Penn State Learning Design Community Hub

You can watch the Oct 12 presentation on accessibility live on Adobe Connect at  https://breeze.psu.edu/accessibility/

It will also be recorded.

FYI - There will be a session on accessibility in online education. It will feature David Cunningham  demoing how real users process documents on a screen reader and Elizabeth discussing NEW examples of implementing accessibility online.

YouTube does support caption files (specifically the SubViewer/.sub and SubRip/.srt). You can find information about searching for captioned videos and reading captions at

http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about

More information about the specific caption format is at

http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=100077

P.S. Pat just confirmed that Parity can create the correct caption format for YouTube.

Last week in my blog I wrote a about a Photoshop CS4 color blindness filter which lets you simulate how a color blind user might see an image.

Event: Online Issues Forum - Accessibility in Online Education
Date: Monday, April 20, 2009
Time: 1 to 2:30 pm
Location: Foster Auditorium, Pattee Library, University Park

Guest Speakers:
William Welsh, Director, Office for Disability Services
Christian Vinten-Johansen, Information Technology Manager, Information Technology Services
Elizabeth Pyatt, Instructional Designer, Information Technology Services
Susan Hayya, Coordinator of Library Services for Persons with Disabilities

FYI - WebAim just publicized results of a survey of 1121 screen reader users
http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey/

Some interesting results.

The free EASI accessibility seminars in January are:

1) Creating Accessible Forms for the Web, Tuesday January 13 at 2 PM Eastern
Presenter: Hadi Rangin from the University of Illinois

2) Cascading Style Sheets: What they are and How they Affect Accessibility A
public Webinar Tuesday Jan. 20 at 2 PM Eastern
Presenter: Terrill Thompson from DO-IT at the University of Washingt

Read more and register at:
http://easi.cc/clinic.htm

A lot of us have heard about the need to caption online videos, but may not have considered the whay they should presented

The following guide, Keys to Captioning, is a style guide to what the standards for captions are
http://www.dcmp.org/captioningkey/text.html

It include topics such as placement, how many lines (2 lines max in most cases), switching voices, background music and other important topics.

FYI - Thanks to Wendy Mahan for pointing this out to me.

EASI is presenting two free seminars this week

1 Making Accessible Forms in PDF presented by Karen McCall
Tuesday Nov. 18 at 2 PM Eastern standard

2 Mass Captioning by Autosynch
Thursday Nov 20 at 2 PM Eastern standard

Read about both and get login information from the EASI Webinar page:
http://easi.cc/clinic.htm
 

Earlier this week, Ray Kurzweil, the developer of Kurzweil screen reading software for students with many reading disabilities. Although he demos a new camera which takes pictures and reads the text aloud, the majority of his talk is a discussion of technology trends and how he predicted some changes based on the rate of exponential technology change.

It truly is a unique point of view.