Accessibility in a Digital Age 1.5

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:19:02 -0500

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/accessibility-in-a-digital-age-1-5/37141?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Accessibility in a Digital Age 1.5

November 7, 2011, 3:00 pm

By George Williams

Welcome to the latest installment of “Accessibility in a Digital Age,” a roundup of links concerned with how to create and use digital resources that are accessible to all people.

Dey Alexander has written a great multi-part series on “Accessibility for Web Writers” for 4Syllables.

Meanwhile, Karl Groves is writing a series concerned with “the Business Case for Accessibility.”

The a11y Bugs Project is “a grass roots advocacy effort to identify and fix bugs that undermine accessibility on the web.” (Puzzled by what a11y means? “Accessibility is often abbreviated to the numeronym a11y, where the number 11 refers to the number of letters omitted.”)

Matthew Lasar of Ars Technica asks “Will copyright hamper IP closed captioning?”

Writing for Media Access Australia, Scott Hollier explains that when it comes to captioning online video, “It’s not as hard as you think.”

Greg Kraus has published “HTML 5 Video, Text Tracks, and Audio Descriptions Made Easy (or at least easier)” at the NC State University IT Accessibility Blog.

Over at WebAIM, Jon Whiting describes his experience using speech-recognition software in “Assistive Technology Experiment: Dragon NaturallySpeaking.”

The DAISY Consortium has announced the release of the latest version of Obi, “an open source software tool for creating DAISY compliant audio books.” (As their homepage explains, “The DAISY Consortium develops, maintains and promotes international DAISY [Digital Accessible Information System] Standards.”)

CodeFactory has released an Android app for AT&T called Mobile Accessibility Lite, which is designed to “enable people who are blind or experience vision loss to get more out of their Android powered handsets.”

Dan Stringer, of the Humanising Technology Blog helps us “[Understand] the purpose of an image using alt text.”

AppleVis, a site “for vision impaired iOS users,” has launched a “Campaign of the Month” series: “Each month we will select an app that currently has accessibility issues, and ask you all to contact its developers and encourage them to improve VoiceOver support.”

Writing for the Yahoo Accessibility Blog, Ted Drake shares “An Introductory Set of Accessible Mobile Applications.”

IBM recently piloted a mobile app to meet people’s transportation needs: “The Access My N.Y.C. pilot app integrated geo-location and mapping technologies with transportation/POI (Point of Interest) accessibility data and demonstrated how such an app can help people.”

A recent episode of 60 Minutes features “Apps for Autism.”

The Mozilla Developers’ Network provides an extremely detailed set of resources about ARIA: “Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), defines ways to make Web content and Web applications (especially those developed with Ajax and JavaScript) more accessible to people with disabilities.”