Archive for the ‘Web Accessibility’ Category

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Teaching People How To Enlarge Web Pages: Task Definition

2010/12/27

Many people need to enlarge Web pages to better see information. People with cognitive disabilities often require larger text sizes to better comprehend information as well.

To develop a best practice for teaching a Web page (text) enlargement skill, I will conduct in-person teaching to groups of people with cognitive disabilities. Specifically, I intend to teach people to use a keyboard with a Web browser to enlarge Web pages. Many browsers will enlarge pages in response to the pressing of two keys: the plus key and the Control key (IBM) / Command key (Mac).

Functional Objective

Given a Web page that may contain images, but must contain text, learners will press two keys to enlarge page content.

Outcome Measure

Learners will open a novel Web page and, without instruction or prompting, enlarge its contents.

Component Skills To Be Taught

Pressing Keys

Learners will:

  • locate the correct keys (2)
  • hold-down one key for at least 3 seconds with sufficient force to be recognized by the computer
  • hold down the one key and tap the other key by pressing it with sufficient force to be recognized by the computer, and immediately releasing it

Completing Sequential Steps

Learners will:

  • follow a multi-step chain of behaviors
  • identify the start- and end points of the behavior chain
  • repeat the behavior chain

Prerequisites

Learners must be able to:

  • respond to textual-, auditory- and/or video-based instruction
  • press keys with their fingers or with equivalent assistive-technology
  • press the correct keys only
  • open a Web page with Internet Explorer

Computers must be:

  • IBM-compatible
  • attached to a monitor and a keyboard or equivalent assistive-technology
  • using Internet Explorer as the default Web browser
  • connected to the Internet

Notes:

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Posted in About Project, Readability, Teaching Web Page (Text) Enlargement, Web Accessibility, Web Usability | 4 Comments »

Multimodal Summary of Complex Sentences for People with Cognitive Disabilities

2010/12/01

The following is a synopsis of work on creating multimodal summaries of complex sentences.  A poster of that work, performed by The Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at The University of Rochester, is the source of all the quoted information in this blog post. I plan to employ this approach on the future Clear Helper Web Site.

The Approach

We propose Multimodal summary of complex sentences. It gives readers the main idea of sentences using pictures and compressed text structured according to simplified text.

The general steps in the MMS approach are:

  • Identify both the main idea of the sentence and related entities and use them to create a compressed summary.
  • Extract pictures for the compressed summary.
  • Add structure to the pictures and text.

Example

Input sentence: In 1492, Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, under contract to the Spanish crown, reached several Caribbean islands, making first contact with the indigenous people.

Identify event and related entities: In 1492, Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, under
contract to the Spanish crown, reached several Caribbean islands, making first contact with the
indigenous people.

Extract picture and add structure:

Naushad UzZaman, Jeffrey P. Bigham and James F. Allen. “Multimodal Summarization for People with Cognitive Disabilities in Reading, Linguistic and Verbal Comprehension” poster presented at “All Together Now: The Power of Partnerships In Cognitive Disability & Technology.” Tenth Annual Conference of The Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities. Westminster, Colorado. 21 October 2010.

Note: No endorsement of The Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at The University of Rochester is intended or implied.

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Learning To Teach Basic Web Skills to People with Cognitive Disabilities

2010/11/03

All people need basic skills to use the Web. A significant part of my effort to teach them to people with cognitive disabilities, via the Web itself, is to implement instructional-design techniques. This post is about my first experiment.

For people of all abilities, examples of basic Web skills are:

  • opening a Web site / using Web addresses;
  • navigating by clicking links and using the back button;
  • performing simple searches with a search engine.

Teaching such a skill includes:

For people with cognitive disabilities, an additional basic Web skill is enlarging the text/font size of a Web site. Thus to learn how best to teach such a seemingly-simple skill, I am continuing my effort to create related instructions.

Guiding me is Janet S. Twyman, Ph.D., BCBA, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at The University of Massachusetts Medical School (Shriver Center), where I work. Dr. Twyman is an expert in instructional design.

Notes: Future blog posts will provide details on each step we take in this experiment. This post is the first in a series about Teaching Web Page (Text) Enlargement. Next up: “Teaching People How To Enlarge Web Pages: Task Definition“.

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New U.S. Plain-Language Law Good for People with Cognitive Disabilities

2010/10/20

The Plain Writing Act of 2010 was signed into U.S. federal law on October 13, 2010. Essentially, it requires federal agencies to create documents using plain language.

The law also requires a section, on each federal-agency Web site, that follows best practices of plain-language writing. If indeed that happens, I anticipate people with cognitive disabilities will find such information much easier to understand. This is particularly good for the people with intellectual disabilities whom I have interviewed. A common thread of our conversations related to their self-advocacy interest in contacting their government representatives, and for determining how their government could help them.

I hope U.S. federal agencies set a standard that others will follow. For people with cognitive disabilities, the accessibility of Web site content is just as important as the accessibility of a site’s design. Text must be written in plain, simple language. There are efforts all over the world to encourage the use of plain language, which helps everyone.

For more information, see:

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How I Was Introduced To Computer Accessibility

2010/10/05

This post is the first of a few in which I will explain how my work in computer accessibility developed into my interest in Web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities.

Since 1992, I have been part of a team that develops software for people with disabilities. We have always made it accessible given the technology of the time, our awareness of it, and available funding.

In the early years, we relied upon third-party software to help make our own accessible. My first related assignment was to integrate multiple systems: single-switch, screen magnification and speech recognition. Each of their developers assumed their system would be the only one present on a computer. I thus had to force their software into non-competing RAM– and ROM regions; configure the interrupts of their hardware; work around conflicting copy-protection schemes; and develop a unified menu.

I was rewarded by overcoming the technological challenges and by helping people with disabilities use our software to find information essential to their lives. The work I just described originated from a project that is a good example. Known as The Massachusetts Accessible Housing Registry, it was and is now a database of accessible housing units throughout the state. Another example was The Massachusetts Assistive Technology Project, for which we developed a database of equipment. I worked with its director, Judy Brewer, who later became the director of The Web Accessibility Initiative at the World Wide Web Consortium. She was the first accessibility advocate I had ever encountered. She demanded that software be accessible at a time when the public was generally unaware of personal computers. Judy had a significant influence in my nascent career.

I found initial- and long-term satisfaction in helping people with disabilities use computers. For some, our software was the impetus for computer use. For them and others, the software I installed to help them with our own also enabled them to use computers like their peers without disabilities. I remember my amazement and gratification watching people who needed single-switch devices become computer users. Another memory is of a poignant moment. It occurred while I was showing a young woman how to use the speech recognition software. She cried as she told me it was the first time she would be able to write a letter to her mother.

To be continued …

Notes

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20 Sites Assessed For Cognitive Web Accessibility

2010/09/22

This post summarizes the results from my assessments of the Web sites of 20 organizations that serve people with cognitive disabilities. It is my plan to perform 100 such cognitive Web accessibility assessments. The Clear Helper site has detailed information and results.

The assessments have 10 criteria. Seven are based upon WebAIM’s latest Cognitive Web Accessibility Checklist. Three are intended to help evaluate general Web site accessibility.

The following are the assessment criteria and the percentages of the sites that met them. The included links go to pages that provide details and results for the guidelines comprising the assessment criteria.

Content Criteria

Design Criteria

Design-Related Criteria

Notes

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10 Organizations That Promote Cognitive Web Accessibility

2010/09/08

I have created a list of ten organizations that promote Web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities. Of those in the list, the following are a few I believe have recently engaged in related activities (guidelines publication, Web site creation, conference presentations, training provision, etc.).

Organizations Recently Active

Notes

  • If you know of an organization not included in the list of ten, please create a comment that includes the organization’s Web address.
  • I plan to expand the list of promoters to include individuals. That will be the subject of a future blog post.
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10 Reasons Against Cognitive Web Accessibility

2010/09/02
  1. There is no generally-accepted, functional definition of “cognitive disability”.
  2. There has been little definitive research on creating Web sites for people with cognitive disabilities.
  3. The vast majority of related guidelines are not part of national- or world sets of Web accessibility standards.
  4. Making sites meet national- or world Web accessibility standards, by itself, is a lot of work.
  5. Because the scope of cognitive disabilities is so broad, the entire variety of needs can not be met even if all related guidelines are followed.
  6. Making Web site content accessible and providing alternate forms of content, which are necessary for people with cognitive disabilities, are typically outside the responsibility of designers.
  7. People with cognitive disabilities may also have physical- or sensory disabilities, which complicates efforts to make Web sites accessible to them.
  8. Web accessibility features (such as text-size enlargers and text-to-speech), which could benefit people with cognitive disabilities, may be a burden on other people, such as screen-reader users.
  9. It may be that no Web site can be made accessible to people with significant memory- and attention deficits, which are common characteristics of cognitive disabilities.
  10. Many people with cognitive disabilities, especially those with intellectual disabilities or Alzheimer’s Disease, do not have even basic computer skills.

Am I trying to make Web sites accessible to people with cognitive disabilities anyway? Yes, I am.

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Cognitive Web Accessibility Guidelines: 2010 & 2009

2010/08/19

I have created a growing list of resources, published in the last ten years, related to guidelines for developing Web sites accessible to people with cognitive disabilities.  Listed below are a few such resources published in 2010 and 2009.

2010

For an extensive list, see Cognitive Web Accessibility: Guidelines 2010.

2009

For an extensive list, see Cognitive Web Accessibility: Guidelines 2009.

Note

A great resource for articles about cognitive disabilities and Web accessibility, continually kept up-to-date, is:

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University Web Site for People with Learning Disabilities: Starting a Redesign

2010/08/11

Today, I visited a local university that has a campus-based program for students with learning disabilities. I am helping to make the program’s Web site more accessible to its students. I met with the program director, two representatives of university Web services, and an adjunct-faculty member responsible for managing site content. We discussed possible cognitive-accessibility features and next steps for the project.

We will focus on content first.

  • Outdated information will be pruned or updated.
  • Text will be rewritten into plain language.
  • Contextually-relevant images will be added, especially photos taken during program activities.
  • After the above tasks are accomplished for one to five pages, they will be evaluated by program students.

We will then revise the site’s design. To do so, we will determine which cognitive-accessibility features we can incorporate using the university’s content management system (CMS). Examples:

Notes:

  • Other development steps will be outlined in future posts. For example, the My Web My Way idea could be expanded such that site visitors could choose their own mixture of content types.
  • Program students will be included in every step of the site development.

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