Archives for 2008
Another great project for technical communicators is happening right now over at WebAIM. As announced recently on the WebAIM blog, they have started a translation project for WAVE, WebAIM’s web accessibility evaluation tool. After all, who says web accessibility evaluation is only necessary in English! First stop is Spanish. The Center for Persons with Disabilities [...]
WebAIM has put together a survey of the preferences of screen reader users. Do you use a screen reader all the time due to a disability? part of the time due to a disability? often, but do not have a disability that requires a screen reader? occasionally to perform accessibility evaluation? If you fit one [...]
We want to share a great link from the Web Axe blog and podcast site. They passed along Deborah Edwards-Onoro’s article, which covers Ten Tips for Creating Usable and Accessible PDFs. The ten tips are Use a structured source document Save/export document as tagged PDF Add title, author, subject and keywords Add bookmarks Initial view [...]
Yes, the long awaited version 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines was announced today! The news is being echoed all over Twitter, and our own SIG twitter account is chiming in. Read the W3C press release for the official news. Then start following the discussions that have started and will continue in the coming [...]
Follow a live webcast from the United Nations on Dec 3rd from 9:30 – 13:30 ET on the International Day of Persons with Disabilities! The event is “Implementing the Digital Accessibility Agenda of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Challenges and Opportunities for Signatory States”. It is the Third Global Forum – [...]
The following is from an 8 May 2008 posting on http://www.consumeraffairs.com/. But travelers complain existing rules are often ignored May 8, 2008—Travelers with disabilities will be getting new protections against discrimination when they fly on a foreign airline flight that begins or ends in the United States, as well as on any flight operated by [...]
SIG member, Whitney Quesenbery shares this news: The HFES 200 has been approved as an American National Standard (ANSI). HFES is the Human Factors and Engineering Society, which has authored several standards relating to usability, accessibility, and ergonomics. HFES 200 covers Human Factors Engineering of Software User Interface, and has been carefully harmonised with other [...]
A great example of the client you don’t want and poor usability and accessibility design. http://view.break.com/542649 – Watch more free videos
Did you know that the STC Technical Summit being held in Atlanta next May will be recorded? Tom Johnson interviewed Lloyd Tucker, STC’s Director of Education and Membership to learn more about this new service. What did Tom ask Lloyd? Why did the STC decide to record all the sessions this year? Won’t the cost [...]
The SIG has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. We tweet at http://twitter.com/stcaccess. Tweet? Twitter? Let’s take Twitter first. Twitter is often called micro-blogging. Entries posted to Twitter can only contain 140 characters. These postings, or messages, are called tweets. We have mentioned tweets on this blog earlier in connection with the June 2008 Technical Summit. [...]
Did you know that Stanford University now has an Online Accessibility Program? They call it “SOAP” for Stanford Online Accessibility Program. I came across this today and thought you might be interested to see it: http://soap.stanford.edu/. The site offers resources and information; tips, tricks, and tutorials; a developers toolbox; and special program services for the [...]
We have exciting news about the 2009 Technical Communication Summit to be held 3–6 May 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia. The STC Board of Directors has just approved the purchase of conference management software that will give STC the capability to record the entire conference. The audio recording will be synchronized with the PowerPoint presentation and [...]
In Digital Web Magazine last month, Leona Tomlinson of Agoo IT wrote a great article on understanding disabilities when designing a web site. While some of the information can be found in many places, Tomlinson distills a broad range of information in one article, making it ideal for sharing with those new to Web accessibility. [...]
Share news about your local events that have accessibility on the menu! Here’s a tip from the Boston, Massachusetts area submitted by our SIG member, P.J. Gardner, Information Designer and Web Accessibility Consultant. If you live in the greater Boston area, please consider attending the following event on the “New Section 508″! I thought I [...]
When you are interested in or work with accessibility on a regular basis, you tend me be aware of whether such-and-such is truly accessible to all. This applies to everything whether it is writing, web pages, or the surrounding community. However, I was stopped in my tracks today by an interesting blog entry from Glenda [...]
Started in late 2001, GOK was created at the ATRC (University of Toronto) with funding from Sun Microsystems. GOK (an award winning software that provides text entry and graphical user interface interaction using only switches and/or mouse devices), is an on-screen keyboard that provides access to the GNOME desktop through dynamically generated keyboards, and text [...]
Orca is an open source scriptable screen reader. The development of Orca has been led by the Accessibility Program Office of Sun Microsystems, Inc. with contributions from many community members. For more information and to download Orca, see http://live.gnome.org/Orca. Using various combinations of speech, braille, and magnification, Orca is designed to work with applications and [...]
October is designated as an opportunity for the GSFC community to gain an awareness of various aspects of disability and accessibility needs. The Equal Opportunity Programs Office is sponsoring a number of events that would be of particular interest to management, supervisory staff, and others who will likely face issues relating to hidden disabilities, cognitive [...]
You might be able to help. Member Whitney Quesenbery brought us the latest news about the Plain Language bill that we wrote about back in April this year. It is stuck in the Senate. Senator Bennett (R. Utah) has blocked the bill on the grounds that it would be a problem for the Federal Election [...]
Turn Firefox into a screen reader with Fire Vox, suggests Roger Johansson of 456 Berea St. He talks about his experience with Fire Vox, the free open-source screen reader extension for Firefox. He has successfully used it on his Mac (after a few unsuccessful attempts), but Fire Vox can also run on Windows and Linux. [...]
The STC Washington, DC Chapter is offering a Webinar about DITA on 31 October. (Speaker: Tom Magliery, XML Technology Specialist, JustSystems; Location: Anywhere with a phone line and a Web connection). Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. [Registration link to be provided.] Do you feel you’ve taken conditional text to the max – and maybe [...]
Avast, me hearties! Once again, we’ve arrived at 19 September, Talk Like a Pirate Day! On this day, all posts will be automatically converted to pirate talk. They will revert to normal after today (or after a few days as this is the weekend). Because this is automated, the wording will be a little different [...]
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