E-Access Bulletin Live

At last month’s launch of Signed Stories (
www.signedstories.com ),
an online treasure-house of children’s stories in British Sign Language created by broadcaster ITV for free use by teachers, parents and carers of deaf children, the excitement was palpable.

G. P. Taylor, author of the best-selling ‘Shadowmancer’ series of children’s books, said the service was “the most exciting thing to happen in children’s reading since the invention of the book.”
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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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What is intended to become the world’s largest online library of contemporary children’s books fully accessible in sign language, sound, animation and text has been launched by the British broadcaster ITV, for free use by teachers, parents and carers of deaf children.

Signed Stories (
www.signedstories.com )
has been created by ITV SignPost, the company’s non-profit accessibility agency. Around 25 stories are already available to view in British Sign Language by streaming video alongside the other complementary formats, with a plan to offer 150 stories by the end of the year, and 300 or more by the end of 2010.
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A row has erupted over whether or not publishers should be allowed to disable the text-to-speech function on electronic book readers, after one US reader manufacturer bowed to requests from an authors’ rights group and made the speech function optional.

Manufacturer Amazon made the move with respect to its new Kindle 2 e-book reader following representation from the Authors Guild, which had claimed that the automatic allowance of text-to-speech (TTS) conversion effectively created an audiobook device, even though no audio royalties were being paid.
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[EDITOR’S NOTE: Twitter is a ‘microblogging’ system that allows people to supply a feed of very short messages, or ‘tweets’ – just 140 characters long, to whoever subscribes to their feed. Subscribers can then reply openly with their own messages, or use the system to send private messages in reply. However, despite the fact that it is such a simple concept (and leaving aside for the moment the question of who has time to use it), the service raises various accessibility issues. Here, blogger Gez Lemon offers one innovative solution.]

Considering the standard Twitter website is so basic, it’s surprising it is so inaccessible.
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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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Employers should do more to help disabled people with their IT workplace needs, according to a new guide from the Employers’ Forum on Disability (EFD).

The ‘Reasonable adjustments – line manager guide’ (
fastlink.headstar.com/efd1 )
advises employers to ensure they procure the correct equipment to ensure disabled workers can work to their full potential, including voice-activated software; adapted keyboards; and chairs which support the back and neck.
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Voluntary guidelines on web accessibility are all very well, but there is nothing like a law for ensuring everyone falls into line. Such was the message to emerge from last month’s European Commission conference on digital inclusion held in Vienna.

Alexander Fase, Web Guidelines Project Manager at the Dutch government ICT agency ICTU, told delegates that his organisation had developed a non-technical, ‘quality’ approach to accessibility standards which focused on ensuring all information could be accessed through any channel, now and in the future.
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The National Trust, the British Museum and the V&A are among the recipients of last month’s annual Jodi awards for excellence in accessible cultural websites and digital media (
fastlink.headstar.com/jodi2 ).

The British Museum won the Excellence in Web Accessibility Award for its BSL Schools Web Project (
fastlink.headstar.com/bm1 ). The museum worked with the Frank Barnes Primary School for deaf children in London to produce videos for some of the exhibits in British Sign Language (BSL).
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The lack of a coherent approach to boosting technology accessibility across European nations has been attacked by a leading technology industry spokesman.

Mark McGann, Director General of the European Information, Communications and Consumer Electronics Technology Industry Association (EICTA), told the recent European Commission Vienna conference on digital inclusion that the lack of a cohesive approach in this field has been “a massive failure”.
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