Category: accessibility

Useful links: students and teachers networking, .gov sites, Dreamweaver tip

when teachers and students connect outside school at apophenia asks What do you think is the best advice for other teachers when it comes to interacting with students on social network sites? She said,

Digital technologies collapse social contexts all the time. The key to figuring out boundaries in a digital era is not to try to revert to space. The key is to focus on people, roles, relationships, and expectations. A teacher’s role in relation to a student should not end at the classroom door. When a teacher runs into a student at a local cafe, they are still that student’s teacher. When a teacher runs into a student online, they are still that student’s teacher. Because of the meaning of a teacher-student relationship, that should never be relaxed; the role of teacher should always be salient (except when the teacher also happens to be the parent which is when things get very murky very fast).

Leave your comments at apophenia.

Jim Thatcher continues his series examining the accessibility of Obama administration web sites with a look at Accessibiliity of MakingHomeAffordable.gov and Accessibility of Data.gov.

A Forgotten Productivity Tip: Dreamweaver CS4 from Greg Rewls is a good tip.

Useful Links: Accessible forms, CSS Quick-Question

Accessible forms using WCAG2.0 from Web Usability. Code examples, screen grabs, video and  transcripts of screen reader interpretations of forms. Very valuable. For educators: this is a  great resource for an assignment. If I gave stars to my useful links, this one would get 5 stars.

Smashing Magazine is doing something interesting using Twitter. Their first post based on questions from forums/Twitter is Ask SM: CSS Quick-Question Edition. Questions posted to the SM forums or to @smashingmag or @chriscoyier are given complete answers in a column of the magazine. Common CSS problems are tackled in this post. I find this idea an example of “getting it.” A design magazine takes questions from readers/followers and answers them in SM’s well-illustrated fashion for all to see. This is a super example of a two-way street working well, of a magazine that gets what social media is all about. Looking for an example of a business that communicates in an effective way with its audience? This is one.

Compare what Smashing Magazine is doing with what Dell just did with it’s Della site. (SEE Big Aaargh! for Dell’s Della.) That’s an example of doing it wrong.

Summary of eHow articles for May

The articles I published on eHow in May are listed.

Deb's Deli

Jemez Springs is about 45 minutes from Albuquerque in the Jemez Mountains. I went to a Tai Chi Retreat there and took a bunch of photos. There are about 4 places to eat in this tiny town, all serve very good food. Deb’s Deli serves real homemade pie, ice cream, and you can get a hair cut in the shop in the hall. I ate a lot more than I soaked in the hot springs, and I did Tai Chi a lot more than either of those things.

For eHow in May, I opened a new Twitter account for @Veesites. Veesites  is my eHow username, and this Twitter account will contain only tweets about eHow content. The new account will give me an RSS feed from Twitter for my eHow content, since eHow doesn’t provide for a way for individual users to get a clean RSS feed for articles.

Does the Kindle Make Sense?

Since I don’t normally buy a lot of books, I never saw much personal reason to buy a Kindle.

That may change. More . . .

I read a lot, but I don’t buy a lot of books. I get books at the library. I buy magazines and newspapers, but only the occasional book. The other day I grabbed a book at the library called Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott because of this sentence on the inside flap of the cover: “The bottom line is this: if you understand the Net Generation, you will understand the future.”

I haven’t read it yet, so I’m not ready to say I understand the future. As soon as I read it, I’ll be ready to give you any hints about the future that you might want. Right now, pre-reading, I’m thinking that the future involves e-book readers, the hottest of which is the Kindle.

Since I don’t normally buy a lot of books, I never saw much personal reason to buy a Kindle.

That may change.

For one thing, I own an iPhone, and read my first ebook using the Kindle iPhone app recently. I found I loved reading that way. Denise does, too.

And then the Kindle 2 came out. This device is bigger in phyiscal size and is meant to handily display larger format information such as newspapers and textbooks. It will also publish blogs and download your magazine subscriptions instantly.

Yes, you can now publish your blog to the Kindle. You can even self-publish a book to the Kindle, like Burningbird.

As I mentioned, I subscribe to newspapers and magazines. A steady flow of paper comes into the house, passes before my eyes, and exits via my recycling bin. Knowing that I could get all the same material without all the paper is important information based on my world view. Miraz at KnowIT said in Books of the future: chunky bits of digital linkbait?

A while back I published a post called I hate books, in which I wrote about how fed up I am with books being published on dead trees. My pal Maria wrote a rebuttal, I love books where she wrote about the appeal of words printed on paper.

What about those dead trees? What is the environmental impact of e-readers?

An extensive analysis of this issue at Fat Knowlege called E-Books Vs. Newspapers looks at every aspect of this question—from cutting trees, running printing presses, delivering paper reading material on the paper side of the equation to manufacturing and disposal of electronic readers and even the electricity consumed by the servers delivering material to devices on the e-book side of the equation. One of the conclusions was

Reading the physical version of the NY Times for a year uses 7,300 MJ of energy and emits 700 kg of co2. Reading it on a Kindle uses 100 MJ of energy and emits 10 kg of co2.

Newspapers desperately need to keep subscribers right now. The New York Times has released its own Reader application which is used on computers. Other newspapers have gone completly online, even without special reader apps. Funny Business asked, Can the Kindle DX Save Newspapers? At the Business Insider, we learn that Printing the NYT Costs Twice as Much as Sending Every Reader a Free Kindle.

We all seem to grasp the idea that traditional publishing on paper has reached a crisis point. What we resist is concluding that devices like the Kindle may the solution.

People are slow to change, and cite reasons like “loving the feel of a book” as a reason to resist e-book readers. Even people who make the switch, like One Plus Two in I love me some Kindle seem ambivalent about the change.

Then there are unresolved issues around DRM and Author rights vs. disability rights. See Publishers hit Kindle Text to Speech Kill Switch for an update on that the rights story.

BlogHer Contributing Editor Sassymonkey talked about DRM to me in an email.

I love the *idea* of the e-book readers so, so much but I hate DRM with a passion. When I buy an actual book I can move it around from a bookshelf to the car to whatever. I can even loan it to friends. So why the heck can’t I move an ebook from my Mac to my ebook reader to my iphone to our PC without doing something illegal and causing publisher/some author’s heads from exploding? I mean, I’ve paid for the book. Sigh.

Even as all these issues are debated, legislated, and pondered, the e-book market races ahead with gusto. Develop the technology, sell the devices, and resolve the details later. That’s the current system. World Public Library has over half a million e-books listed. When Jeff Bezos introduced the Kindle 2, he said,

Today there are 275,000 books available for the device. On Amazon.com, 35 percent of sales of books that have a Kindle edition are sold in that format.

That’s huge: 35%. As more people get Kindle devices, I think that percentage will rise. The plus factors are compelling. It’s better for the environment and it’s cheaper. Most books are only $9.99, there’s no shipping cost, and you have the book or newspaper in your hand seconds after you buy it. That seems like a “duh” factor to me. What person who owned a Kindle wouldn’t opt for e-book over print?

Does that mean e-book readers are the solution for publishing, or are they just one aspect of this transition in media that we are embroiled in right now? I wish I had the answer. I can tell you this: the next time I buy a book, if I can get it on the Kindle app on my iPhone, I will. Absolutely.

Cross-posted at BlogHer.

Obama groks technology, but what about accessibility

Jim Thatcher runs accessibility tests on Recovery.gov.

A while back I linked to an article at Jim Thatcher’s site that showed his accessibility test results on whitehouse.gov. He recently ran some checks on Accessibility of Recovery.gov and got quite a few accessibility errors at that site, too. As he explains in A Postscript on Recovery.gov the official response to his article was a bit “disappointing.”

Since Section 508 Accessibility Standards requires government web sites to comply with accessibility standards, it’s surprising that the results are so blatantly bad. They include missing alt text and lack of proper heading semantics.

The surprising thing about this story and the response to it is that we have watched this administration use technology so well and show an understanding of technology issues. This business of getting it wrong in terms of accessibility is a bit odd.

I, for one, expect this administration to get it right.

There’s a draft version of an article at the W3C about Contacting Organizations with Inaccessible Websites. Here are some ideas from the section on how to approach such organizations.

There are several ways you can let an organization know that there are accessibility problems with their website, including:

  • Contacting them directly
  • Seeking assistance from a local or national disability or older peoples’ organization
  • Taking a more public approach via the press or through online platforms after contacting the organization without resolution

Regardless of the approach you take, you will need to clearly describe the problem being experienced:

  • Which page; which part of the site
  • What the problem is; what you were trying to do
  • If possible, tell them about your computer and software

My approach is obviously to take the public route. I hope  people using the technology to access the site who can list the problems error by error will take some time to contact them with specific errors.

It isn’t enough to expect them to get it right. We need to insist it be done right.

Standards and Accessibility with Dreamweaver

Yesterday Emily Lewis and I gave a talk for Webuquerque. Here’s  the presentation:  Standards and Accessibility with Dreamweaver.

The slides are posted on Emily’s blog, A Blog Not Limited. Emily explained the principles and goals of developing with web standards and best practices, then I gave some demos in Dreamweaver to show how to implement the standards in that software environment.

Emily shares the leadership of Webuquerque this year with Jason Nakai, who made a video of the presentation. The video will provide some extra context for the slides and show the live demos in Dreamweaver, as opposted to the screen grabs you see in the slides. I’ll let you know when the video is ready.

Useful Links: Skip Links, Twitter search, best job in the world

Iheni on skip links, Twitter search will soon include indexing links, and a new social media job description trend?

The shelf life of a skip link from iheni talks about accessibility, navigation with a screen reader such as JAWS, HTML5 elements that will aid navigation and WAI ARIA roles. Excellent reading.

@Google – @Twitter to start Indexing Links for Search from TechCrunch is a fast and concise explanation of why changes in search on Twitter may end up being a big deal. If you didn’t watch Laura Fitton’s talk about Twitter the first time I recommended it, I urge you one more time to do that.

In January, I published The Best Job in the World – Going Viral. According to MSNBC, that job has now been filled by a 34 year old Brit named Ben Southall. The way the job posting went viral was of more interest to me than the fact that the job is now filled. But the notion behind the way it worked has been picked up by at least one company, this time  a California winery looking for a social media guru. They are paying $10,000 a month for someone who will visit wineries, taste wines, and do the whole 2.0 social media shtick about it for them. I think it’s about time educators developed a curriculum for social media shtick, because a lot of grads would like one of those jobs.