Transcription:
– [Dennis] Welcome to this year’s final NCOA/IlluminAge Aging Briefing series webinar. Our title today, “Web Accessibility Compliance: Making Sure Your Website Doesn’t Play Favorites.” I’m Dennis Kenny, IlluminAge CEO. In a moment, I’ll introduce our presenters for today, but first a couple of logistics items.
We invite your questions, and there will be time set aside at the end for Q&A. Please type your questions using the Question icon you’ll see in your screen, usually in the upper right-hand corner. Next, a word about the archive for today’s session. We expect to post that as a free resource within a day or two. You’ll find it at illuminage.com/webinars. We will also send out a follow-up email probably within a week, and we’ll include the archive link with that follow-up email. Finally, if you would like a participation certificate for today’s program, you may go to the same webpage, illuminage.com/webinars, and click on Participation Certificates. Today’s event code will be 110316. That’s 110316.
Today, we are pleased to welcome as our lead presenter, Terrill Thompson, Technology Accessibility Specialist with the University of Washington here in Seattle. Terrill is a frequent speaker on the challenges and rewards of understanding and meeting web accessibility standards. Also joining us today is Irene Stewart. Irene is a Planner and Communications Coordinator with Aging & Disability Services, the area Agency on Aging for Seattle-King County, and part of the City of Seattle’s Human Services Department. Irene is a veteran presenter as part of the NCOA/IlluminAge webinar series, and it’s a pleasure to have you back, Irene. I should also mention that there’s a fourth person on the call today. Anne Wiltgen, part of our IlluminAge Web Accessibility Team will be helping us with the slides and coordinating the Q&A session.
Now, before I turn it over to Irene and Terrill, who’ll cover the what and how of web accessibility, I’d like to get us started with a few thoughts on the why, why each of your organizations should be committed to meeting web accessibility standards. Persons with disabilities represent a significant part of the internet user base. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the number of Americans living with some form of disability at nearly 60 million, or about 1 in 5. Of those 60 million, 38 million or about 1 American in 8 live with a severe disability. All do not use the internet, of course. But a reputable study found that 54% of adults living with a disability are in fact internet users. These numbers frame the core challenge. Publishing to the web cannot be considered competent or complete unless it is reasonably effective in reaching the entire population of internet users, both those with and those without a disability.
A second important reality is this. Within the 20% of the population living with a disability, there is wide variation in both the type of disability and how severe it is. The major types of disability we as web publishers need to be concerned about are hearing impairment, sight impairment, and physical limitations, for example an inability to use a mouse. Web accessibility in simplest terms is the imperative that your website serves everyone, including visitors with disabilities, that it doesn’t play favorites. Web accessibility compliance refers to the measures you and your web communications team take to ensure that your site and its content and functionality are fully and equally accessible.
The phrase “accessibility compliance” seems to imply a legal requirement that your site meet accessibility standards. What are the legal requirements and to whom do they apply? We like to diagram the why of web accessibility in the form of a triangle. The bottom level applies to all websites and is not technically a legal requirement. Here, the driver for building in accessibility rests with service and ethics. Because your web audience includes a significant number of web users with a disability, isn’t it the responsible thing to do to take those special user requirements into consideration in designing your site, and its content and functionality? To put it a different way, since you are going to the trouble of publishing to the web anyway, isn’t it the smart, responsible path to make sure your content is as universally accessible as you can make it? The middle of the triangle is all about professional standards. As Terrill will explain in more detail, the international community of web communications professionals has adopted an agreed set of standards and best practices for web accessibility. While the lower tier is an imperative based on service and common sense, the middle tier reflects the professional and peer review expectations we are all subject to. At the top of the triangle, we focus on the legal requirements. For background purposes, I’ll leave you with three points. Government websites, those of cities, counties, and their programs and agencies are covered by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Public accommodation websites are covered by Title III of the ADA. The Department of Justice’s implementing regulations under Title II state that a public entity shall take appropriate steps to ensure that communications with applicants, participants, members of the public, and those with disabilities are as effective as communications with others. Healthcare provider websites are also now subject to the same mandate. For healthcare websites, the mandate is rounded on Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act and new final regulations adopted in July by the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Civil Rights. A key provision of these regulations states a covered entity, which is essentially any provider that receives any federal funding for healthcare services or programs, shall take appropriate steps to ensure that their communications with individuals with disabilities are as effective as communications with others.
Finally, there’s the question of how the law is being and will be enforced. The Department of Justice routinely includes web accessibility review when it conducts reviews under Title II of the ADA. Settlement agreements typically include a range of corrective measures dealing with web accessibility. As to healthcare providers, remember that the new rules give any aggrieved person the right to file a complaint with Health and Human Services, Office of Civil Rights. That office has been investigating Section 1557 complaints right along, since the Affordable Care Act took effect, and it seems reasonable to assume the pace and scope of nondiscrimination and web accessibility review under Section 1557 will only increase over time.
Now, with that background, I’d like to turn it over to Irene for her perspective, and then to Terrill for his tips and best practices.
– [Irene] Thank you, Dennis. I want to share a story with everyone, and it’s really a story of how I discovered accessible communications. A few years ago, as one of the aspects of the work that I do, I began staffing the Northwest Universal Design Council. The Universal Design Council promotes good design of anything that can be designed, whether it’s the built environment or a website, promotes good design for all ages and all abilities all the time. One of my steering committee members is blind. Actually, at that time, one was. Now, I believe I have three blind members of my steering committee. But a few years ago, one day I realized that my steering committee member did not receive information that I sent, at least not what I had intended to send. He got information, but was struggling to understand what it was that I intended when I sent it. Next slide.
I discovered that I just didn’t know. I didn’t know that what I was sending was inaccessible, that what I was sending was in some cases nearly pointless. Next slide.
I asked him to tell me what he received, and I was really shocked to learn the spectrum of errors in my materials. This was in email messages, in Outlook schedulers, in PDFs, and links to websites, my own and to others. A simple email might not be a problem. But an email that’s long and/or involves, say, a matrix or an appointment scheduler that has Windows in it, it turned out that that was very difficult for him to access. An email without text with an attached PDF image was nearly pointless. I was also shocked to find out just how much effort it took for him and for other people who are blind to access the information in my messages using a screen reader. Again, sometimes there was nothing. Other times, it was just full of what I refer to as “gobbledygook.” He and others have described to me how physically and mentally exhausting it can be to find information they need. That’s to find simple information. But imagine if you are seeking information, say, for half the day, or all day if it relates to the work that you do or a project that you have. I thought about that a lot. I continue to get information from him about what I send. I’m getting better. That’s good. But I realize that the onus is really on me to send information that is accessible, and by that I mean effective and meaningful to the people it’s intended to support. So when I prepare communications intended for the general public, and in my case that’s typically a public that includes people who are older and may include people who have disabilities, I need to ensure that individuals with visual or hearing impairments, or other physical and cognitive challenges can access that. So imagine if I had not had those conversations, and imagine if I didn’t ask. I simply wouldn’t know what I don’t know. Next slide.
The same goes for websites. As I learned more, I met with a group of web developers, designers, trainers, and others who focus on user experience and accessibility. It’s actually a Meetup group. That’s at meetup.com, if you’re interested in looking for similar groups in your area. My group is called “A11YSEA”. It looks like “Ally,” but it’s “A11Y,” and it stands for “Accessibility Seattle.” The web developers there told me about a simple tool I could use to check my websites. It’s called Wave WebAIM, so it’s wave.webaim.org, and it looks like the image on the screen. There are other online tools, too. But this one is free and it was recommended because it works quite well and gives a list of errors, as well as structural considerations and other considerations to improve accessibility. So I started testing my websites, and unfortunately they flunked. So I moved on to get more information. Next slide, please.
I am on several accessibility listservs, and I started seeing reports from the U. S. Department of Justice about their settlements with not only local and state governments, but also with nonprofits and with for-profit organizations, businesses that were in violation of some aspects of the ADA. Invariably, no matter what they investigated, the DOJ seemed to always include a section on communications with specific orders to make websites accessible. You can find that information and you can sign up for those alerts if you go to disability.gov and/or ada.gov. So our agency made a quick decision. We needed to make our websites accessible and we needed to do it right now, because this is truly important to the work that we do. Next slide.
Fortunately, IlluminAge Communication Partners came to my rescue, and I’m happy to say that I believe all of our sites to be fully accessible now. Meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or what we affectionately call it, the “WCAG,” 2.0 AA Guidelines. Dennis mentioned that in his remarks, and Terrill will talk about it in a little while. One exception, and I’m not happy about it but I haven’t found an easy solution, our main website includes a large number of PDFs from years past, things like Advisory Council meeting minutes and agendas, that sort of thing. These are not fully accessible in the past. Because so many of the accessibility strategies that you will hear about for websites can also be applied to everything from a Word document to an email, to a PDF, moving forward, we have the tools to post accessible documents online. Another feature, every one of these websites has an Accessibility page. We offer accessibility tools and tips for website visitors. We show our accessibility policy, and we have an Accessibility Feedback Form, so that we can respond to accessibility problems as quickly as possible. I would encourage you to visit one or all of these sites and look for the accessibility link, typically at the very bottom of the page. The images you see on the screen on the upper left-hand corner is our main site, agingkingcounty.org. To the right of that is our Advisory Council’s monthly e-zine, and that’s agewisekingcounty.org. Down on the lower level to the left, you will see the image for the communitylivingconnections.org website. That is our version of the Aging and Disability Resource Center. Resources are available everywhere, but this is specific to Seattle King County. The one in the middle on the bottom is an image of the King County Caregiver Support Network website, and that address is kccaregiver.org. KC as in “King County”, kccaregiver.org. Then, over on the right side, the Northwest Universal Design Council, the site is called “environmentsforall.org” and it is the Universal Design Council’s site. Next page. Next screen, please.
So in summary, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know. So let’s explore this. One of the best ways to learn if your website is accessible or effective is to ask someone. Ask someone who depends on a screen reader, or ask someone who may have difficulty handling a mouse. You can use a web accessibility checker to see what kind of errors exist on your webpages, and most of them are easy to fix. Terrill will be sharing some of the key elements of accessible digital communications, and you’ll learn about some of those. Make sure that your webmaster knows about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and some of the other standards, again, that Terrill will talk about in a moment. I’ve learned that there are a lot of very talented web designers in this world who have never heard of the WCAG, and also unfortunately have never given any thought to accessibility. Now, some of them have given some thought to user experience without thinking about disability and maybe thinking about things like, oh, voice activated software. It would be really good if they understood that there are people right now who depend on it, whether or not they have an Amazon Echo or Siri, or any of the other voices that can tell you what you’re looking for. So also, really anyone who prepares web content should learn about the elements of accessibility, and there’s some easy to read checklists available if you simply google “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.” Then, also if necessary, get some professional help. It’s a very small price to pay to ensure that your audience can access the information that you’ve always intended them to have.
Dennis, back to you.
– Irene, thanks so much. Now, we’ll turn to Terrill Thompson from the University of Washington.
– [Terrill] Thanks, Dennis, and thanks, Irene. Let me share my screen here. Just a moment. As Dennis mentioned, I’m at the University of Washington. I’m a Technology Accessibility Specialist there. It’s actually good to hear you say “I don’t know,” or, “I didn’t know,” Irene, because that is common. It’s great to see, I’ve been watching the number of attendees sort of ticking… The counter has been ticking along. We’re up to 107 now. I really like to see a lot of people who, just by being here, you’re admitting that there’s some things that you don’t know. You’re either wanting just to get the basics. Maybe you’ve already got the basics, but you are acknowledging that you need to know a little bit more. So there’s always something we can learn about this. But I’ve discovered in over two decades in the field of accessibility that even though accessibility techniques have been around for a very long time, there aren’t a lot of people that know about them. So it really does come down to raising awareness, providing education. So the over 100 people that are here today, I hopefully will provide some information that’s new to you and useful to you if you take it back and apply it immediately. Also, I hope that you’ll share it with somebody else. So if each one of you shares this with somebody else, then we’ve got 200 people who know a little bit more about accessibility. Or at least cognizant of the fact that we need to pay attention to this as we’re creating digital communications, creating websites or documents, or making purchasing decisions related to tools and that sort of thing.
So at the University of Washington, just in sort of thinking back to the numbers that Dennis shared in the opening couple of slides, we have over 1,000 students registered with our Disability Resources for Students Office. So those are students who have specifically acknowledged that they have a disability and they need some sort of accommodation. Statistics or research show that actually the majority of students with disabilities don’t register. They find other means of getting their needs met. So that’s a lot of students who have disabilities and the technologies they use, the communication that’s going to them through digital means, really impacts the quality of the education that they receive. So my job is to try and mostly educate, [and] spending a lot of time just raising awareness, providing trainings, and developing resources for people on our campus who are communicating digitally in various forms. And helping them to understand what the issues are, and helping them to find solutions. It’s not just about students for us, either, but employees as well. We have thousands of employees with disabilities, and they too need to be able to access all the digital communications and software that are required for performing the functions of their job.
So this is the work that we do, and I’m delighted to be able to share that with you all today. I do want to talk about digital communication and sort of explore that together, and figure out what that means exactly. So digital communication obviously is huge. This is the way that we are communicating today. We used to have conversations face to face, and we still do that occasionally. But there are, according to internetlivestats.com. This was just updated yesterday, so it probably is out of date. But 3.5 billion internet users, over 1 billion websites, over 150 billion emails sent today, 3.2 billion Google searches today, over 7 billion videos viewed today on YouTube, and over 1.7 billion active Facebook users. So this is our society. There’s a lot of information, an extraordinary amount of information that’s being shared constantly via electronic means, and there are a lot of members of our society, particularly people who are aging into having disabilities, growing numbers of people in our society that can’t fully participate. Because they can’t watch that video, or they can’t get anything from the video because it doesn’t have captions. Or they can’t access that website, because it’s not developed in a way or designed in a way that is fully accessible. We’ll talk in a bit about what that means. The same thing with documents.
So just the sheer volume of communication, think about those numbers, and then think about all of that being inaccessible to several large groups of people within our society. This is a problem that we’re hoping to make a dent in.
So if we think about the typical computer user, as shown here, somebody who’s sitting in front of a desktop computer with a monitor and a keyboard, and probably a mouse. The whole notion of web accessibility is that there is no typical computer user, that this is a myth. It may have had some basis in older days. But today, really, it’s an old-fashioned image and even just looking at that, we can tell, well the monitor is larger than most monitors that we have on our desks. So this is not really a typical user. The typical model of using a monitor for output, and keyboard and mouse for input, is kind of passé, that there are a lot of people now who are using their phones for interfacing. Communicating in a variety of different ways using text or email, or accessing websites, they can do that with their phone, and there are a variety of different flavors of phones. We’ve got different platforms, different shapes and sizes. We’ve got, so it’s all sorts of different mobile devices. So we’re not just talking about phones, but we’re talking about iPads and various flavors of tablets.
We also have people who don’t just access information visually, but who access information audibly. So traditionally, that has been people who are blind and they’re using a screen reader that reads the content on the screen. But now that’s expanding too, so we have a lot of people who are using their mobile devices or maybe they’ve got a Wi-Fi enabled automobile who are listening to content rather than viewing content visually.
So just a wide variety of ways to get the output from the computer, from the internet, and then the same thing with input, that we’re not just typing anymore and we’re not using a mouse. We’re using a touchscreen sometimes on our mobile devices. But more and more often, we’re using speech, and this originally also started with people who had physical disabilities and were unable to type or use a mouse. So they use a program like Dragon Dictate, which eventually became Dragon NaturallySpeaking, to talk to the computer and dictate documents, and give voice commands to operate the computer. But more and more, once again, we’re interacting with our technology using voice so we can have that hands-free experience. So our mobile devices are really kind of revolutionizing the way we interact with technology.
We also have people who use touch interfaces. So a blind person may be using an audible screen reader, but they may also be using touch. Or instead of an audible output, they might just be getting output through touch. Somebody who’s deaf/blind would just use touch. So on the slide here, we have a refreshable brail device, which has a row of dots that refreshes as they browse through the content of a webpage or a document. So they can move up and down through rows and so forth, and the dots change as they do that. So they can then use brail to read the content on the screen. This particular model also has brail input, so they could type. They could type using a regular keyboard as well, but they can also type using brail keys.
So I ran out of space on this slide. Otherwise, I could go on and on, and on with the variety of different ways that we access technology and digital communications, both input and output. It’s an incredibly diverse and rich environment now, lots and lots of different tools out there. People with disabilities are part of this mix, but they’re like everybody else. They’re just using different technologies, or using different formats, different configurations. We all are, and it’s not a binary thing. There’s not people with disabilities and people without disabilities. It’s not that simple. It’s this rich, full spectrum of different ways that people access communication.
Even those of us who access information visually with a monitor have widely variant configurations. So this is a screenshot from my MacBook Pro, where I’ve got resolutions from 640 by 480 all the way up to 1680 by 1050, and there are about a dozen choices in between those two ranges. So depending on what I’ve selected for my resolution, it’s going to be a different sort of experience than what somebody else might have. Then, within a web browser, I can change the font size very easily. These are my choices in Firefox from 9 point up to 72 point. Or pixels, whatever the unit of measure here is, there’s a huge variety. By default, it’s set to 16. But I do know a lot of people who increase the font size and some people who decrease it, because they’ve got a particular range that works best for them. So just knowing that there are all these differences in user preferences, user tools, in the way that users interact with technology is the first step toward understanding what web accessibility and digital communication accessibility is all about.
So on this notion of ability not being a binary thing, I’ve got a spectrum here where you’ve got “Not able” on one end and “Able” on the other. If we think about all these functions, the ability to see, for example, some of us have 20/20 vision with no correction, some of us can’t see at all, and some of us, most of us, fall somewhere in between within that spectrum. So if we were to actually take a poll and plot our responses in terms of what our vision is with or without correction, then it’s all over the map. There is no seeing and not seeing. Really, it’s not that simple. But it’s a wide variety, and the same thing with the ability to hear and ability to walk, and ability to read print, write with pen or pencil, communicate verbally, tune out distraction. We all fall somewhere on this continuum, and it just depends on what the particular function or particular behavior is that we’re talking about.
So once again, understanding that and understanding that people are very diverse is important for how do we communicate with such a diverse population. I guess, I’ve used the phrase “with or without correction” because there are ways of correcting some weaknesses. So if we sort of fall on the left end of that spectrum, on the lower end of that spectrum on a particular variable, then maybe we can correct that. So if we can’t see very well or if we can’t see at all, then we can listen to content. So we could use a screen reader. I actually, even though I’m not blind, but I do have not the best vision and it’s getting worse as I age… There are times when I can’t find my reading glasses, and I just got a text and I can’t see it, then I’ll fire up VoiceOver, the screen reader that’s built into iPhones, and I will listen to that text. So it’s not just a tool just for people who are totally blind, but we can all sort of benefit from that capability.
So a screen reader, something that reads the content on the screen, is an assistive technology that could benefit people. A refreshable brail device is an assistive technology. So if somebody can’t see or can’t hear, then they can still use an assistive technology like a brail device and access content that way. If somebody can’t type, can’t use the keyboard, can’t use the mouse, maybe they have no hands or they have limited use of their hands, or they have tremors, they can speak and use speech input as an assistive technology. If we are math-impaired, and we can’t perform complex mathematical calculations in our head, then we can use a calculator. So it’s the same sort of idea. A calculator is an assistive technology that helps us to get beyond our mathematical limitations. Eyeglasses, for those of us that don’t have perfect vision, that’s an assistive technology that improves our vision and gives us access to the visual world. A high-powered wheelchair, like the one shown here, I don’t know how many people have these turbo-powered wheelchairs that can probably get over any obstacle. Most wheelchair users don’t. But if somebody is unable to walk or has difficulty walking, then a wheelchair provides assistive technology. So assistive technologies can make a huge impact, and can help us to overcome whatever sort of functional limitations we might have.
However, if we’ve got a wheelchair, unless we’ve got that high-powered wheelchair on the previous slide… Most wheelchair users or maybe somebody using a walker. If we’re at the bottom of a set of steps, like shown on this slide, you have several dozen steps and a long way up into this government building where we want to be able to participate in whatever’s going on in here, it’s very hard to get there. It’s probably impossible to get there with our assistive technology. So assistive technology can get us so far, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
So here we have a classic accessibility problem, where assistive technology doesn’t fully solve the problem. What needs to happen then? Well, what needs to happen is the building itself has to be modified. So there needs to be a ramp, perhaps, and maybe there is one, hopefully there is one, off to the side here somewhere. We can’t see it in this photo, but a ramp that would allow the wheelchair user to get up to the top of these stairs. Or maybe, there’s an escalator somewhere. So the building itself gets modified in order to sort of meet the person halfway. Assistive technology gets them part of the way as well, but the modification of the building is necessary in order to fully have accessibility.
So we’re talking about digital accessibility. It really is the same thing, that we’ve got a website, we’ve got a document. The user has assistive technology that helps them to read that, and really there is nobody on the planet who can’t access computers. Regardless of how severe their disability is, if they can twitch a muscle at all, then there are assistive technologies that will enable them to access computers. I go to a conference every year in early spring, the CSUN Conference on Technology and Disability in San Diego. It’s held by the California State University of Northridge, CSUN. There are always hundreds of assistive technologies there, including some really innovative ones. But there are tools that allow you to control a computer with eye gaze. Just moving your eyes left and right, you can control the cursor, and sip and puff devices so you can control, you can click and double-click with a straw. So if you can breathe, which hopefully everybody can breathe, then you can control a computer. If you can move your eyes, you can control a computer. Or if you can move your head a little bit, then there are devices that support that. There are even brain wave-based devices that allow you to control the cursor by thinking “left, right, up, down,” thoughts. So it’s not reading your mind. It can be a little scary if you think about the potential there. But at this point, in its infancy, that technology can accurately track whether you’re thinking, “left, right, up, down,” and you can train yourself to control a computer that way. So anybody can use the computer.
But despite these breakthroughs in assistive technologies, if we have a website that isn’t created with accessibility in mind or have composed a document that isn’t created with accessibility in mind, then all these advances can’t get the person access. So that’s a shame. We want to make sure that we do our part, because our part actually is the easy part.
So what is our part? What does it mean to build an accessible digital environment? Well, I want to give you an example. I’ve got three examples here, and the first is probably the most common that you guys are dealing with or creating, an online document.
So there might be a webpage or it might be a Word document or a PDF. Whatever sort of document we are communicating to users with might look like the one shown here, which is just a bunch of text that is really hard to decipher. So if I were to ask you to… For example, this is an Introduction to Physics course syllabus. So it’s a syllabus from a higher education class. It’s got things like course objectives. It’s got the class schedule. It’s got the reading assignment from week to week. It’s got sort of how the tests are going to be graded and what percentage of your grade those are. A simple question like, what are the course objectives… Let’s just keep it simple, how many course objectives are there in this class?
So I’ll give you a few seconds here to see if you can come up with the answer to that, just in your head.
So by now, with a typical course syllabus that might be presented a little bit better visually than this, you probably would know. You could just glance and under the heading that says “Course Syllabus” you would see maybe some bulleted items, and you could answer that question in five seconds or less. But some of you probably are still struggling to figure out the answer to that question. So imagine that you are blind and you’re enrolled in this physics course, and something as simple as how many course objectives there are has totally stumped you. Imagine what the rest of the class is going to be like. This is a huge problem and a huge barrier, and it really is not that difficult to solve.
The issue is that this document doesn’t have any structure. So it’s just a bunch of text and we don’t know whether there are headings here with different sections of content. We don’t know whether there are items in a list. None of this makes any sense. It’s just jumbled text.
So visually, to improve this, maybe it looks like this. Here’s the same document that now has structure. So it’s pretty clear that “Introduction to Physics Course Syllabus” is the main heading of this page, and that there are several subheadings that break this page into groups. So you’ve got “Text Book,” “Course Objectives,” “Class Schedule,” “Grades.” Those are all subheadings. So if I wanted to know what the course objectives are, I could jump directly to that subheading. Visually, I glance at that, and then I look below that and I see three list items. So that’s my course objectives. The answer is three. Then, I’ve got tables that give me a week by week class schedule with the topic and reading assignment, and then I’ve got the grades in a table down at the bottom of the document. So pretty easy to figure this course out visually.
So the problem is, for somebody who’s not visual, if they’re accessing content audibly or using a tactile interface, then they don’t have access to these same visual cues. So we know that “Introduction to Physics Course Syllabus” is the main heading of the page, because it’s big and bold, and centered, and the subheadings are all a little bit different. They’re maybe a little bit smaller and they’re off to the left and not centered. So we know those are different. We can ascertain from the visual cues that those are subheadings that form the different sections of the page. So changing this rather obscure blob of text to this visually is one thing.
But communicating that to people who can’t see it is what we really need to be cognizant of. So when there’s a heading, we need to identify it as a heading, and when there’s a subheading we need to identify that as a subheading. When there’s a list of items, that needs to be specifically identified as a list with each item being a list item. So as web developers, that all happens within the code within HTML. But this is also all built into any web authoring tool, or any document authoring tool, Microsoft Word or any of the other word processing programs that are out there, Google Docs. PDF also has support for structure.
But again, going back to “I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” this is something that not a lot of people are aware of. So accessibility, probably the most important thing to be aware of with accessibility is that structure matters and it’s important to communicate what this thing is that I am creating. So if it’s a heading, I need to be sure that I know how to identify it as a heading using whatever tool I’m using to create this document.
So a second example is video, and the most obvious aspect of video accessibility is that if there’s audio content, somebody who can’t hear that audio doesn’t have access to it. So they can watch the video, watch the visuals if they can see it, but they can’t hear what’s going on, can’t hear what’s being said. So captions then provide the solution, and that’s been around for many, many, many decades as a solution and it’s available online. YouTube actually supports captions and allows the author to do some really cool things, and the user to do some really cool things with captions. If you have captions on your video, then you can translate that automatically into other languages. You can also generate an interactive transcript that allows you to just sort of quickly read through the video content, and then click anywhere in that transcript to play the video at that point. So with so much information being delivered through video now, having captions on that video really becomes important for everybody, because it makes the video content searchable and it makes interactive transcripts possible. That’s just its functionality that really improves the efficiency with which we can consume all of this video-based information.
There are other issues with video accessibility that we probably don’t have time to go into in depth. But if somebody can’t see the video, then they might also have difficulty accessing its content. So if there’s information that’s being presented only visually and if somebody is just listening to the audio track, they can’t get that message, then there’s a technique called “audio description” where narration is added to the video that describes the visual components. There are lots of different techniques for delivering audio description, and you can find out more about those online.
Also, the accessibility of the media player, you should be able to operate the controls without a mouse. If you can’t physically use a mouse, how do you play or fast-forward, or pause, or turn the volume up or down, or mute it? All of these things should be accessible by keyboard, and that’s true not just of video players, but of all sorts of web interfaces. Any webpage, you should be able to operate and control all the functions and features without using a mouse.
So that brings me to the third example, which is an online application, similar to the one we’re using today actually that has a lot of features where in some environments you can see a list of participants, and you can ask questions and you can chat, and you can see the slides. There might be some other features. Maybe there’s a video of the person who’s speaking, all sorts of functionality built into the environment. But the question is, who can access that and who can’t access that? What sort of barriers are there with a tool like this? With the tool we’re using today, actually, GoToWebinar, we can illustrate this point.
The method for asking questions is to type something into the question box. So I challenge you now to do that without touching the mouse.
So don’t anybody touch the mouse or track that. Just use the keyboard alone, and the standard technique for using the keyboard is to use the Tab key to move around from component to component, to component within the application. Then, wherever it makes sense, arrow keys, maybe Esc. Esc usually closes something that’s open if you don’t want something that’s open to be open. But otherwise, you have Tab, and then arrow keys, and then when you want to select something you usually do that with Enter or Space. So if anybody can ask a question or just say, “I did it,” with their keyboard alone, without using the mouse, then let us know also how you did it. What technique did you use? I’ll give you just a minute to do that, and I think Anne, you’re monitoring the questions. So if anybody responds, let me know and let me know what they say. So we’ve got 101 people who are trying this. So potentially, I’m going to get flooded with questions. But I’m pretty confident that if you are having a difficult time asking a question without a mouse, the rest of the 100 people in the session are having similar problems.
So this is the kind of problem that we need to ask whenever we’re looking at products, building products, or making purchasing decisions. Always ask, “Is this accessible?” If it’s not, then you have some choices. You can either choose not to purchase it or not to sign that contract. With GoToWebinar, I don’t want to pick on them necessarily, but another approach is to engage them in a conversation. Because vendors and developers of products, just like everybody else, didn’t know what they don’t know. So approaching them and saying, “Hey, your application is not keyboard-accessible,” or if somebody is using a screen reader, “This is not accessible by a screen reader. Somebody who’s blind can’t interact with this,” and then help them to become aware of that, help them to understand how to fix it.
So that actually is what we’ve done is engaged with GoToWebinar. They’ve escalated this issue, and are going to be, hopefully, trying to fix their accessibility. In the meantime, for asking questions we do have illuminage.com/accessibility as a backup option. So if somebody can’t use a mouse and they can’t get to that question form, then they can go to the online form and submit their question that way. We’ve got people standing by and monitoring, watching for questions. So this is the kind of question we need to ask.
I’m getting low on time, so I apologize. I’m going to have to sort of skip quickly through the next section. But I do have some tips.
First, using proper heading structure, as we looked at that document, that was really a key is we need to identify headings as headings. So in HTML, for those of you that are web developers or know a little something about web coding, then you want to make sure you’ve got an H1 for the main heading, H2s for any subheadings. Then, if you have more depth within your document, then you might use H3, or all the way down to H6. But the important thing is that it needs to form an outline of the page, so screen reader users understand how the page is organized and structured. Just by doing that, you really go a long way to convert that blob of text to a document that actually has some structure and is easy to follow and easy to understand. That same idea is also important in Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word, ever since the beginning I think, or very early versions of Word, has had headings, and those are organized as styles, or identified as styles. But if you use the heading styles, then that has the same function. So a screen reader user then can jump from heading to heading, to heading within a document, and they can understand the organization and the structure of the document.
Now, a lot of people make the mistake of thinking, “Well, I don’t like the way Heading 1 looks. So I’m going to go for something smaller or different, and choose a Heading 5.” The visual way that a heading looks should have no impact on your choice of headings, because you can customize these. You can very easily go into Word and customize the look, and the size and shape, and color of any of these headings. So you need to choose headings based on the outline of the document, and then stylize them separately. That also had benefits to you, because if you get a document that has several dozen Heading 2s in it, then you can just go to one place and change the look and feel of all of those headings. Heading are everywhere. So anywhere where you can author content, even in a forum on a webpage in a rich text editor, chances are there’s some sort of control on the toolbar that allows you to add headings at various levels. So it’s just important to think about that and to add headings to your documents.
The second tip is to add alt text to images. So if you have images, then you want to communicate whatever it is you’re trying to communicate with an image, you need to provide alternate text that describes that image. So the text that you choose really depends on what you’re trying to communicate. This is a photograph of the University of Washington campus, and so I might just say, “University of Washington.” But depending on the context, if I’m using this image to try and sell the University of Washington to potential students, then I probably want to describe it in a bit more detail. So I’ve added on this slide some HTML that would be used to add this image to a webpage, and I’ve added alt equals “The University of Washington campus under clear blue skies: majestic historic buildings, fountains, and Mount Rainier looming in the distance.” So that I feel like is language that kind of sells the campus and makes people think it’s always a blue sky day in Seattle, which actually is dishonest. But it’s the same dishonest message that sighted users are getting, and it’s all about providing equivalent communication.
Some images are either easier or more difficult to label. So you really need to consider the functionality of an image. I could talk for a while about this particular image, and in the interest of time I’m just going to have to skip it. But the bottom line is, functionality is important. So you probably want to say something like, “Move to previous group of emails,” or, “Move to next group of emails,” these are images from Gmail, in order to communicate, “What’s going to happen if I click this button?” to somebody that can’t see the button.
Once again, Microsoft Word, ever since images have been supported, they have also supported alt text. How you do that varies from version to version. But you just need to go in to right-click on an image, and select Image Properties or something like that, and eventually drill around a little bit and you’ll find a place where you can enter alt text.
Again, you can do that everywhere. Any place that you can add an image, you can also add alt text. So creating accessible PDFs, there are steps for that. I’m going to provide a resource at the end, where you can get more information about how to create accessible PDFs. Unfortunately, I have to skip that for now.
Captioning videos, there are tools that allow you to do this for free. There are also services that will do it for a fee. I’ve got resources that link to all these resources, so again I’ll share that resource slide at the end.
But I want to get to accessibility standards. WCAG 2.0 has been referenced by both Dennis and Irene. That is a standard that comes from the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. Those are the people who have all sorts of web standards. So HTML, the language of the web, that’s their specification. They’re the keeper of that standard. Cascading Style Sheets, also theirs. Ever since the beginning of the web, back in the early ’90s, they were aware that accessibility could be a problem with the web, and they developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at that point. So WCAG 1.0 actually came out in the late 1990s, after many years of working on it with a variety of stakeholder groups. WCAG 2.0 is the more recent version of that. There’s also a specification from the W3C called ARIA, Accessible Rich Internet Applications, that kind of goes to the next level. It really makes accessibility possible, even with complex, interactive web widgets.
So a bit more on WCAG 2.0. The most recent version was published in 2008, and there are 62 very specific success criteria, and those are labeled with different levels. So there are Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA success criteria defined within WCAG 2.0. So things like “add headings to your document,” like we’ve just talked about. “Add alt text to your images.” Both of those are Level A success criteria. So that means that they are critical for certain groups of users, and they’re really not hard to do. So they’ve been assigned a very high level.
Level AA go kind of the next level. They might not be as critical, but they’re still very important and they’re still pretty easy to do, pretty attainable. That’s important, because Level AA of WCAG 2.0 has kind of emerged as the standard. In all of these legal cases, settlements, resolutions, Level AA WCAG 2.0 is what the defendants are ultimately agreeing to meet after these legal challenges. The Department of Justice has identified Level AA of WCAG 2.0 as the target for their forthcoming ADA regulations on web accessibility, which haven’t been fully developed yet. But they just closed the public comment period, and it was really clear that they were leaning towards WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
So that covers things like the issues we’ve been talking about, heading structure, alt text, captions on videos, and some issues we haven’t talked about, having adequate color contrast, making sure that you’re not just using color as the sole means of communicating information. Like your required fields are in red on a form. That doesn’t work for somebody who’s colorblind, and then clear, visible indication of keyboard focus. So as you’re trying to Tab around, trying to get to the question area without a mouse, you probably couldn’t tell where you were with the keyboard. So that actually is really easy to fix and a very important thing for people who are using a keyboard.
So there’s also the Section 508 standards, which are federal. Section 508 is a federal law that requires that the federal government make sure that its electronic and information technology is accessible, and that was passed in 1998. The standards for that law were published in 2000. That’s a long time ago, but they are currently refreshing those standards, and they, too, are leaning towards WCAG 2.0 Level AA as the standard for electronic and information technology accessibility. So getting to know WCAG 2.0 Level AA is really an important next step.
So really quickly, the big takeaway is to just always ask, “Can everyone access this?” Whether you’re creating a website, creating or distributing a document, producing or uploading a video, or purchasing any technology, just always sort of have that question in your mind as a mantra. Make sure that your digital communications don’t play favorites. By asking that question, that’s the first step. Then, exploring that question, trying to get answers to that question, you’ll constantly be developing and learning new things. That will ultimately help to make the world more accessible. So we’ve got several resources, and probably the most important is that first one. The uw.edu/accessibility, that is our hub for all sorts of things related to technology accessibility. So we’ve got document accessibility information, web accessibility, captioning information. So if you want any details about the stuff we’ve talked about today, that’s a great place to find it. Then, illuminage.com/webinars is this webinar, and all the other resources that are available through this slide, or linked on this slide, also can provide useful information.
So we’re just a little bit past time, but I actually have blocked an extra half-hour. As long as IlluminAge will allow us to stick around, I’m happy to stick around and answer any questions that you might have.
– [Anne] Hi. This is Anne at IlluminAge. I’m facilitating the webinar and monitoring the questions box. Since we’re right about at the hour, I want to let everyone know that, as Terrill said, this webinar will be available at the link on the screen, illuminage.com/webinars, along with a recording, captions, and a transcript shortly after today, within a week. Please do type any questions you might have in the questions box. You can also, if you’re having any trouble with the webinar interface, you can go to illuminage.com/accessibility or email them to me at Anne, that’s ANNE@illuminage.com.
The first one we have, I want to give Dennis a chance to answer this. A lot of this information is a little overwhelming. Do we have any tips on where we could start first?
– So let me take a quick run at that, and then ask Terrill and Irene to weigh in. This is a lot of information and if you haven’t been paying a lot of attention to accessibility and non-discrimination in your web communications, it can seem overwhelming. I would break it down into some pieces, as you would with any major undertaking.
The first thing to me would be to make sure you and your colleagues understand the issues. Basically, bring this out front and center on the table. Make it available for discussion, and sort of change your web publishing and web communications frame of reference at the base level to make sure to make a commitment that accessibility is baked into your web presence. That’s the first step.
Second is to take a team approach. Nobody can do this alone. So to bring together the content contributors, the developers, the designers, webmaster, and so forth, people who respond to online forms or create them for you, and make sure that everyone shares the same goal and assign some responsibilities within that team. So teamwork is the second point.
The third one would be to begin to take individual steps to test, fix, update, upgrade your website in response to specific guidelines that Terrill has talked about. So basically, understand that everything isn’t going to happen overnight. But take the initial steps and steps right along to make sure that your website gains in accessibility on a progressive basis, and then finally to measure progress. To use the wave.webaim.com tool, for example, to test your site now and six months from now, or three months from now, and see what sort of forward progress you’re making.
So clear understanding, teamwork, individual steps, and the commitment that that requires, and then measuring progress is how I would answer that question. Terrill and Irene, do you want to add anything?
– I’ll just refer folks back to the Resources slide, and that uw.edu/accessibility site was developed for the entire university community. So we’ve got a lot of people who are brand new to this and have no idea what it’s all about, as well as people who are more advanced and need answers to technical challenges. But there is content there that speaks to, “How do I get started with this? What is this all about?” Then, the second resource too, uw.edu/accesscomputing/tips is a document that we prepared specific on web accessibility. But it’s 30 web accessibility tips and each of those tips is just one additional thing that you can kind of focus on, and maybe you can take them one at a time if 30 is an overwhelming number. But they’re all very clearly explained, and they kind of give you sort of a foundation for where to start with web accessibility.
– This is Irene. I have the luxury of having a web consultant team, and that’s really wonderful. But I also do some web work on the side for a community association. So I have some understanding of what it’s like to be the webmaster in a small organization that has no particular resources other than what you can learn yourself. I have looked around for training online. Oh, I would say follow these tips. Also, as I suggested before, Google Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and you’ll find checklists. Again, it’s relatively easy as you start to go through it to figure out what needs to be done. Also, just recently, I discovered that on lynda.com, there are some trainings on accessibility that are video-based trainings. That you can stop them, you can try out the strategies that they teach, and so that’s another option if you’re in a smaller organization and are looking to do this work yourself.
– Thank you. We had one more question during the webinar. It says, “What is the definition of a severe disability?” From the Census Bureau study that we reported on, a standard definition is an impairment that seriously limits one or more functional capacities such as mobility, communication, self-care, self-direction, interpersonal skills, work tolerance, or work skills. I wanted to ask Terrill if you had anything to add in explaining what is a severe disability?
– Well, I used that term informally. So I’m not defining it as anything specific, other than if you think back to that continuum of functional behaviors. If somebody falls to the far left on a particular function, then they would have, maybe “significant” is a better word than “severe,” but a significant inability to perform that function. My point when I used that phrase was just that there are assistive technologies that can help people regardless of where they fall in that continuum. So somebody that’s all the way over on the left and get a zero on that particular function, there still is an assistive technology that can help that person to get access. But they’re still going to be at zero, unless whatever it is they’re trying to access meets them halfway and is designed in a way that’s accessible.
– Great. Thanks. We have one more question. “For professional development, is it possible to obtain documentation for the webinar?” Dennis, would you like to take that one? Do we have a certificate for participation in the webinar?
– Oh, yeah. Of course. I’m sorry. So yes. Just as a reminder, and I’m glad to be reminded, if you would like a participation certificate for today, you just go to that website, www.illuminage.com/webinars. Over on the right is an icon for participation certificates. If you click on that, there’ll be a form you can fill out. You’ll just need today’s event code, and it’s the date, “110316.” That’ll get you in and you can just print your own participation certificate.
So I think that’s it. Do you have anything else, Anne? – That’s it.
– Okay. So we want to respect people’s time, and I want to thank everyone on the call. We had great participation, and we will be getting back to everyone with an email. It’ll probably be several days, maybe as long as a week, and we’ll include the archive for the event and some of the other links that we’ve talked about, that Terrill has talked about. So thank you again for participating, and then a special thanks, Terrill, to you and to you, Irene, for your time and expertise. This has been a great session with just a lot of information that will have all of us thinking more clearly and in greater depth about the challenges of accessible web communications. So thank you all and have a great balance of your day.