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Summary of WWW8 Developer's Day Track - Accessibility: Software and Design

Internetworking
by Linda Tauscher
June, 1999

Accessibility was a thread throughout the 8th International WWW Conference. The topic was raised during various panels, plenary talks, and paper presentations that did not have accessibility as their main focus. The most in-depth treatment of accessibility occurred at a Developer's Day track devoted to the topic. The theme was "Software and Design" with five presentations focused on software, and four focused on design. The purpose of this article is to summarize the highlights of these presentations. Links to the actual talks are included where available at the time of writing. Also, a list of links to the software, specifications and organizations discussed are provided at the end of the article. Jutta Treviranus organized this session and heads the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto. She reminded us that, "Accessibility in Web design makes good design, business, and legal sense." It is hoped that this information will assist those of us in the design, usability, and development communities to realize this goal.

Presentations

Special Needs solutions and accessibility for the Web and Java

Phil Jenkins (pjenkins@us.ibm.com)
Kim Stephens (kstephens@us.ibm.com)
IBM

Phil Jenkins began this presentation by defining five major disability issues: blindness, low vision, colorblindness; impaired mobility; deafness and hardness of hearing; attention / reading impairment; and combinations of these. He then discussed why accessibility is important. Two particularly salient points he made were:

  • All users have a range of disabilities" when one considers environment, task or life stage
  • Accessible design benefits all." For example, from a software development point-of-view, making a product keyboard-accessible facilitates automated testing of the product. Also, accessibility improves design.

The majority of Phil's presentation was devoted to IBM's Self-Voicing Kit (SVK), which enables the automatic speaking of Java applications. The SVK consists of a development kit and the IBM Access Engine, a new technology that exploits the accessibility features found in the Java Foundation Classes (JDK 1.1 with Swing, or Java 2). Phil demonstrated several products that use the SVK. One of these was the application version of the Bobby Web page accessibility analyzer. When the user adds the SVK to the Bobby application, Bobby will speak aloud as the user interacts with it.

Kim Stephens demonstrated IBM's Home Page Reader (HPR), a talking Web browser. It requires IBM's ViaVoice OutLoud text-to-speech speech synthesizer (provided with HPR), Netscape Navigator, and Microsoft Windows. HPR is able to recognize and speak Web page content in six different languages (though the product itself is only available in English at the moment). The keypad is used to interact with it. Kim also reviewed some of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Content Accessibility Guidelines that would improve the browsing experience for visually impaired users.

Both the SVK and HPR can be used by developers, designers and usability specialists to hear how Java applications or Web pages will actually work for visually impaired users. For example, when I added an item to my shopping cart at a major online grocery site with HPR, I had difficulty interpreting the next page that appeared. While the page did confirm that "This item has been added to your cart" and gave the product name, the purpose of the page wasn't clear. Both the update total and remove item image buttons were spoken as "submit button". Also, the okay image button, which is intended to be an active link, appeared as "continue" text. Because it uses a Javascript close function, HPR does not consider it a link; I had to activate HPR's Back function to leave the page.

Influencing Product Direction: Tips from the Front Lines

Bruce Roberts (bruce_roberts@lotus.com)
Lotus
(see paper)

Bruce Roberts has several years of experience developing and architecting software. He created Lotus FastSite and worked on Lotus Freelance Graphics. Bruce gave us some great suggestions for influencing product direction. First, you've got to understand the development life cycle as your success in having new features incorporated will be greatest while the feature set is being designed. Second, very often one person is most influential in designing product features. Find that "center of power" and try to convince them about the need for the features you want to see. Bruce's third suggestion centered around appealing to basic human instincts; his categorization was based upon the seven deadly sins and included such pearls as:

  • Avarice / greed: show how your idea can increase revenue
  • Envy: show that competitors have implemented the idea or that they plan to
  • Lust: show how the feature is neat/cool/flashy
  • Pride: convince the team that the features will make the product better
  • Fear: show how product will get bad press or customers will complain without these features

But in the end, Bruce believes that the best way to influence product direction is to cultivate personal relationships with the product team.

SoftQuad and Accessibility

Roberto Drassinower (roberto@softquad.com)
SoftQuad

Roberto reminded us that SoftQuad's commitment to accessibility can be traced back to one of its co-founders, Yuri Rubinsky. Yuri was an accessibility advocate. In 1992 he founded the International Committee on Accessible Document Design (ICADD) initiative. The Yuri Rubinsky Foundation was established in 1996 to carry on his work.

HoTMetaL PRO is an HTML authoring tool that has two main accessibility focuses: the accessibility of HoTMetal software itself, and the accessibility of the Web pages that it creates. Roberto described the accessibility features available in the latest version of HoTMetaL PRO (5.0) that address these focuses:

  • Visual Dynamic Keyboard: a technology that provides support for alternative pointing devices for users who are unable to use traditional keyboard and mouse devices; includes a word prediction feature that speeds up text entry by predicting which word a user is typing
  • Screen Enhancer: provides "functional magnification" by increasing font sizes rather than merely creating enlarged bit maps of the area
  • Accessibility Prompting: reminds you when to add alternate text to image tags, or when you've selected element attributes like background colors that may make it difficult for people with disabilities to view your site
  • Check Accessibility option: allows you to review your markup for inaccessible elements before you publish your site

Note that HoTMetaL PRO 5.0 predates the release of the WAI Content Accessibility Guidelines, so the product does not incorporate all of the guidelines. SoftQuad has updated the software and are planning integration. Also, version 5.0 corrects a problem in version 4.0 whereby a screen reader was unable to find the cursor.

User/Client/Friend Design Source Importance

William Loughborough (love26@gorge.net)
(see paper)

William Loughborough has worked with visually impaired people for over 30 years. He is also a member of several WAI Working Groups. William's essay provides advice about how to prepare Web content that is accessible and usable. He advocates not only following the WAI Content Accessibility Guidelines but also hiring "blind people and others with disabilities to supervise you in your work." This essay is destined to become a classic within the Web accessibility field. It deserves to be read in its entirety!

Accessibility without Compromise

David Grogan (dgrogan@cast.org)
Sheela Sethuraman (ssethuraman@cast.org)
Centre for Applied Special Technology (CAST)
(see paper)

David Grogan is a Web Developer at CAST. He gave us some background about CAST, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology. CAST's major initiatives include product development and applied research. They refer to their vision as "Universal Design for Learning" (UDL). This vision goes beyond providing information access to supporting the processing of information, planning ahead for diverse user needs, and designing for accessibility at the outset. UDL has several implications for Web technology: multiple modes of representation, audience appropriate readability, meaningful and consistent navigation, and meaningful and alternative representations. David also discussed several myths of accessible Web pages e.g. that they are dull/boring, plain text or that authoring is expensive and time consuming.

Sheela Sethuraman is a member of the product development team at CAST. She demonstrated Bobby, a Web page accessibility checker. Bobby 3.1 is an implementation of the W3C's WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Techniques. Currently Bobby supports the W3C Recommendation released on May 5, 1999. These guidelines have been organized into three levels of priority. Priority 1 items are mandatory for baseline accessibility. Bobby isn't capable of checking all of these items though it does present a list of manual checks that you should perform. Both the automatic and manual Priority 1 checks must be passed in order to obtain Bobby Approved status. Bobby also performs a browser compatibility check to identify HTML invalid for particular browsers, and estimates page and image download times for a 28.8 Kbps modem.

An important goal of Bobby is to educate developers about accessibility. Bobby lists errors and manual checks by their priority. Each guideline is linked to a page that describes it in detail, explains why it is important to follow, and gives concrete examples for implementing the guideline. For example, the "update total / remove item" page on the online grocery site that I visited with HPR contains a Priority 1 error: it does not provide alternative text for image-type buttons in forms. Bobby also explained that this alt text should explain the function of the graphic, and described the types of users (blind people) and user agents (text-based browsers, screen readers, Web browsers with image-loading turned off) that are affected. Finally, Bobby gave an example of how to repair the problem and test it: "A good test to determine if alternative text is useful is to imagine reading the document aloud over the telephone. What would you say upon encountering this image to make the page comprehensible to the listener?"

Recent Developments in Accessible Web-based Multimedia

Madeleine Rothberg (madeleine_rothberg@wgbh.org)
WGBH

Madeleine Rotherberg is an Project Director at WGBH, a public television station in Boston. WGBH invented closed captioning 25 years ago. In 1990 they developed a Descriptive Video Service that adds additional narration about the video's key visual elements into natural pauses during the dialogue. Madeleine discussed captioning and description functionality in four different software applications: QuickTime, RealPlayer G2, Windows Media Player, and Magpie.

QuickTime was the first video technology to incorporate captions and descriptions. The Text Track feature can display a caption in a separate box below the video or on top of the video; the Find command can be used to search these captions making them a useful indexing mechanism. This feature was introduced in version 2 for the Macintosh and version 3 for Windows. QuickTime also contains extended descriptions; because it is digital video, the video can be paused if necessary to fully play these descriptions.

RealPlayer G2 can play SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) documents. SMIL can be authored to play a captions file if the client has captions turned on in their SMIL player. Descriptions are always turned on.

Microsoft's Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI) file format specification permits closed captions to be added to audio, video or animations. The SAMI source file is played through the Windows Media Player. This technology is used to display closed captions in Encarta Encyclopedia 98. Audio descriptions can be played with a few scripting tricks.

Madeleine also demonstrated a media access authoring tool, called MAGpie, currently under development at the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). MAGpie will provide authoring support for transcribing or pasting in a caption script, formatting of text, insertion of timecode cues, insertion of audio descriptions, keyboard control of the multimedia player, diagnostics and playback of the finished product. MAGpie can output captions in a variety of formats including SAMI, SMIL, and QuickTime. MAGpie will be available free from NCAM's Web site in July. It is designed to be accessible.

Incorporating Universal Accessibility

Robert Neff (robert.neff@usmint.treas.gov)
US Mint

Robert Neff is the Branch Chief, Technical Service and Intranet Project Manager for the US Mint. His talk addressed issues in implementing Universal Accessibility (UA) in the corporate and government office. First, Robert noted that there are no standards for Web site compliance testing, and the testing process is complicated by the fact that there are 20 different browsers available. Second, there is a lack of funds and resources to redesign sites for accessibility, and revise documentation. Sites are content driven with new content each day. Also, senior management does not understand UA nor the level of effort required to redesign a site. In terms of resources, it is difficult to find people that know how to design for accessibility. Third, there is a lack of education and outreach to the Web community within the corporate or government office. Grass roots efforts should be used to ensure that designers, developers, and managers understand how people with disabilities interact with their Web sites. Fourth, there are issues of definition such as what constitutes "reasonable accommodation." Finally, there are legal issues - could a site be subject to a law suit?

Robert then described a life-cycle development process that he is implementing at the US Mint to ensure that its Web sites are functional, usable, and accessible. The process follows the Capability Maturity Model, a software process management approach that describes of how software organizations "mature" or improve in their ability to develop software. Robert's process has distinct planning, requirements definition, design, and testing phases. It will utilize HTML validation tools (W3C HTML Validator, StarBase's StarSweeper), and usability testing. Accessibility validation will be performed with Bobby. Sites will also be tested with screen readers (JAWS for Windows), and voice browsers such as pwWebSpeak.

Keyboard Only Access

Alan Cantor (acantor@interlog.com)
Cantor + Associates
(see paper)

Alan Cantor presented a paper that evaluated the accessibility and usability of keyboard-only access to Windows 95, 98 and NT. This research is based upon insights that he collected from his clients who are attempting to use keyboard-only techniques (Alan is a workplace accommodation consultant). Alan concludes that while the Windows keyboard-only interface is basically accessible, it is not usable. It does boost productivity once it is mastered, but it is hard to learn, hard to remember, produces unnecessary errors and does not promote user satisfaction.

Alan suggested several ways to improve the mouseless interface: the various functional, navigational, and visibility-related problems should be corrected; the set of keyboard shortcuts should be expanded; software developers should create keyboard equivalents for mouse-intensive tasks.

Alan concluded with three design principles to ensure good keyboard-only access: ensure that important information (especially the focus) is conspicuously visible, ensure that all aspects of the interface can be reached as easily with the keyboard, and ensure that all features are as easy to use with or without a mouse.

Alan circumvents many of the problems with keyboard-only accessibility by writing customized macros and Visual Basic procedures for his clients. He also offers training courses in this area.

Authoring Tool Support

Jan Richards (jan.richards@utoronto.ca)
Anastasia Cheetam (a.cheetam@utoronto.ca)
Joseph Scheuhammer (clown.scheuhammer@utoronto.ca)
University of Toronto

Jan Richards discussed the three main features that a Web authoring tool must support in order to make creating accessible documents easier for authors. First, authors need to know why they should change current practices, how to do so, and what the result will be. Second, accessibility should be integrated into the authoring process. Third, the authoring tool should perform automated checking for accessibility problems, and provide correction assistance.

With these design goals in mind, the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto has developed the A-Prompt (Accessibility Prompt) Toolkit, a software module that may be integrated into HTML editing applications. Anastasia Cheetham demonstrated the Windows DLL version while Joseph Scheuhummer demonstrated the Java Bean. A-Prompt has two modes of operation: it can validate HTML as it is entered by the user, or it can validate an entire file. When operating in the former mode, the A-Prompt validator module is sent HTML elements from the editor as they are entered. If A-Prompt detects accessibility problems with the HTML element it will display a "wizard" that prompts the user to create accessible HTML The wizard dialog box presents three types of information:

  • Concern: the guideline that has been violated
  • Guidelines: suggestions for why and how to eliminate the concern
  • Repair: actual text to insert into the file to correct the concern

The future version of A-Prompt will be able to convert a server-side image map to a client-side image map, convert a table, and maintain an alt text registry.

Links

Additional WWW8 resources addressing accessibility
Software
Specifications / Documentation
Web sites

NCAM News


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