RuthEllison.com

My thanks to Max Design for highlighting the recent court ruling in California regarding the accessibility of Target Corporation’s website.

A federal district court judge issued two landmark decisions on the 2nd of October in a nationwide class action against Target Corporation.

The first decision involved the court certifying the case as a class action on behalf of blind Internet users throughout the country under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). In addition to violating the ADA, the suit charges that Target has also violated two Californian civil rights statutes: the California Unruh Civil Rights Act and the California Disabled Persons Act.

In the second decision, the court stated that websites such as target.com are required by California law to be accessible.

For more information:

• Court Ruling Says California Disabled Rights Law Applies to the Web
• Blind patrons sue Target for site inaccessibility
• Judge allows class action against Target Web site

This is a step in the right direction, although it’s sad that it has to get to this stage before action is taken by the big corporations. Remember, accessibility is best done proactively - not reactively.

Meet Glenda Watson Hyatt - she is an author, blogger, podcaster and she runs her own accessibility business called Soaring Eagle Communications in Canada. By the way, she has cerebral palsy.

Glenda shares her life story in her book I’ll Do It Myself to show others that cerebral palsy is not a death sentence, but rather a life sentence. Having previously visited Australia where she chatted with Jacqui Dalling at her blog Terrible Palsy, Glenda is back in the land down under. As part of her virtual book tour, she answers my questions about living with cerebral palsy and web accessibility.

Starting at the beginning…You mentioned being integrated into a regular classroom when going through school, plus going on to earn the highest award in Girl Guides, the Outstanding Junior Student Award and a gold medal in horseback riding! What was it like going through “mainstream” school with cerebral palsy?

To be honest, I preferred regular class to special ed class. For the most, I felt part of the group, albeit the fairly quiet part. I think I was challenged more and more was expected from me. I’ve probably accomplished much by being mainstreamed than I would have by staying in special education.

You recently coined a neat phrase - “Disability 2.0 - Nothing about us without us”. Are you able to expand on what you mean by this?

So many decisions, policies and such are made that affect people with disabilities, yet we are not part of the process. Some of these decisions and policies are absolutely ridiculous, yet we need to abide by them to get the services we truly need. By Disability 2.0, I mean a greater emphasis on self-determination – on people with disabilities being actively and equally involved in the decision-making process, and being present when information regarding them is shared and discussed.

It’s amazing reading about using your left thumb to type. Do you use a standard keyboard to type and navigate around websites? Are there any other technologies that you may use?

Yes, I plunk away at on a standard keyboard with only my left thumb; my four fingers glide along the top of the keyboard to steady my unsteady hand. However, it is becoming more difficult to find keyboards without an extra row of keys along the top.

In place of a mouse, I use a Traxsys (formerly Penny + Giles) joystick. Definitely not an inexpensive alternative at approximately $700 Canadian. OUCH! But I have much better control with the joystick than with the mouse. With the mouse, one involuntary or jerky hand movement and the mouse pointer goes flying across the screen. How frustrating!

I also use EZ Keys software for word prediction and abbreviation expansion. As I begin typing, the six most frequently used words starting with those letters appear in a small blue box on the screen. Different words appear as I continue typing. When the word I want appears, I simply hit the corresponding number and the computer completes the word. It does save me quite a few keystrokes! Although, even with this handy software, I still only type approximately ten or twelve words a minute, give or take.

Communication has always been a key message in your blog. With web 2.0 bringing new and fascinating ways of interacting with people around the globe, what are some of the key opportunities and challenges that you have faced with web 2.0 technologies?

These technologies have expanded the ways I can interact with people. The new opportunities to connect with people are truly amazing! I am eagerly waiting time to explore Second Life and to see what it is all about.

However, I am reluctant to fully embrace some of these technologies because they aren’t accessible to people with some types of disabilities and, if my business is about web accessibility, I feel I need to walk the talk as much as possible.

It has been interesting reading about your accessibility work for the Canadian Government and encouraging to see the growing awareness of accessibility and the W3C WCAG 1.0 in both the government and private sectors. To some extent, there seems to be a perception that web accessibility is mainly for people with visual disabilities. Developing websites for people with motor related disabilities is not often covered to the same depth as say, visual disabilities. Have you got any tips for our readers on some things to consider when developing websites for people with motor disabilities?

I agree that there is a misperception that web accessibility is mainly for people with sight impairments, and the barrier facing people with other disabilities are discounted. For me with limited hand function, I find those pop-out menus difficult to navigate – they either disappear before I can click or I end up clicking the wrong link and going somewhere I didn’t want to go. It would help if those menus were keyboard navigable so that I could tab through the links if necessary. Equally frustrating are tiny clickable areas; redundant text links are helpful. Also, timed tasks are some times difficult for me to complete before the session times out. A way to increase time would be appreciated.

Many thanks to Glenda for taking the time to satisfy my curiosity and for the opportunity to be part of her Summer Sojourn virtual book tour. Don’t forget to check out her Do It Myself blog where you can read and purchase her inspiring autobiography I’ll Do It Myself You can also help out by voting for Glenda in the “blog for a year” competition.

A local Canberra team, Team Audio Programming Assistant (APA) from the University of Canberra, have won Microsoft Australia Imagine Cup. APA presented their entry to a panel of judges at Microsoft’s Remix conference in Melbourne. The team used Visual Studio SDK to customise Visual Studio 2005 so that it could be used by vision impaired programmers.

The team demonstrated their entry by covering their laptop screen and using verbal commands to write code, including the use of the Intellisense autocompletion feature. In addition, the team presented a customised IE browser which read out links on a web page and lets users fill in input fields and dialog boxes. APA also designed a web site specifically for blind developers, consisting of tips, tricks, and tutorials for teaching the blind how to write code.

It’s good to see local tertiary talent take off! Well done to APA.

Source of information: APC mag article and Ars Technica article.

I’ve always been passionate about accessibility and in particular, the social aspects and implications of living with disabilities. One of the blogs I follow on a regular basis is Glenda Hyatt’s Do It Myself Blog. Glenda shares her experiences about living with cerebral palsy and it’s just fascinating having the opportunity to get an insight into her life and the interesting challenges that she and her husband face. Glenda recently posted about the Blog For a Year competition.

Blog For a Year is a social sponsorship experiment by Charles Jolley that awards one winner a year-long contract to blog full time on a blog of his or her own choosing. The award is funded by donations from the community and sponsors. The competition ends when the Blogger Fund reaches $160,000 or on January 1, 2008, whichever comes first.

It’s an interesting concept. Glenda writes:

Blogging is fulfilling my childhood dream of having a regular column in which to share personal experiences of living with a disability so that readers may come to know me, the person, and to realize that I am more than my cerebral palsy. My goal is to alleviate people’s fears of those with disabilities in a non-confrontational and humorous way. Unlike writing a column in a local newspaper, blogging has allowed me to touch people from around the world. My dream would be even sweeter if I could find a way to be paid for blogging.

You can vote once a day for a blogger of your choice. I’m showing my support for Glenda by voting for her. You can support her too!

After nearly missing my flight this morning, thanks to Canberra Cabs, I’ve learned a few valuable lessons:

1. Do not book a Canberra Cab using their online form - the cab will never arrive (discovered this one through my hubby, which was also verified by Russel)
2. Do not ring up and book a cab for the future (i.e. at least a day ahead) - that cab will never arrive either
3. What ever time you’ve allocated for the cab to arrive - give yourself at least another half an hour on top of that

So after two phone calls this morning, and a lot of panic attacks, a cab finally showed up. The driver had to significantly speed along the highway to get me to the airport so I could just make it on the plane. The passengers were already boarding when I made it to the airport. I’m entirely grateful to Qantas for their fairly usable self check-in system - I managed to check in for my flight (including my return flight) in under a minute. It took longer going through security (my shoes set off the metal detector) but I finally made it. I was one of the last few passengers on the plane, but I made it!!!

We (Russ and myself) visited both offices in Sydney to conduct our accessibility testing. Discovered lots of interesting stuff about various disabilities, particularly, Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) /Occupational overuse syndrome (OOS). It was great to get verification about the issues we thought were occurring, and very importantly, to start building up the relationships with our users of assistive technologies.

A piece of learning from the last few years is that, like usability evaluations, you have to consider the context of the user in terms of their environment, their experience levels (of the assistive tool as well as of the application), the amount of training they have received, whether they undertake other training, the frequency of that training, and the work culture.

It is ideal to conduct the accessibility evaluation with a range of users across different experience levels, and across the different assistive tools. It is also important to note that when analysing the feedback received from the users of assistive technologies, it should be balanced with the factors mentioned in the previous paragraph. For example, a user may have been using an assistive tool for many years, but if they were not given the opportunity to do much training (whether it is self training or through a trainer), their experience levels may not match another person with the same number of years experience who had more opportunity to get more familiar with their assistive tool.

I could go on, but ironically enough, my own RSI is playing up…..

The GNOME Project has released Orca - a screen reader with other cool sounding features - as part of the release of version 2.16 of their popular Unix desktop environment. This piece of assistive technology is not just a screen reader. It also makes use of braille and screen magnification.
I need to find some time to have a play and report back about it.

Web Directions 2006 has just been launched! The line up of speakers look fantastic, as well as the workshops which have been scheduled for 26th and 27th of September.

I’m totally excited. Now to find the money to book myself on to the course…..

The Register writes about how text to speech gets emotional, thanks to Swiss based company, SVOX AG, who have produced a text to speech engine that is the result of 15 years of research and development.

The SVOX TTS engine is scalable between mobile, personal and server solutions so that as these new challenges are solved for the mass market they will become available for the specialised accessibility market.

Source: The Register

So perhaps it’s goodbye to the stereotype-basic-speech-synthesiser of JAWS - hello emotional synthesiser!