Penn State Learning Design Community Hub

FYI - If you couldn't make the presentation on accessibility in March, you can view the recorded presentations over Breeze at http://meeting.psu.edu/node/384

The second goes into depth about video captioning at Rochester Institute of Technlogy while the last was a presentation from David Cunningham, a visually impaired student, about his challenges with acessing course materials.

They're also good examples of live signing and live captioning. The captioning was good, because as John notes, there were some audio glitches in the beginning...

 I was pleased to find out that YouTube finally allows for captioning and annotation of movies. Google Video has supported captioning for some time now, but YouTube's implementation is a bit different. With Google Video, you upload a text file with timestamps (.SRT or .SUB) file and Google Video creates a CC button on your video's interface that allows you to turn captions on and off. With YouTube, you set captions a bit differently. When you log in to YouTube, you go to your My Videos page, find the video you want to caption and select the Edit Annotations button next to it.

There's been a good discussion on the W3C Accessibility list about Captchas and accessibility with some great ideas.

FYI - The next candidate release for WCAG 2.0 Web Content Accessibility has been released at

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-WCAG20-20080430/#guidelines
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/04/wcag20_cr_april2008.html (FAQ)

This is an overhaul which is meant to address gaps in WCAG (e.g. more recommendations for audio) and make recommendations for new options (e.g. CAPTCHA, AJAX like interactive Web sites). For most purposes, level A is sufficient. Fortunately, a lot of the new guidelines have been suggested before as usability guidelines or were a part of WCAG 1.

Bill Welsh from the Office of Disability Services (ODS) walked through how an accommodation request works. It wasn't quite what I expected.

1. Students requesting official accommodation must register with the Office of Disability Services....but not all students choose to do so (because they want to be more independent).

2. When ODS sends an accommodation letter to faculty, the accommodation is identified (e.g. a captioned video), but not the "condition" behind it - this is to maintain student privacy.

FYI - There is a section on accessibility at the Penn State Adobe Connect Hub
http://meeting.psu.edu/faq#general7

Thanks Yvonne, John and company.

There will be a free Penn State seminar/webinar on accessibility issues on Wed April 2 from 8:30 to 12:30. You can attend either via Acrobat Connect (Breeze) https://breeze.psu.edu/atdemo/ at or you can go to 101 Foster Auditorium, Pattee Library at University Park.

A common accessibility suggestion is to place navigation lists after content so that screen readers don't have to "plow" through a list of links before being able to read the content.

But a survey from Australia Source Order, Skip links and Structural labels found that screen reader users expect navigational elements to be read first on a page and are confused when they are not there.

FYI - The Blogs at Penn State do allow users to input an ALT tag when an image is uploaded. It's actually generated from the Name field on the image upload form. The default name is the file name, but can be easily changed.

See http://blogger.psu.edu/help/upload/images for details.

The Blogs at Penn State generally produces accessible HTML....but that doesn't mean it couldn't use some improvement.

If you are as obsessed with CSS as I apparently am, you may be interested in reading how you can tweak the theme CSS templates to get a really nice display of H3 and H4 in blogs (these are for subsection headers of long posts or portfolio pages).

http://blogger.psu.edu/node/368