Hanona.org

This September, the Hanona.org website was launched. I've teamed up with a couple of guys and some disability organisations to provide some collective accessibility experience.

This means that Hanona.org will be able to offer multi-user-pan-disability testing, in addition to

• accessibility consultancy
• training
• web testing
• application testing
• PDF tagging

I'll be adding articles and other content over the next few weeks, so why not pop over and bookmark it now?

Voice Activation and Flash

Just a quick one, I just thought I'd post a note for accessible Flash developers regarding Voice activation software. Not everyone has had the chance to test using this software so This may be helpful to a few.

Flash applications are typically tricky terrain for Voice activation users (think Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS)). The most common voice commands for HTML pages such as "link" and "image" don't work. In HTML these commands will identify the links or forms on the page and put a little number next to them. By speaking this number you can follow the link or activate the form control. Neat.

Flash reveals the controls via MSAA but Dragon does not seem to have a method of displaying them accurately yet. In fact it seems to struggle with matching links with numbers in simple CSS.

For the time being voice activation users can either rely on the mouse grid method of navigation (very slow) or spoken keyboard commands such as "tab" and "enter". this allows the user to methodically move through the Flash controls and as Flash doesn't tend to have so many links etc. this should be fine. The one thing I haven't been able to test with the guys at the Shaw Trust yet is whether DNS is capable of accessing Flash controls that are "below the fold" either because of a browser scrollbar or a Flash scrollbar. Once I get that info I'll pass it on.

Sorry for the lack of detail/illustrations but I just wanted to share this info before I forgot all about it. If you want some clarification feel free to leave a comment or send me a mail.

Making software accessible: rising to the challenge

Last Thursday (17/05/2007) I attended the Becta event "Making software accessible: rising to the challenge", with Andrew Evans, our Standards and Interoperability Specialist.

I have to say that the event was quite an eye-opener. I was struck by the emphasis on cognitive and learning disabilities which have such a bearing on education. It should be obvious that these are a prime concern for many educators and it seems silly now that I was surprised by it. I suppose I've been so focussed on the physical aspects of accessibility on the web that I hadn't considered the shift in emphasis when it comes to education.

Another issue was the need for teachers to be able to use the online material in different forms - extracting images, or cutting and pasting text for use in other documents. This is partly because some students respond better to physical resources, but also because many students aren't able to interact with certain pieces of software because they aren't keyboard or screen reader accessible. This is another thing I was shocked by. It's hard to believe that in 2007 vendors are still selling products to schools which can only be accessed via mouse control. Many of these vendors have been around for a decade or more, but for reasons I can only marvel at, haven't factored disability as a concern.

There was a great video demonstration by David Colvern of Ace Centres which showed a mobility impaired boy using a simple paint package. His impairment meant that he could only use one key at a time to draw a picture on the screen. He had to move the cursor, start drawing a line, end drawing a line, change colour etc. all with single key presses. The fruits of his efforts were astonishing, and if it hadn't been for a simple customisation of the package by the guys at the Ace centre then maybe nobody would ever have known that he could draw at all. I'll try and get permission to post a copy of the finished image to show here.

There were some very good presentations on the day, but Carol Allen, a respected practitioner from North Tyneside made a statement that summed the day up for me. She said:

Give me FLEXIBILITY!

...and for me that's the new challenge, helping Accessibility, Usability and Flexibility play together.

Why we use headings

There’s been a lot of debate about headings lately on the GAWDS mailing list and at the recent PSF event. I think this is great because it means that people are discussing the finer points of accessibility and working on the details.
I thought I'd repost my response on the GAWDS list here for those who don't use the GAWDS mailing list (shame on you!).

The problem with headings is that nobody seems to be able to agree on which heading needs to start the page, and whether it’s OK to skip a heading or not. The problem is further compounded by automated tools which will fail you if you use more than one H1 or if you skip a heading element (say H2 to H4).

I need to make it clear that I'm not advocating sloppy structure, sites should be designed with a logical heirarchy as part of good design practice.

I’ve put something together here to try and illustrate how JAWS users use headings and why these main concerns may or may not actually be that important from a practical perspective. So if you've inherited a site or these changes are out of your control you'll be able to have a better idea of their impact.

How Screen Reader users use headings

Here are some examples (for those that haven't had the opportunity to use a screen reader like JAWS):
By pressing "H" on the keyboard, the user can cycle through headings. JAWS will announce the status of each heading as it appears in the cycle e.g. "heading level 1 company name", so in this way, the user gets an indication of the order of the headings as they appear on the page and what heading level they have been given (we'll come back to that in a minute).

Another way is by bringing up the heading list dialogue (insert + f6 in JAWS), which displays a list of all the headings on the page. The user can cycle through the headings using the up and down keys, the level of each heading is also announced in this dialogue. The dialogue has controls so that the user can sort headings by alphabetical order or tab order and also only to list headings at each level. I've personally never seen these dialogues used, but different users will have different methods, and I don't spend as much time with these guys as I would like.

So in terms of what the user expects to see as a H1 or H2 is highly dependent on whether they've visited the site before as each site has a slightly different approach to how headings are used (I doubt that this will ever change) so I think the most important thing is consistency.

Consistency is the key

If you're using H1 for your site logo, article heading or navigation heading, then you need to keep using that on every page of the site. If you find yourself in the position where you don't have a logical H3 for the page, but you've consistently implemented H4 for your section headings then in my view (and I'm sure others will disagree) you should keep on using the H4. Don't feel inclined to change it to a H3 just for that page just because you don't want to skip a heading level or to pass through some automated accessibility testing robot.

This is important because if you happen to have a lot of headings on the page and typically the user is looking for a certain H4, they could assume that this new page doesn't have the information they are looking for because it has been changed to H3.

There is a counter-argument to this because if you have a H2 and no H3, you may assume that the user won't look for a H4. But this is a weak hypothesis, because if the user is using the "H" key as described above, they will happen across the next headings whether it be a H3 or a H4. If they are using the headings dialogue, the same is true. If they are using the dialogue to list the H3s only and find nothing, this is also fine, because they will be looking for the H3 equivalent of what they found on another page. If there is not one, then it is logical that none are present.

I think the debate is useful and interesting in that a consensus will bring greater consistency across the web, but developers shouldn't mistake this as being a critical issue, the key (in my opinion) is to use lots of headings (as long as they are relevant) and use them consistently across all pages. And I'm aware that what I've stated may not quite be in accordance with W3C specifications (I'm not sure), but works best from a practical perspective.

I hope someone finds some of this useful.
If you're a screen reader user, I'd love to hear from you.

PSF accessibility gathering

Public Sector Forums (PSF) made my week by facilitating a presentation where I got to present along side some of my favorite accessibility names. Bruce Lawson, Patrick Lauke, Anne McMeekin, Ian Lloyd, and Dan Champion, (who organised the event for PSF). The event took place in the function suite of Edgbaston cricket grounds yesterday.

The event seems to have been a big success with "exemplary" speaker feedback. A big plus for me was getting to spend some time with some really interesting people.

If you're interested in seeing them, Patrick took some photos of the event and the preceding night out.

The Dutch lead (again)

So we all know that the Netherlands is the best place to bring up your kids already, but I fell over this today while reading through the GAWDS mailing list. It's a link to an article entitled
"New Dutch accessibility law" which announces a fairly detailed and comprehensive law ensuring that any new Dutch government sites are accessible and any older ones made accessible by 2011.

I get so frustrated/ jealous when I think about the DTI debacle and how we just can't get our act together in the UK. Web managers are largely left to their own devices here and many find it's too much of an effort to consider the needs of their disabled constituents.

I'm going to stop ranting there for the time being. I don't want to distract from the fact that the Dutch have done something pretty amazing if you compare this to the policies of UK and other developed nations. They made a decision to make something better. Such ground breaking ideas seem to rarely enter the minds of British politicians who seem to be struggling to keep the status quo.

The importance of link highlighting

I had assumed that most people were aware of the importance of clear link highlighting until I read a post on accessify demonstrating how to turn off the "dotted line bug" in firefox. I figured it was probably worth writing about.

Mobility impaired keyboard users rely heavily on highlighted links. A keyboard user will typically tab through link items and hit "enter" to activate the link. For this to work, the keyboard user needs to know where the current focus is, otherwise they have little hope of knowing where the next tab will take them. Site design can make this problem much worse if the links are on a background that make the dotted line difficult to detect. Mark Pilgrim is considering developing a more prominent focus indicator for Firefox, which would be a huge help if they can get the colour right.

The default link highlighting for the BBC website works fairly well (extra points for adding access key help in the tab sequence), but other websites such as CNN have a design that can be really tricky to navigate if you're using the tab key, particularly if your sight is less than perfect.

Additional help

Stephen from Shaw Trust is a keyboard-only web user and he sometimes needs a little extra help to see links, particularly if the background to the link is a colour(particularly mid-grey) that makes the dotted line harder to see. Stephen has Cerebral Palsy which means that he finds it hard to focus on small areas of the screen. Highlighting a link (ala Salford University) makes the focus more prominent, and Stephen can get around the site much more easily. Mobility impairment combined with less-than-perfect vision is fairly common and will become more so as the average computer user gets older.

Invisible links

While offset links are a pretty good idea in lots of circumstances, don't forget that keyboard-only users don't have the benefit of having a screen reader. Therefore offset links such as "skip to content" need to be made visible so that sighted keyboard users also have the option of using them. BBC again does a good job of bringing offset links back on screen for this reason, and you can see another example of this technique used at the Salford University website.

Hidden menu items

Beware of using menu systems that provide drop down options when you mouse-over the top level menu item. Keyboard-only users can often still tab through the lower link options even though the focus disappears, so even though they'll be able to get at the lower level menu items, they won't know what they are because they can't see what they have just tabbed to. Tesco have made a song and dance about accessiblity in the past, but they manage to get this all wrong; the vast majority of the tabs are "empty" with no visual feedback at all. This makes me wonder about how serious they really are about user testing. I suspect the developers were stoked because they did it without JavaScript, but it's not good enough.
If you're going to use this type of menu system then make sure that the hidden links are visible on focus so it's keyboard-user friendly.

Summary

This all really boils down to two things:

1. Make sure that all links are visible when they receive focus
2. Create links that highlight when they recieve focus

Simple really, but not as well used as it ought to be.

Update!

Mike Cherim sent a link to an article he wrote a little while back detailing the technique used to achieve the highlighting effect: Let's Focus on Focus. It should be a fairly simple mod to make the script bring offset links back on screen. Cheers Mike!

Accessible e-Learning? You BETT!

I'm lucky enough that I have a job that gets me out of the office for 1-2 days a week doing something or other. Normally it's providing training or consultancy to the growing number of organisations that "get" accessibility and want to do something about it. It's a nice break from routine and this week I'm going to be at the BETT show in Olympia, London to represent(CDSMs) suite of accessible e-Learning products.

Accessibility is extremely important to the education sector in the UK. Fortunately, we have a quite a tight Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) designed to protect the rights of disabled learners, but despite this, educational software vendors still aren't investing in developing truly accessible solutions for learners. That makes it difficult for Schools to procure material that actually allows them to comply with Government requirements and with accessibility being such a buzzword, confusion rains on the poor procurement officer.

As part of the "Building Schools for the Future" (BSF) initiative, the government are expecting Local Education Authorities (LEAs) to invest in technology and the built environment to encourage effective learning. Schools and colleges will be expected to demonstrate how they have implemented their solutions and improved the state of affairs in their own establishment.

Over the past 2 years, CDSM, has invested in developing a truly accessible, SCORM compliant e-Learning package using Flash technology which can be delivered via a learning platform. CDSM's learning platform is called "My Learning Space" and it allows teachers to easily author their content, have it peer reviewed, improve it, upload it, and share it with others. The solution is being developed in Partnership with Dr. Kevin Palmer, Director of Salford City Learning Centres. Several components of the solution are already complete and work as stand-alone applications. This includes "Pedagogue" the accessible Multimedia e-Learning content development platform. The ability to create repositories of learning material which are quality graded by other teachers is one of the key features of the product. It will help teachers find the best resources to help them deliver quality lesson plans.

To ensure that we stay on the right track, all these developments need regular peer review by teachers and educators to shape the solution into something that meets their requirements precisely. CDSM/Salford CLC want to broaden the scope of the project to include other learning professionals. Middlesex University, London's largest University has recently started to participate in steering the "My Learning Space" initiative after becoming disillusioned with their existing VLE. At BETT, I hope to be talking to other enthusiastic educationalists who will also want to shape the future of e-Learning in the UK.

So anyway, from Mid-day Thursday and most of Friday, I'll be at BETT on stand S86. It's always good to put faces to names so if you happen to be at the show, call in and see me.

Thank you Zeldman

The eagle eyed blogger will notice that I chose Zeldman's template design for my own blog. It's nice and contrasty which suits my own taste and it's pretty accessible.

Some may wonder why I didn't use a more flexible platform such as word press. Well really, I've been putting off this blog for years due to the fact that I could never find the time to put one together. In the end I thought bugger it. The realities of work and hectic family life meant that I was never going to get around to doing it and there's lots of things I'd like to share. I suspect I'll tinker with the style sheet a little at some point. I quite like the new beta blogger. It's quick and intuitive, costs nothing and it will do me fine for now, plus I can say that Zeldman designed my blog!