going to have to retrofit it later. Absolutely. Let me go briefly, because now we're into about five minutes to, here, and I want to make sure I get through this, how you guys can use your little polling buttons here real quickly — how many of you have heard about Section 508? Section 508 — we'll let everyone either hit the “yes” or the “no” buttons and see how many of you have. And I ask this question, because an awful lot of folks are getting very nervous and very worried about what the new Section 508 regulations could mean for them. And the numbers are just pouring in. It looks to me like we've got an awful lot of folks that have heard about it. I'm going to move ahead, Sue, even though some folks are still coming in on this.

SUE: Okay.

CINDY: Yeah, that's a lot. That really is. What's important to know is that Section 508 of the Rehab Act of 1997 — Re-authorized Rehab Act — it covers the accessibility of all electronic information technology. They call that EIT, and the Web is one piece of it. So this is the Web we're talking now the subset, because it covers printers, fax machines, anything that can convey information in electronic format would be covered under Section 508.

Now, what's important to remember is that this deals solely with the federal government. So a federal agency cannot procure goods or services that are not fully accessible. So Department of Commerce, Department of Education, all of these places are now bound by making sure that, if they contract out for, let's say, Web services, that those are fully accessible. If they buy hardware, those have to be fully accessible. And it makes sense, because they want to make sure that the citizens, the taxpayers, can have equal access into what it is that they do. And that took effect this last summer, in June.

Now, why is Section 508 such a big darn deal? Well, there's at least three reasons why it has risen in prominence and in people talking about it. To begin with, Section 508 provides the first federal definition of what Internet accessibility means. And again, now, I'm backing off, there's the big, broader 508, and then there's our little tiny piece which is what does it have to say about the Web? 508 has sixteen specific, clearly defined standards around what makes an accessible website per this federal government's distinction. It also provides language that is so specific that, frankly, people could start monitoring compliance at a distance. It used to be the Feds would have to, like, make site visits. Well, now they can do a lot of this stuff remotely. They can look at your site to determine whether you're in compliance or not.

The other reason that Section 508 is such a big deal right now is that all fifty states, right now, take monies under what is called the Assisted Technology Act, or the Tech Act. For a state to receive that money, they signed or the appropriate entity in the state signed assurances and those assurances are saying things like, “We promise to you, the federal government, that we will follow Equal Opportunity hiring practices, that we assure you that we will keep our books in such a way that comply with federal auditing procedures.” And it also says, “And we promise to you, the federal government, that we will comply with all of the Section 508 regulations as a state entity.” So now you can kind of see why there is a lot of confusion and a lot of conversation about Section 508. Because of the state Tech Act, your state has assured the federal government that it will comply with Section 508.

We now know Section 508 deals with accessibility to all electronic information technology, including the Web. Now, here in Utah, higher education is part of state government. So not only would I say that we would be compelled under Section 504, but we might also be compelled under Section 508. And I have a feeling that, at some point in the very near future, that's going to be tested and we'll just have to wait and see on that. Let's see. We can actually skip the next couple of slides, Sue, just because I am running short of time. Let's go to what folks can do to help.

SUE: Okay.

CINDY: And because I bet that we end up with some more questions on this. By the way, the content that you would be missing here are the exceptions to 508 and just further clarification of what I said, but hopefully I'm making sense as I go along.

PAT: Well, and all of those slides will be on the WCET site so folks can look at them later.

CINDY: Yes. Well, let's look at what is it that you out there could be doing to help this situation. And I haven't even really had an opportunity to talk about how horrible it is. Current data suggests that very few sites in higher education, in post-secondary education, are fully accessible if you're going to cut across whenever you're talking about accessibility, you always have to ask the question, “Accessible to whom?" Because different groups of consumers have different needs. But if you're going to talk about full accessibility across the range, we have horrendous rates of very inaccessible sites.

But how you could help address the problem — the problem at your own institution — first and foremost would be to become an advocate at your institution. To make sure that people know that you are aware of this problem and that you want to work towards a solution. Clearly, to the extent that you learn more about accessibility, you're going to be in a position to help. Very few institutions, for example, have express and specific policies that cover Web accessibility. Well, maybe you are in the perfect position to sit on a task force, to institute a task force, to go to your president and talk to him or her about the importance of having an institutional policy that is set and that is clear to everybody.

And then finally, I would say that one of the best things that you could do is make a commitment to creating accessible content in whatever domain you have control over. If you're a faculty member and you have a class, even if you don't develop all the content, make sure that the person that helps you can do it in a way that's accessible. If you have a department or a whole program, be aggressive and be an advocate for the need to create things accessibly within your own sphere of influence or sphere of power. I think that those are really the elements that are key in helping to solve this horrendous problem.

But I'm going to hush up now. At the end of the slides here, I had several pages of resources, of URLs you might want to check out. But let me just touch for a bit and see if we've got some questions that have come in and in what ways I can just engage in conversation here.

PAT: And, Cindy, while some of those questions are coming in, one of the comments you had the other day when we were talking — was it was some statistics about the number of higher education pages that are really accessible to students with disabilities. Can you talk a little bit about that?

CINDY: Yes, I can, and this is data that we've been collecting here at WebAIM. Of course, when we started, we were hoping that our baseline data would be improving each year. We're in the third year of a four-year project. Now, not that we could claim if the data got better that it was because of us, but we would certainly feel better about ourselves, <laughing> even though we couldn't necessarily take credit for it.

But in every year we do a large scale sample — I mean hundreds and hundreds of institutions — and what we're finding in year three, and, of course, we started this as pilot data, so we now have four years of data, and the data are pretty stable, it's less than 25%. One in four home pages of, again, randomly selected colleges and universities, so we are mixing up the small private colleges and the big, Carnegie research-intensive universities, mixing everybody up, all together in one big bag, but less than a quarter of them, one in four, would be fully accessible to individuals with disabilities. Now, the troubling thing is that, as you go off the home page — because, of course, we're assuming, if people are really paying attention, they're going to spend the most energy on that front door, on the home page of their program or institution — level one links off that site, it drops to, like, 9%.

PAT: That's just amazing.

CINDY: It's just horrendous. And what I had mentioned to you the other day, Pat, is that very few students go to a single page. The whole power of the Internet is its interconnectivity. And think, if you will, of trying to get around the Web if three out of every four pages you tried to get to you got a 404 error or something like “file not found." Or somehow you couldn't actually get to the page. It's unlikely that you'd get to your destination.

CINDY: ... beyond the frustrations that we can create for folks on single pages, we are really putting them at a disadvantage for getting around the Web and learning to use the power of the Web because so much of it is a mess.

PAT: Right. I think one of the simulations that was the most eye-opening for me was the one you had us do the other day where we were using only our keyboard to move around the Internet and taking maybe forty or fifty tabs to get from one page to another.

CINDY: Right.

PAT: I was just amazed.

CINDY: Right. And folks will find that under the motor disabilities simulation. And again, I would just want to reiterate that so many of the kinds of fixes that at WebAIM we're advocating that developers do, it's not rocket science. And, in fact, 99% — now, this isn't empirical, I made this figure up — 99% of the folks we talk to, the developers we talk to, their comments are, “Hey, we can do this. We never thought about it, you know.”

PAT: Right.

CINDY: “This is important work. And yeah, we can get this done.” So we're meeting up with any resistance really, it's just something that people haven't had on their radar up until recently.

SUE: Okay. Well, Cindy, I saw a good question come through. “What would you suggest are some of the best ways to spend money?” Or how do you prioritize where you spend your money to make your sites accessible?

CINDY: Well, I think that it's important for people to recognize that and I'm making an assumption here that we're talking about something more than one site, that we're actually talking about the complexity of a program site or an institution site, or what have you, and I think that the most important place to be putting resources at this time is at the promise of system level change.

So I think step one of all of this is to bring together the stakeholders, the faculty members, the technical people, the administrators, people from disability resource centers or students and staff that have disabilities, to come up with what that institution or what that program's definition of accessibility will be. Now, maybe it'll be under Section 508, maybe they'll decide, “Oh, we'll use these sixteen federal standards.” Maybe it'll be under the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium guidelines. Maybe they'll use Priority One or Two to define accessibility. But, the place to start with resources is to know how you're going to define accessibility and then to start the process of implementing the system change efforts, so that people receive training, so that there is a system of accountability or of monitoring or something. Because if you don't do it that way, you end up with just this kind of haphazard happenstance people throwing money at, like, one site here and one site there, and then what do you do when that Web developer moves on to private industry?

That's another little study we did within WebAIM, we did a quick survey of, oh, it was over six thousand webmasters in higher ed, and most of them had been in their position for under two years. We have a huge, huge turnover rate of highly technical and skilled professionals in higher education. So if you are thinking that you want to throw money at training individual people, then what do you do when they leave?

And by the way, we do not have curricula in post-secondary ed to train people to design accessibly. Talk to your colleagues that are right now teaching the courses in HTML, XML, whatever, do they actually require that products that come in are accessible? Do those students leave with the mastery skills to be able to design accessibly? If the answer is yes, you are in a very unique position and that faculty member should get a big fat star or kiss on the lips or something. But very few are. So we're creating this system that is going to perpetually create folks that don't understand this phenomenon. So, again, to summarize and answer your question, I think where I would prioritize any money that I had at an institution or a department would be to create a system level change that could be perpetuated.

PAT: Cindy, I know you have a lot of resources up here in this slide and we talked about maybe providing people with some solutions for captioning or creating transcripts. Could you maybe talk a little bit about those?

CINDY: I would want to just remind folks of all the different resources we have on the WebAIM site. For example, if you wanted to learn how to post PowerPoint slides in a way that's accessible, if you wanted to know what you do with PDF files or other kinds of plug-ins, how to make them more accessible, we have tutorials like that on the Web. For folks that are using HTML editors like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, we have stuff on our site that shows you how to maximize the accessibility of those editors and where the whole system falls apart and where you're actually going to have to get behind the code and fix it on your own. In terms of things like BlackBoard and WebCT we've got information on those course management tools. Again, how you can maximize their accessibility and where things fall apart.

What you're asking about, Pat, is on the captioning and there really are some fabulous resources. I would want everybody to make sure that they have an opportunity to go to NCAM, the National Center for Accessible Media, out of WGBH in Boston. They have wonderful resources, they have free downloadable software. There's one called Magpie and it enables you to do captioning in a very efficient, very quick way.

And in fact, I'm going to tell you about a process that I heard about from Norm Coombs, who is the CEO of EASI — Equal Access to Software Information. If any of you guys are familiar with a piece of software called Dragon, you'll know that that's a voice recognition piece of software. And what they've done out at EASI, which is so slick, let's say we've got a twenty-minute audio tape that we want to caption, a videotape that we want to caption. They have someone out there on their staff who has trained his voice to Dragon and he puts an earpiece in his ear and he listens to the audio message and he speaks it into the computer. And then within about oh, let's say thirty minutes, he now has a Dragon dictated text screen in front of him and since he's just been through it, now he can go back and kind of clean it up for any errors, because there will be some errors.

Now, it's been about a half an hour or maybe, thirty-five or forty minutes, he can pull all of this text down into Magpie and what's so wonderful is he'll end up by just putting some hard returns between, like, the logical breaks where he'd want it to be captioned, and as he imports all of this into Magpie — this is the coolest thing — he starts the video or the audio and every time he wants a new captioning element to be put in all he has to do is hit tab. So tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, as it's moving along and Magpie will import both the text and the time code, which is the — that was always the labor-intensive part was that darn time code— and within a little bit over an hour, you have a fully captioned twenty-minute audio segment. I mean, it's just incredible.

It used to be that looking at stuff like this was just too labor-intensive. But if you've got someone that's trained to voice recognition, if you've got free downloadable Dragon, you don't even have to look at high-speed transcriptionist which, of course, could also do the same job for you.

PAT: And project EASI is one of your resources that we have on another slide.

CINDY: Yes, EASI has been doing that as kind of a little sideline, but that's for any of you that have a lot of audio you may want to check out the feasibility of using, the system that they've been working on. Other people are doing similar things, as well. But I guess the point that I would want to make is that even really difficult things — and I would think simultaneous captioning would be one of those difficult things— with just a little ingenuity it's now doable. It's now no longer something that's an undue burden and that people just couldn't conceive of getting done.

PAT: Cindy, on behalf of WCET, I want to thank you for a wonderful presentation today, and I know you've prepared many materials and resources which Sue has put up on the WCET site, so that people can go and visit the simulations and find out more about the resources, and about your project. So thanks so very much for being here today.

CINDY: Well, you bet. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to so many folks. You have quite an audience out there.

PAT: That's right. And we're very pleased that they could be here and share some information. I would like to announce our next webcast, but ask Cindy to stick around for a little longer, as you might get a few more questions. Our next webcast will be on March 13th at noon, Mountain Time, and Bill Haid who is the Executive Director of Enrolment Services at Colorado State University will talk about the role of the student information system in designing personalized student services. And he will go over FERPA regulations and some of the other issues that people who are beginning to build these systems that integrate data across both student services and the registration system student information system, need to think about. So we'll look forward to that presentation. And now we're going to take just a couple of minutes and ask that you respond to the evaluation that Sue has put up here on the screen because your comments help us design future presentations that better fit your needs. So if you'll take just a minute or two and respond to this evaluation, we'd really appreciate it.

MATT: Right, and I just wanted to again thank everyone as always for logging on. And there will be an archive, of course, of this presentation. I'll e-mail you all the archive link in a few moments. And of course, Cindy, I want to thank you for your first presentation on HorizonLive. I think it was a smashing performance.

CINDY: Oh, thank you.