++E-ACCESS BULLETIN
Access To Technology For All, Regardless Of Ability
- ISSUE 137, May 2011.

A Headstar Publication.
http://www.headstar.com/eab/ .

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++Issue 137 Contents.

+01: Screen-Reader Problems With Olympics Ticket Site
- AbilityNet testing reveals ‘Captcha’ accessibility issues

02: US Law School Council Settles Web Access Legal Action
- Court case led by National Federation of the Blind.

03: UK Government Promotes Inclusive Web Principles
- 10 guidelines offered as practical tool for all.

News In Brief: 04: App Sight – smartphone vision assistance
tool; Billboards Blocked – online political campaign glitch; 06:
Smart Museums – Australian audio tour app.

Section Two: Inbox.
07: Support Plea - access technology prices 'outrageous'; 08:
Copyright Complaint - call for EU treaty opposition protest.

Section Three: Special Consultation - BBC ‘MyDisplay’.
09: The Future of Web Access? Jonathan Hassell of the BBC
reports on his organisation’s trial of a highly customisable,
innovative new web access tool – and invites E-Access Bulletin
readers to help him perfect it.

[Contents ends].


++Section One: News.

+01: Screen-Reader Problems With Olympics Ticket Site.

Some blind web users may not have been able to buy tickets
for next year’s London Olympics due to the partial
inaccessibility of the tickets website, testing by the charity
AbilityNet has found.

In April this year, AbilityNet tested a series of major websites
linked to the 2012 Olympics with screen readers, magnifiers,
voice recognition software and other tools used by people with
disabilities. Sites tested included the main London 2012 site:
http://www.london2012.com ,
the Transport for London website:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk ,
the Visit London website:
http://www.visitlondon.com ,
and various specific hotel and restaurant websites.

Most aspects of the all the sites were “really quite good from
an accessibility point of view”, Robin Christopherson,
AbilityNet Head of Digital Inclusion, told delegates at a
seminar ‘London 2012 – the IT accessible city’ hosted earlier
this month by the Information Technologists’ Company.

However the ticket buying section of the Olympics site used a
‘Captcha’ anti-fraud system which required users to either
decode a distorted image or an audio alternative. The latter was
intended for people with impaired vision, but “I couldn’t work
out what it was because it was also distorted,” Christopherson
said. “This would cause a lot of problems for people – the
blind user wasn’t able to register for tickets.”

The site would have been better off using a system such as
‘Textcaptcha’ (http://textcaptcha.com/), he said, which asks the
user a logic question which only a human is capable of
answering such as “Pub, sweatshirt, green, mosquito, white,
jelly – the second colour is?”

Such questions do require some level of understanding, but if a
user finds one question hard they can ask for as many
alternatives as they like, and people with learning difficulties
such that they could not answer any of these questions would
not have the ability to use the web without help in any case,
Christopherson said.

Bob Cottam, head of IT for the London games, said it was
inevitable that one or two mistakes would be made in such a
large project working to immovable deadlines, but that his team
was committed to building in accessibility to all its systems,
and was making efforts to ensure problems are minimised.

Other web sites where accessibility problems were found by
AbilityNet included the ‘Visit Britain’ website run by the
British Tourism Authority, which was a “real stinker”,
Christopherson said.

Problems included a video player which automatically started
up on accessing the site, so that a screen-reader user is unable
to hear the sound of their access software over the sound of
the video.

“I’ve got to try and listen to my screen-reader over the top, so I
can find pause button to make the stop. But in any case, there
isn’t a pause button – the video player they have used is
invisible to me so I can’t turn it off.” The player also lacks
subtitles or audio description, and the site as a whole features
many unlabelled graphics, another barrier for screen reader
users, Christopherson said. Use of an accessible video player
and better site coding could solve all these issues, he said.

- Comment on this story now, on EAB Live:
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=588


+02: US Law School Council Settles Web Access Legal Action.

The Law School Admissions Council (LASC) in the US has
agreed to make its website fully accessible to blind and visually
impaired users following legal action by the country’s National
Federation of the Blind (NFB).

The NFB filed a lawsuit against LASC in 2009 claiming that the
organisation’s website – used by nearly every US law school to
accept student applications – violated the California Disabled
Persons Act and the Unruh Civil Rights Act (a California-based
piece of discrimination legislation).

The federation claimed it was not possible for screen-readers to
recognise various text on the website, meaning that visually
impaired law school applicants who wished to apply online
were forced to rely on assistance from a sighted employee –
over the phone – at LASC’s customer support service, which
was only available at certain times.

Following a two-year legal battle a settlement has been reached
whereby LASC will make its website accessible by allowing
screen-readers to recognise all text on the site, meaning visually
impaired applicants will be able to independently complete
applications at a time of their choosing.

The changes will come into effect from September 1 this year,
and the NFB will perform semi-annual accessibility testing of
the site until September 1, 2012.

From 2006-08, the NFB was involved in a similar case
supporting a class action against the US superstore chain Target
for the alleged inaccessibility of its website. Target eventually
agreed to pay six million dollars and make changes to its site,
while not accepting liability (see
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=206 ).

- Comment on this story now, on EAB Live:
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=586


+03: UK Government Promotes Inclusive Web Principles.

The UK government Department for Culture, Media and Sport
(DCMS) has published a set of 10 principles for inclusive web
design to highlight the importance of building websites that can
be used by as wide a range of people as possible and drive
forward e-accessibility.

The principles were written by Sandi Wassmer, managing
director of web design company Copious and can be viewed
on the DCMS site ( http://bit.ly/mfx9ax ) or the Copious site (
http://bit.ly/lzsnOe ). They were designed to sit alongside
existing web-based guidelines and best practice for building
accessible and user-centred websites.

The ten principles are broken down into keywords such as
equitable; flexible; straightforward; and perceptible, each
followed by a brief explanatory statement to give guidance on
how the term relates to inclusive website design.

Speaking to E-Access Bulletin, Wassmer said: “The 10
principles of inclusive web design are not theoretical, but a
practical framework for everyone involved in building great
web experiences. Having the support of [DCMS minister] Ed
Vaizey will encourage their adoption – from education to
industry – and that is very exciting indeed.”

- Comment on this story now, on EAB Live:
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=593


++News in Brief:

+04: App Sight: A new iPhone application could allow blind
and visually impaired people to recruit sighted people to give
them information about an item or problem they have
photographed. The ‘VizWiz’ application, being developed by
Rochester Human Computer Interaction – from the University
of Rochester in New York State, US – sends a photograph and
recorded question from the visually impaired smartphone user
to a team of sighted people sourced from Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for people to
complete paid-for tasks. The helpers then send a spoken
answer back to the iPhone user. The application is still in
development and is not yet available to the public:

http://hci.cs.rochester.edu/currentprojects.php?proj=vw
Short link: http://bit.ly/jSv9Al


+05: Billboards Blocked: A ‘make your own billboard’ website
( http://makeyourownbillboard.co.nz/ ), created by the Labour
Party of New Zealand as part of its campaign for upcoming
elections, has had to be altered after it was found to be
inaccessible to disabled computer users. Web accessibility
blogger Nicolas Steenhout discovered that billboards on the site
were displayed as images only, meaning that screen-readers
were unable to read out the user-created messages on them.
The site’s owners have now amended parts of the site to
include tags, making it easier for screen-readers to identify:

http://accessibility.net.nz/blog/nz-labour-billboard-website-not-
accessible/
Short link: http://bit.ly/iNF4LF


+06: Smart Museums: A smartphone application to transcribe
audio museum tours in Australia into captions and sign
language has been released, to improve museum accessibility
for deaf and hearing impaired people in the country.
Developed by the Australian Communication Exchange, the
Smart Auslan service can be downloaded to a personal
smartphone or accessed through museum-owned phones. The
user scans a ‘Quick Response code’ on each exhibit which
prompts the phone to display the relevant captions and sign
language video:

http://www.aceinfo.net.au/index.php?option=com_content&vie
w=article&id=88&Itemid=83
Short link: http://bit.ly/iiFNl4

[Section One ends].


++Section Two: 'The Inbox'
- Readers' Forum.

Please email all contributions or responses to:
inbox@headstar.com .

+07: Support Plea: A new response to March’s opinion piece
by David Bates on the need for more free or cheap open
source accessibility solutions has been sent in, from reader
Rachael Donnelly.

Rachel writes: “I have been employed on and off for the past
three years. I was out of work for a long time, and don't have
the necessary software on my personal computer. I had an
access to work pack, but wasn't sure if I could transfer the
licence for ZoomText or JAWS to my PC and so I left it. I
looked into buying my own copy of JAWS but being out of
work, I couldn't afford the £800 they were asking for it. In
order to search for a job online I needed some sort of assistive
software and it was too expensive for me to use.

“I also looked into buying some speech software for my
mobile phone - but it was four times the price of my phone. It's
outrageous! Why should visually impaired people need to pay
enormous prices just to use their computers or mobile phones?

“There should be a system in place for people who need to use
this technology but who are on a low income and not
employed so that they can have a heavily subsidised cost,
which is more affordable, and I'm not just talking about £10 or
£20 here! Even knocking things like that down to half price
would be more bearable.”

[Further responses please to inbox@headstar.com].


+08: Copyright Complaint: Reader Vivien Palcic has posted a
comment online to our April story, ‘UK Fails To Support
Accessible Copyright Treaty’ (
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=581 ),
which reported that the UK government has declined to support
a draft international treaty to allow accessible versions of
copyrighted works to be shared across international
boundaries.

The story also found a general lack of EU support for the
treaty, prompting Vivien to write: “The EU has only served to
make illegal copying of copyrighted material more attractive to
a community who have traditionally been the most compliant,
patient and tolerant with the ongoing failure of publishers to
make their works available in accessible formats to them.

“Enough talk-fests have been held on this issue. Maybe it's
high time for the disability community to finally mobilise on
mass and call for widespread boycotts against the EU! It's bad
enough when equal opportunity/anti-discrimination laws are
toothless!”

[Further responses please online, or to inbox@headstar.com].

[Section Two ends].


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++Section Three: Special Consultation
BBC ‘MyDisplay’

+09: The Future of Web Access?
by Jonathan Hassell

Many people struggle with reading text on websites,
particularly those with dyslexia, vision impairments, Asperger’s
syndrome, ADHD and the multiple minor impairments
associated with ageing.

While web browsers do include facilities to help these users
such as the ability to change text size or colour or use your
own style-sheets, many people are not able to find or use the
browser controls to take advantage of them.

The situation is even worse for mobile web access, as most
mobile browsers do not even include these facilities.

A 2003 study by Forrester Research for Microsoft found that
57% of all computer users would benefit from the use of
assistive technology, yet figures for the UK show that only
between 6%-8% of disabled people are actually making use of
it. Even taking possible differences between US and UK into
account, this is a huge gap. It could help explain the fact that
disabled people’s use of the internet is lower than that of the
general population.

Put plainly, for a lot of disabled people as well as our ageing
population, our current accessibility models aren’t working.
They require too much from users to get things to work.

As an attempt to address this problem, the BBC is testing a new
tool to allow users to change the way text is presented on the
more than three million web pages published by the
organisation.

While including a text-resizer or style-switcher tool on a
website is not in itself a new idea, the scope of the new tool –
called MyDisplay – is what makes it different.

The tool enables commonly-requested alterations to be made,
such as changing the text size and text and background colours.
However, rather than restricting text changes to three sizes, it
includes the ability to change the text to any size; change the
font type; alter character spacing; remove italics; and force all
lettering into lowercase – all preferences requested by
consulting different sets of disabled users. And rather than
restricting colour changes to four choices, it offers a choice of
some 44 themes developed through user-research, and if that is
not sufficient, also allows complete customisation to whatever
other colour combinations the user might want.

The tool is free, and works on any computer and browser, even
on smartphones like the iPhone or Android phones. It’s really
simple to turn on, works on computers with locked-down
browser and operating settings, and does not require any
downloads. It also allows users to store their settings in a secure
‘BBC-iD’ and reuse them across devices. So you could set
your preferences on a PC at work, and then use them on your
Mac laptop at home, or your smartphone on the way home.

The BBC has already user-tested MyDisplay with a large
number of users during its development, but we are now keen
for more people to try the tool and offer us their feedback
before deciding whether it’s ready to launch.

So if you think you could benefit from such a tool please visit
http://bbc.in/kFB05p
and give MyDisplay a try. And, most importantly, let the BBC
know what you think via the feedback form you’ll find there.

If the response to MyDisplay’s trial is favourable, it may
become a permanent feature of bbc.co.uk, and possibly also be
included on other websites so users can use their preferences
on more of their web journeys.

NOTE: Jonathan Hassell is Head of Usability and Accessibility,
BBC Future Media.

And you can comment on this story now, on EAB Live:
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=584

[Section Three ends].


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[Special notice ends].


++End Notes.

+How to Receive the Bulletin.

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with 'subscribe eab' in the subject header. You can list other
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Please send comments on coverage or leads to Dan Jellinek at:
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Copyright 2011 Headstar Ltd http://www.headstar.com .
The Bulletin may be reproduced as long as all parts including
this copyright notice are included, and as long as people are
always encouraged to subscribe with us individually by email.
Please also inform the editor when you are reproducing our
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is also cited.

+Personnel:
Editor: Dan Jellinek.
Reporter: Tristan Parker.
Editorial advisor: Kevin Carey.

ISSN 1476-6337.

[Issue 137 ends.]