E-Access Bulletin Live

By Brian Kelly

To achieve universal accessibility for their web resources, surely all that organisations need do is implement the international Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines (in particular the WCAG guidelines for web content)?

Sadly the evidence, such as the recent Better Connected 2009 survey from the local government Society of IT Management
( http://fastlink.headstar.com/so6 ),
demonstrates that public sector organisations are failing to implement these guidelines. But rather than calling for a renewed effort to implement the WAI model, perhaps an alternative approach is needed: a move from web accessibility to web adaptability – such as the approach described in  a paper entitled ‘From Web accessibility to Web adaptability’
( www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a912788469 ),
which was published recently in the ‘Disability and Rehability: Assistive Technology’ journal.
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An approach to improving web access for people with disabilities based on ‘adaptability’ rather than ‘accessibility’ is urged by a leading academic in this month’s E-Access Bulletin.

Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus at UKOLN, the national digital library research body based at the University of Bath, says ‘adaptability’ adopts the UN Convention’s view that disability results from the interaction between people with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinder their participation in society.
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Social media users are being invited to think about the internet in terms of touch, taste and smell, to raise awareness of deafblindness and encourage deafblind people to use social networking sites, in a project from the deafblind charity Sense.

An online ‘Sensehub’ portal ( www.sensehub.org.uk ) has been created for Sense on a pro bono basis by advertising and digital agency RMG Connect, allowing visitors to link to sense-based channels on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. On the Twitter channel, for example, visitors can view streams of Tweets which contain words like ‘touch’, ‘taste’ and ‘smell’, while the Facebook link takes visitors to a group which encourages people to tag their photos with sense-based words, rather than just people’s names.
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A more solid European legal foundation is needed to enforce technology accessibility, a leading software expert from Yahoo! told E-Access 09.

Artur Ortega, ‘accessibility evangelist’ at Yahoo! Europe, said that ensuring more accessible products were developed would be a challenge, but that a legal basis for accessibility would actually impact positively on suppliers.
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Unasking The right Questions – By Bill Thompson.

Accessibility has always been an issue for information and communications technologies, but for most of the 60 or so years we’ve had stored-program digital computers, it was a secondary consideration.

Getting physical access to early computers like EDSAC and ATLAS involved being in the right room in the right city at the right time, whether or not you were a wheelchair user or had poor vision.
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Just 10 per cent of accessibility statements on local government websites are ‘excellent’, with a further 37 per cent deemed ‘satisfactory’, according to new research from the Society of IT Management (Socitm
www.socitm.gov.uk ).

The research is published this week as a special supplement to Better Connected 2009, the society’s annual snapshot review of all UK council websites.
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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has failed to adequately address accessibility problems with its new mobile web news service, one of the country’s leading accessibility analysts has told E-Access Bulletin.

Tom Worthington, a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University, examined ‘ABC Mobile’ (
www.abc.net.au/innovation/mobile )
for accessibility on its launch. In a report posted to his blog, he said: “The home page does not appear to have been designed in accordance with guidelines for web accessibility for the disabled, and may be unlawful. The site also fails several mobile phone and other web guidelines.” One of the key faults had been with a lack of proper alternative text tags for information conveyed as images, he said.
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Readers of the eleventh annual Better Connected report on UK council websites, published last month by the local government Society of Information Technology Management (Socitm), might be forgiven for feeling that time has stood still.

Last year’s report found that only 37 out of 464 council websites (8%) attained the most basic level of accessibility, Level ‘A’ of the World Wide Web consortium’s (W3C) web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG 1.0) (
www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=164 ).
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A ‘mystery shopper’ test which sent emails to a range of UK local council and private sector websites requesting information on their accessibility to blind users has uncovered a pattern of poor responses, with around one in five sites not bothering to respond at all.

The exercise, carried out by the local government Society of IT Management as part of its annual ‘Better Connected’ review of council websites (
www.socitm.gov.uk/socitm/Library/Better+Connected+2009.htm ), found local government websites performed better than sites in other sectors.
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A tool to make the social networking site Facebook more accessible to visually impaired users has been created by Project:Possibility (
www.projectpossibility.org ),
a group of not-for-profit software developers in the US. The application (
fastlink.headstar.com/pp2 )
allows visually impaired users to log in, navigate and use the site by combining screen reader technology with other coding techniques.

Brian D’Souza, a team member who worked on the project, explained: “We leveraged an existing technology developed by Google called AxsJax (accessibility + AJAX), which combines use of screen readers and java script and navigation methods to make navigation and modification of content of webpages easier. It provides a lot of value for a blind person.”
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