Transcript of Webcast: Web Accessibility for Community College--January 25, 2005

Presented by Paul Bohman of WebAim

Sponsored by the Great Plains ADA & IT Center

Pamela Cress: Hello. Welcome to Web Accessibility for Community Colleges. My name is Pamela Cress, and I'm with the Great Plains ADA and IT Center, the sponsor for today's webcast. This webcast is the first in a series of programs sponsored by the Great Plains Center on topics related to accessible information technology. If you registered for today's program, you will automatically be notified of future events. If you didn't register, I encourage you to check our website for announcements of upcoming events. I'd like to begin by thanking the University of Kansas Continuing Education staff for managing the technical aspects of this webcast.

If you have any technical problems during the webcast, please contact them at the e-mail address or phone number found on the webcast page.

The audio file and transcription of this program will be archived at our website if you wish to review the program, or if you know somebody who was not able to join us today. Also on our website is an online evaluation form. At the conclusion of this program, please take a moment or two to complete this form.

Now I'd like to introduce you to our speaker, Paul Bohman.

Paul is an expert in web accessibility and serves as the director of products and services for the WebAIM project.

If you have questions, you can e-mail Paul during this webcast by clicking on his link from the webcast page.

Paul has a great deal of information to share with you, so I'll turn this over to him now.

Thanks, Paul.

Paul Bohman: I'm going to start by giving a little bit more detailed background in what I've been doing for the last few years and how I came to be involved in the area of web accessibility. My path is not a very direct one.

I actually started out a long time ago as an art major in college, went through the psychology path, then into instructional technology, and am currently pursuing a degree in education.

The reason I give that little bit of background about my educational history is not so much that you get to know me, but just to show that, like a lot of people who end up being experts in the web or end up making a living somehow with the web, they usually start out in some other area.

For one thing, the web is a relatively new area of expertise, and I think that having gone through the different areas in my professional career enables me to have a different perspective than someone who has always been involved in technology.

I've never taken a class in HTML or in web design, and yet that is something that I now teach on a regular basis.

And I think you're going to find that in the area of web accessibility and with the Internet in general, a lot of people didn't have that background to begin with but are now the ones in charge of either the website at their organization or the web accessibility aspects of the website and things along those lines.

One of the interesting things about web accessibility is that it isn't exactly a science in the sense of if you follow the rules, as you would in physics to apply the rules of physics to rocket propulsion, there is no real correlation between the rules of the technology and with the science and art of web accessibility.

Web accessibility is an animal unto itself, very much involved in the human aspect, very connected with usability and human interface design.

When people talk about web accessibility, they tend to think of it as rules that you must follow and checklists that must be tended to. In actuality, it's more accurate to think of it as designing information that is usable, which is a broad and vague science at its core, but at the same time, there are some rules that you can follow.

As we go through this webcast, I'll be talking about some of those rules or guidelines, but also about reasons why the metaphor rule or guideline isn't exactly accurate when talking about web accessibility.

Also, since this webcast is geared towards web accessibility in community colleges, of course we're going to bring up topics that deal with education, distance education, online learning, and learning styles.

With distance education and with education in general, there are considerations about designing instructional content.

In the realm of community colleges, we're serving a broader audience than the very selective universities or graduate schools.

So you get into areas that go beyond motor disabilities or visual disabilities. Learning disabilities become more important, more prominent.

During the course of this webcast, we'll not only talk about the disability types and their needs, but we'll talk about some of the aspects of policy and law and how to provide training within the organization.

With that introduction, I want to emphasize that you can submit questions to me, and I encourage you to do so. Otherwise, it's going to be kind of a monologue. I do have a lot of material prepared, but I think this will be more interesting if you contribute your questions.

I will talk more at first, and then as the questions come in, I'll tend to those.

Probably the best place to start is to talk about people with disabilities themselves, and the needs of this population. In talking about them, we will categorize them as well as provide a framework of understanding.

When we talk about disability access to education, or in fact to technology in general, we usually group the disabilities into four categories with a fifth category that I'll get to in a minute.

The first category is visual disabilities, which of course includes blindness, but also includes low vision and color blindness.

The second category is motor disabilities. This is a subset of the larger group of motor disabilities that's affected in terms of access to the Internet. For example, someone who doesn't have use of his/her legs still can use the hands to access the Internet. When the use of the hands is compromised (someone with tremors, for example), then there are disability access issues for the web.

The third category is hearing, which includes people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

The fourth category is cognitive disabilities, which is a broad category including all kinds of learning disabilities. They range from mild learning disabilities to extreme and perhaps even complete dementia.

But when you're designing for the Internet and specifically for post-secondary education audience, you'll want to focus on a subset of that group.

There's a line that you have to draw in the sand. For example, we're going to make the content accessible to someone with a learning disability, such as dyslexia, but may not be able to serve someone with dementia.

It's tricky, especially when you get into policy issues and procedures, to define your boundary, or your line in the sand.

The last category, which is not always included as a category, is that of epilepsy, specifically those who are sensitive to photo-epileptic seizures, people who, when they see strobing lights or flickering effects on the computer screen, can experience a seizure.

Those are the broad categories of disabilities. Each one has its own set of needs and circumstances that we have to keep in mind as we're designing web content for them.

It's interesting to think about some of the statistics in the United States for disabilities. I realize there are probably some people listening from other countries as well. I don't have statistics specific to other countries, but I think the statistics for the U.S. can provide an example of the types of statistics internationally. It's helpful to know how many people with disabilities we're talking about. That's a tricky number to pin down. The 2000 U.S. census says almost 20 percent of our population has some sort of disability. As it turns out, it overestimated the disabilities by approximately 3.7 percent, which it puts in the 15-16 percent range rather than 19.3 percent, which was the original estimate with the 2000 census.

That's for the population as a whole. When you break that number down, you find other interesting statistics, for example, disability incidences among different races. It doesn't break down evenly. This is probably a reflection of socioeconomic status and opportunity, but, for example, blacks and American-Indians and Alaskan natives have a higher incidence of disability than non-Hispanic whites. Hispanics are in the middle of those groupings. Asians have the least number of disabilities, the smallest incidence.

Regarding working class adults, the percentage of people with disabilities is quite interesting, especially since we're talking in the context of higher education. This is the group that we're focusing on.

The numbers were 24 percent for Hispanics, 26.4 percent for blacks, and 27 percent for American Indians and Alaska natives compared with 16.2 percent for non-Hispanic whites.

You wonder why I'm bringing this up. It's interesting to look at disability access not so much as a technical issue, but as a social issue, and a matter of social justice, especially when you consider the other factors that impede some of these populations.

Disability attitude is simply one more obstacle to overcome.

Geographically within the United States, the percentage of people with disabilities is not evenly split. The largest percentage of people with disabilities in the United States is in the South, where you also find lower socioeconomic status.

It is a challenge to provide a situation that's conducive to social equity, social justice.

Going further down that road, disability and unemployment and disability in poverty become important issues. The incidence of disabled people who are unemployed is much higher than for those without disabilities. The same is true for poverty. Among young people, approximately one in four young people with a disability lives in poverty, which is significantly higher than the national average.

In the area of education, people with disabilities tend to drop out of high school at a higher rate. They also tend to drop out of college at a higher rate, and they tend to not enroll in college to begin with as often as people without disabilities.

Here's the clincher: In presenting the argument that it's much more a social issue than a technical issue, in the area of social and emotional health, the incidence of people with depression who have disabilities depends on the study you read. Some studies estimate this incidence to be about double, but other studies estimate it to be about ten times the incidence.

For people with disabilities, there may be some circumstances with the disability that lead to decreased mental health. I don't want to imply that all people with disabilities are depressed or have mental health issues. I do want to emphasize that people with disabilities may live very fulfilling lives and are certainly capable of being employed, of not being in poverty, and the whole gamut of these social issues that I'm talking about.

A disability is not determinant of these factors, but still there is a correlation. I encourage you to keep that in mind as you listen to the information about the technical aspects, because it's not just a matter of the webmasters trying to simply ensure that the content is going to meet some standard.

If you think about what web accessibility actually means for someone with a disability, it can mean an immense increase in quality of life. For example, someone who is blind previously accessed the daily newspaper or a magazine either when someone read it to them on tape or through a Braille format. Both Braille and tape are very recent.

The Internet is even more recent. Although cast as the problem when we talk about web accessibility, it's actually the solution because it allows people with disabilities to access information that they never could before in new ways.

They can access it independently without having to rely on the help of others, and it becomes a personally directed action. You can go to a website to access the news. In the educational environment, you can go to a website and register for classes and look up library materials. In some cases, you can even read online materials in the library or in the library archives or through the library resources. You can register for financial aid. All of these are now possible that were never possible before.

With community colleges, other important issues to keep in mind are not just the people that we're trying to serve, but it's not a matter of simply saying web content must be accessible and, therefore, the result is that all the web content is accessible. It just doesn't happen that way.

There's a lot more to making web content accessible than simply saying that it should be so and letting it happen. It takes training. It takes policy. And an understanding of the legal picture as well. That's our next topic.

In fact, this is in line with one of the questions brought up by Rodney Hartsell. I apologize if I mispronounce some names. Rodney asked, "What are the legal ramifications of not providing good web accessibility for disabled students subject to the ADA?"

The short answer is there are legal ramifications, and in fact, there have been lawsuits against some community colleges and against some institutions of higher education.

The second half of the question, "Are they subject to the ADA?" is an interesting question, which requires more explanation.

There are several pieces of legislation that are important to web accessibility. The Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA, is one of them. The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. If you think about the chronology of the Internet, that was just before the Internet came onto the scene. The Internet existed then, but it wasn't in widespread general use, so the ADA does not address the Internet directly.

That doesn't mean that the ADA doesn't apply, but by the same token, it may mean that in some cases it doesn't. It may depend on the legal expert you consult. Some statements issued by the Department of Justice indicate that, in their opinion, the ADA does apply to the Internet and not just say for government or education, but in a broad sense as well.

But in the context of education, there are other pieces of legislation that have greater relevance. The first one is Section 504, the Rehabilitation Act. Some of you may have heard of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and I"ll return to that in a moment, but Section 504 actually has greater relevance.

Section 504 is a one-paragraph statute that, in essence, says it's against the law to discriminate against people with disabilities and that any program receiving federal moneys cannot discriminate on the basis of disability.

For example, in a college setting, it would be against the law and against Section 504 to provide or to teach a class that had materials available to all students except to those with disabilities. It would be against the law to not allow admission to a class or to a college or university based on disability status.

In that sense, Section 504 is similar to the ADA in that both are antidiscrimination laws. Section 508 goes beyond discrimination, and it gives some guidance about technical aspects of accessibility. Section 508 is a procurement law that is targeted at federal government websites and federal government entities.

On the surface, that sounds like that gets us off the hook if we're not working for a federal government entity. In some cases, that is true; however, many states have adopted Section 508 as a standard.

I don't have a comprehensive list, but it would be worthwhile to find out whether your state has adopted Section 508.

Section 508 includes much more than the Internet. It includes all of information technology: telephones, fax machines, and copy machines all fit under Section 508. The essence of 508 says you can't buy any technology that is inaccessible to people with disabilities unless, within that category of technologies, there is no technology that exists that is available for people with disabilities. Section 508 indicates that you would buy an accessible phone system.

With websites, because the format itself can be accessible, there's no such thing as a website that cannot be made accessible. I would put an asterisk on that and say there are certain aspects of disability that are more difficult than others to achieve, and in some cases you have to make adaptations.

By and large, the Internet, as I said before, is a solution rather than the problem.

It is important to distinguish between the different laws and pieces of legislation that apply. Most of the lawsuits that have been brought against commercial websites have claimed that because the ADA requires the accessibility of, for example, stairwells and public places, places of public accommodation, that the web can be considered a place where the public would go, similar to a library or a restaurant. In nearly all cases, they were settled out of court.

Some judgments have required websites to be accessible, and there have been a few in which the judge has declared in that instance it wasn't necessary.

In comparing some of these court cases, it's interesting to note for those of us who understand the technology behind web accessibility, a lot of those judgments against web accessibility, of course, this is an opinion, were based on faulty information and faulty understanding of what it means to make a website accessible.

So if you look at the broader picture, most companies are willing to make their sites accessible, or at least they claim they are, so they settle out of court rather than go through the judicial process, because the majority of verdicts required disability access.

Also, having a court case in which a company says we're not willing to make our website accessible to people with disabilities is simply bad public relations.

Most companies have been willing to comply, and a lot of them have made significant strides to match their words with deeds.

Now we know that there are legal ramifications for not making websites accessible, even though the specifics in the legal context aren't spelled out in great detail by case law. There has been a history of lawsuits, which we want to avoid.

Most students don't take the lawsuit route. If they come against some content that is inaccessible, the usual route is to go through either the instructor or the disability resource center at the college and find some way to make an accommodation.

For the most part, the system has worked, but at the same time, a lot of the instances where students complain about content being inaccessible could be avoided if the content were accessible to begin with on the Internet.

Again, I'll emphasize that the Internet is not the problem, but the solution. If the content does exist in a format that is accessible, then you have solved the problem. You don't have to provide an alternative version of the content. The ideal solution is to provide one version of the content that is accessible to everybody.

Now I'll make the transition that I was going to make a second ago before I side-tracked myself, and that's into the area of organizing web accessibility efforts within an organization.

There are a lot of ways to handle this. I'm going to recommend several and discuss some issues that need to be discussed before any decision can be made.

For example, within the college setting, we know that there are laws that do apply. If the State requires 508, then that is the law. But if you are at an institution in a state where that hasn't been declared the law, how do you proceed?

First, there is still a legal risk. If a student complains and invokes Section 504, the antidiscrimination law, then the university could be liable and that's a situation you want to avoid.

Do you just decide that we're going to use Section 508 as our policy? Do you come up with a different policy or a different standard? What are the steps you would follow?

The fact that you would be asking those questions at all is a step in the right direction. Most colleges and universities have at least asked the question, but a lot of them haven't yet answered that question.

I did an informal study of different web accessibility policies at colleges and universities throughout the country and found that even among those that claim to have a policy, a lot of the policies were rather weak or vague and weren't enforceable. Many of them didn't define any technical standards.

There's more than one standard that you could choose. Obviously, Section 508 is one of them, but it's not the only one. The international recommendation is known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines were written as a collaborative project among many people of different countries. They preceded Section 508. Section 508 relies heavily on the logic and language of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Let me give a little background about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). There are three conformance levels within the WCAG. Level one is a collection of those guidelines necessary to follow to ensure that people won't be left out in some way or another. You could put the word "must" next to level 1.

The second level--probably you could put the word "should" next to this grouping—includes things that should be done to avoid excluding people with some types of disabilities.

The third level is kind of the icing on the cake. These goods may be difficult to achieve, and the problems that could occur by not complying with these guidelines are less severe.

The three levels within the WCAG form the international standard for web accessibility. Some colleges and universities have adopted the WCAG, but they haven't specified which level is the compliance standard for that college.

For example, if you say that at our college it's necessary to comply with the WCAG, that can mean a lot. It can mean great hardship if you're requiring that every recommendation in level three be met.

It's reasonable to limit it to a subset, such as level one or level two, and some colleges and units have done that.

From a legal standpoint, if you say that our standard is the WCAG without specifying the level, and if you find a page that doesn't comply with a level three guideline, that could leave you liable in a way that you didn't intend. Even though the intentions were to make it as accessible as possible by specifying the highest standard, you may be opening yourself up for more difficulty from a legal perspective.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't aim high, but you need to be careful from a legal standpoint when you're setting policy.

Some colleges have simply said they require that web content be accessible to people with disabilities and leave it at that without specifying a technical standard.

That would be the solution to being too specific, yet it doesn't give much guidance to the people developing the web content. I recommend something in the middle, whether you say Section 508, which is, in a sense, a subset of the WCAG, or level one or level two of the WCAG. There should be some way of measuring it. Training is one issue. Another issue is deciding who is responsible for making the web content accessible.

This is an interesting area, because if you think about the faculty at colleges and universities, there are definitely some faculty who are technology savvy and very skilled. They can make their own web content. They'd be insulted if you asked them to give that task to someone else. They say they enjoy that and they're good at it. But most faculty don't fit into that category. They're experts in their field--whether it's psychology, education, or math--and not necessarily experts in Internet design and definitely not experts in web accessibility.

So what do you do in that case? At a college or university, not everyone who posts web content is going to be a faculty member. The main webmaster and the people in charge of department websites should be required not only to know how to make websites, but also how to make them accessible, because knowing that is simply part of their job.

However, in the realm of faculty, it isn't necessarily part of their job. If their job is to teach web accessibility or computer-interface design, then it would fall into their realm of expertise, but most faculty don't fit that category.

My opinion is that faculty who want to, who have the skill, the aptitude, and the interest, should definitely be allowed to create their own web content. If they're doing that, they should be required to make it accessible.

If creating web content is not in their area of expertise, there should be probably a group of web developers--this is going to perhaps make some of you laugh because you can anticipate the funding requirements--that is dedicated to ensuring that the content is accessible. That implies that there's some money behind it, and that's a definite issue. It's something that needs to be dealt with, and it can't be trivialized. It does take expertise, and it does take money to make web content accessible.

For those who know how to make the content accessible, the effort that typically goes into the process is not particularly great. In most cases, web accessibility is a rather simple process of adding alternative text to images, adding cable headers, or providing formed labels. I'm mentioning a few technical aspects, which I'll revisit later. It takes a little bit of time, and some expertise, but it's not a great undertaking.

Now, when you get into multimedia and flash and web captioning for video, then the time required and expertise required do increase and the cost also increases.

It probably should not be required of all faculty to know how to do that. Sometimes what happens when people with good intentions know a little bit about web accessibility, they make decisions based on that knowledge without having the full picture. It must be recognized as an expertise and not be treated too lightly.

As far as the funding issue is concerned, unfortunately, I don't have great recommendations, but I want to offer the idea of having people who are dedicated to making web content accessible. If that's something you decide to do at your college or university, then it's something to also consider in the budget. I know that's not a very satisfactory answer, but it's a real world answer. It may not be solved in this year's budget, but may be taken into account in future budgets. Obviously there are going to be other opinions on that, and my approval is not the only one that would work. So I'll leave that for discussion. And I hope that you do discuss it at your institutions.

In looking through some of the questions that have been submitted, here's one of the first questions which I probably should have answered right away: "Is there video associated with this presentation?" No, there's not.

In fact, that brings me to another point that I want to make. I was originally going to post some supplementary material for this webcast, but if you think about how most accommodations are made for people with disabilities, for example, you can see on the bottom of a piece of paper that says if you need a document in an alternative format, ask for it, and it can be provided through the disability resource center. If I'm a blind student walking into the class the first day of class, the teacher may have been notified ahead of time, but there's a possibility that the teacher would not if I decided to just that morning change my schedule at the beginning of the semester. If I'm blind and I get the syllabus on paper, it's not going to be much use to me. Even the note telling me that I can find an alternative version is not going to be helpful.

The instructor is going to make the student aware that it can be done, but when do you think that student will receive that copy? It might be the same day, but chances are it won't be. That’s something to consider as well. Let us suppose that the syllabus, instead of being only in a paper format, is also available on the web.

After you leave class, the syllabus is already available online, and you can access it. A person who is blind would access it with a screen reader technology, which would read it out loud. That person is going to have almost immediate access.

Again, the Internet is not the problem, it’s actually the solution.

You’re benefiting from a reverse order of events where I say that rather than provide you with all the supplementary materials now, you’re going to get it in the transcript later. I’ll provide some links that can be added to the transcript.

A taste of our own medicine is what I’m dishing out today. Often we think of disability access as an extra burden or something that is tacked on to the procedure, as opposed to integrated. By making the web content accessible to begin with, it can be included as a part of the original version, and the solution is created at the same time as the original content. I hope the point is at least understood and considered.

Now, I’m going to give an example of what it sounds like to access web content using a screen reader. This is specific to certain kinds of disabilities. For example, someone who is deaf is not going to use a screen reader, which reads content out loud, but someone who is blind probably would use a screen reader.

Someone with a cognitive disability or reading disorder also may use a screen reader. Someone, for example, with dyslexia could benefit by hearing the words and not just seeing them.

I’m opening up a page in a technology called IBM Home Page Reader. Home Page Reader is not probably the most common of screen readers, but it is easier to use for people who do not use a screen reader on a regular basis.

For developers who are interested in providing content through a screen reader, I would recommend Home Page Reader as one option, but not the only option.

Other screen readers include Jaws and Window-Eyes, but Home Page Reader is cheaper by a significant margin.

The last time I looked it was around $130. The provider is releasing a new version that may have a different price structure, but significantly less than Jaws or Window-Eyes, which are close to $1,000 per user license. Even with educational discounts, they are about $800. Don’t quote me exactly on the price.

I’m going to bring up a page. The title of the page is Class Schedule Supplement. On this page, there’s a table with different department codes and a list of the room numbers, current enrollments, and the days that classes meet and other details.

I’m going to give you a specific task. Let’s say that you wanted to take Biology 315, and you want to find out which room number Biology 315 is going to be held in.

That’s your task: which room number is Biology 315 going to be held in?

When I set this to reading, I want you to see if you can identify that.

I’m going to make the transition over to the screen reader.

Class schedule supplement. The following classes were added after the official schedule was printed. This page is updated daily at 2300 hours so availability is current as of yesterday at that time. Department code class number, section, max enrollment, current enrollment, room number, days, start time, end time, instructor. Bio 100, 1, 15, 13, 5, Mon, Wed, Fri, 10:00, 11:00, magde. 112, 51300 hours, 1400 hours.

I’m going to pause it there with sincere apologies to our captioner, because I realize that was not an easy task.

As you’re listening to that, I wonder how many of you were actually able to find out or to discern which class, or which room number, Biology 315 was going to be held in. My guess is that probably almost none of you were able to figure that out. If you were, I congratulate you.

This doesn’t mean that all content is going to be as difficult to listen to as what I just played, but this is an example of a table that has been set up in a way that is not easily accessible.

It did not have the proper headings with the table, and the data cells were not associated with those headings.

There are many different technical aspects of accessibility that we won’t cover in this webcast, but that’s illustrative of one of the problems. Some of you who were listening to that probably thought that’s too fast. It’s hard to discern the difference between one table cell and the other, but when you listen to someone using a screen reader who uses it on a regular basis, that was actually very slow.

They do get used to hearing the sounds. They can speed it up and get through web content quickly, but there still is a problem of differentiating one table cell from another.

You can go into what’s called table navigation mode, and you can navigate cell by cell. At least you can tell which cell is which, but that doesn’t help you know what each cell means. For example, if you’re under current enrollment and the cell says 3, if you don’t have the headings set up properly, it will probably just say 3. You won’t know that 3 is the number for current enrollment. And by the way, for those of you who are curious, the room number was 6. Biology 315 was going to be held in Room 6.

There are a lot of considerations other than just table cells or adding alternative text images, but by understanding how people with disabilities access the Internet, you get a feel for some of the problems they could face.

The tables can be made very accessible, and you can associate the headers with the data cells, and it becomes easy to read. When the mark-up on this same table is done correctly, they can navigate from cell to cell. It will say, for example, biology class number 315, biology section 1, biology max enrollment 12, biology current enrollment 3. I would add biology 315, room number 6, so all of that information is available when it’s marked up correctly.

Now I’m going to go to some of the questions that have been submitted. This one comes from Tamara Taylor. Tamara says first, “You mentioned the legal aspects of making the web page too accessible. Internet Supreme Court case law supports otherwise for other Internet cases.”

Those were attempting to do good and not being perfect. The case was against an ISP service provider trying to prevent illegal use of their service to deliver illegal images and images were found, and someone tried to sue.

What information do you have that may support otherwise?

Let me go back to the first sentence in your e-mail about making a web page too accessible.

First of all, there’s no such thing as “too accessible.” If we’re talking in literal terms, there probably is not such a thing in theoretical terms as true universal accessibility. There will always be a portion of the population that has difficulty with some aspect of a web page. For example, outside the realm of individuals with a disability, a Chinese website, precluding a translation, will always be inaccessible to me. Someone with a cognitive disability perhaps a learning disability where reading is particularly difficult, for example, a page full of text (no matter how the mark-up looks, whether all guidelines are followed, on a theoretical level) is not going to be ideally accessible to this person. On a certain level, it’s not attainable just as perfection is not attainable, but we can make significant strides.

I am taking issue with the phrase “too accessible.” You can provide a standard that you may not be able to meet, but whether that makes you more liable legally probably is an issue to discuss with lawyers, and I’m not a lawyer. Probably your university legal counsel would be a good place to start that discussion.

I would suggest that you don’t set a standard so high that it’s impossible to meet, but don’t set it so low or so vague that it’s impossible to meet in the sense of someone who wants to meet the standard but can’t because he/she is unsure how to proceed. I hope that addresses at least a part of your issues. Here’s another question, from Karen Riley. It says, “Paul, can you provide us with samples of exemplary web accessibility policy models from community colleges?”

Of course, that’s a loaded question. There are certainly examples of colleges and universities with web accessibility policies. I will provide this in our list of resources. You can find it on the WebAIM website, which is www.webaim.org.

And if you click on the tab that says “coordination and leadership,” or something along those lines, you can find a list of different colleges and universities that have policies on web accessibility. Listing them doesn’t necessarily mean that I consider them all exemplary, and excluding others doesn’t mean that I’ve found that they’re unacceptable. It simply means that at the time that I was compiling the list, these were the ones that I found. From this list of colleges and universities, I picked some of them through a random process and analyzed their policies. This is definitely not comprehensive, but it’s a good starting point. I’m going to refrain from mentioning specific names of colleges and universities simply because it can give a wrong impression. I don’t think that there’s one that I would call the best, but many of them do have many good points that can be learned from.

There’s not just one way of looking at a policy. There are many different opinions on what constitutes a good policy, but some of the things that I have been talking about, such as designating some technical standard, would certainly be one of my criteria for a successful policy.

I could probably go down an informal list of other criteria that I would consider important for a good web accessibility policy. I will list those now in the form of questions rather than in the form of mandates. The first question would be, “Who is responsible for creating accessible web content? And that goes against the idea of is it everybody, is it a certain group, a certain person, is it outsourced?” That’s a question to answer.

Number two, “How will the responsible individuals receive training and technical support? If the answer to the first question is everybody, then how are you going to provide the training and technical support for that group, or if it’s for a certain small group, how are they going to get the training?”

The third question is, “What does ‘accessible’ mean?, and how can you tell when content is acceptably accessible?” And this speaks to the idea that I was mentioning earlier of what is your technical standard.

Number four, “By when must the content be made accessible?” This has a double meaning. One meaning is, Let’s say that you’re implementing the policy for the first time. By when does everything have to be in compliance? Should it be by the end of the fiscal year? Should it be by the end of the semester? Or by when?

The second meaning is, if a page or certain aspect of the content on the website is found that is not accessible, what’s an acceptable time line for making it accessible? Is it one hour, or is it two days? Is it three weeks? Is it a month or six months? Obviously, for critical areas of the web content, six months just isn’t going to cut it. But there should be some sort of definition in the policy. These are my suggestions.

Number five, “Who will verify that the content passes the minimum standard, whatever that minimum standard is? Is it going to be a committee, one person who sits at the desk all day going through web content? Is it going to be random sampled once every six months or once every year?” This is something that has to be defined at some point.

There’s a follow-up to figure out if you’ve actually met your goal, which brings us to the next two points: How and by whom will this standard be enforced?

Finally, what are the consequences for failure to comply with the standard?

There are software tools that can be used, for example, to spider through websites, going through different links automatically, and retrieving the content, and then putting it through an accessibility validator or accessibility checker. These tools are useful in getting a snapshot of what it means to have accessible content.

There are some cautions I would apply in that these tools can only find certain types of accessibility errors. For example, one of the cardinal rules of accessibility is that you provide alternative text for images so that screen readers have something to access. Obviously a screen reader, which processes text, can’t figure out an image and describe the image. The person who develops the web content has to develop alternative text for the image.

Any of these automated tools can go through the content and find out whether there is alternative text. That’s not really a problem, but none of them can determine whether the alternative text is appropriate or accurate, or too long or vague. These tools have their place, but they also have their limitations.

This question comes from Jacob Davis: “I’m hoping to upgrade the tab sequence on our center’s web page. Do you have any guidelines or advice for trying to organize the tab-reading sequence on a web page?”

This gets at a certain aspect of accessibility, and that’s the reading order. As a general rule, a screen reader will read the content in the order that it appears in the source code of the web page, or the source mark-up of the web page. That doesn’t necessarily match the visual reading order that you see in the browser itself.

Going into the source code is the way to figure out whether the reading order is going to be logical. The question about a tab sequence, I assume, is about visual graphic tabs. Tab is a metaphor for a physical object of tabs in a folder. What’s the best reading order for those? The simple answer is there’s no one right answer, but you do want to pay attention to what’s logical. For example, if you look at the source code and imagine all the code and mark-up being removed and only the content remains when you look at the reading order, does that reading order make sense? And if it does to you, that’s at least a start. You might ask some other people whether that reading order makes sense to get a consensus. But there is no one right answer.

With tabs and navigation at the top of the page, one common technique for making it easier for people with disabilities to access the content is to provide what’s sometimes called a skip-navigation link. That allows people who use screen readers or the keyboard to skip past what appears at the top of the page.

Visual users who use a mouse can do that automatically. When you look at a page, you recognize that there are navigation tabs at the top, and that they appear on more than one page and then you simply look elsewhere. You look to the main content. You do the skip navigation automatically with your eyes, and someone using a screen reader can’t do it so automatically.

So you provide a link at the top of the page that says, “skip over the navigation”—not literally in that phrasing, but a common phrase would be “skip navigation,” for example, or “skip to main content.” Those are common ways of phrasing the idea. That links to a spot further down on the page so that a person who clicks on the link can bypass the navigation. The exact order depends on the website in question.

A question from Matthew Norris: “What are some new trends or new products being tested or encouraged that will standardize accessibility in post-secondary settings? I’m thinking about technology such as XML that isn’t necessarily being implemented for accessibility that can be used to ensure accessibility.”

It depends on which category you’re talking about. Obviously, there’s a wide range of tools that can be used to check for accessibility errors, and some of them do use an XML structure, but I realize that’s probably not addressing the question you’re asking. I think the question you’re asking is, “Is there a way to get around this problem of accessibility?” Is there a technology that avoids the inherent problems or potential problems with the Internet? I think that’s the gist of where you’re going.

The answer is straightforward. There are a lot of technologies already out there. Flash is one of them that is becoming more accessible. There’s a long way to go before Flash can be made accessible for more difficult, more interactive content. Nevertheless, in Flash, there is a method for making content accessible.

In Adobe Acrobat/PDF files, there is now a structure that you can use called tagged PDF. If you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat professional, you can create tag PDF files that are natively accessible to modern screen readers. And there are various XML languages, for example, voice XML, which has been around for a little while, which allows a person to interact with the source content with voice input and voice output.

But to be honest, it comes down to the same issues. HTML can be made more accessible. Like the original specification of the language itself, we could add extra accessibility hooks to HTML, just the same as we can to PDF, Flash, or to any file format. Whether it’s XML or any other format, the same principles apply.

Now is a good time to mention some of those basic principles as conceived in version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which is not an official document yet. The first one is making content perceivable. That means, for example, someone who is deaf is going to need captions for sound or video; someone who is blind is going to need to access content in a nonvisual format. So perceivability is a major principle.

The second principle is operability, which means that you can manipulate the interface using a variety of instruments. If you have an interface that requires a mouse, then you violated this basic principle. With some Java scripts, when you mouse over something, when you roll the mouse over them and you have extra content that pops up, or you have a menu system that appears that wasn’t there before, try to access that same page without the mouse. Try using a keyboard. You could use, for example, the tab key to go from link to link, and the enter key to follow a link, and the alt forward and back arrows to go forward and back. If you find that the interface is not accessible with a keyboard, then it’s not operable across the widest range of equipment.

This is important because not everyone who uses the Internet uses a mouse. Someone who is blind wouldn’t use a mouse, because a mouse is a visual tool, clicking on a spot on a graphical screen. A person who is blind will use the keyboard.

A person who doesn’t have use of his/her hands may use either a trackball mouse, a keyboard, or an alternative device that would emulate the keyboard more closely than the mouse. By making it keyboard accessible, as well as mouse accessible, you’ve satisfied that guideline.

We’ve talked about operability and perceivability. Another concept is understandability. This gets into a fuzzier area. It gets into the area of usability. It’s more difficult to define. But it’s important, especially for someone with a cognitive disability or someone with a learning disability. In general, it’s good for all users, but especially for those with cognitive disabilities.

And the last category for Version 2 of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is robustness. That refers to the ability to have the content show up in multiple browsers, in multiple environments. For example, if something works only in Internet Explorer Version 6 and not in different browsers like Mozilla, Fire Fox, or Netscape, then you haven’t achieved the goal of making the content robust. That is important because not all of the technologies that people with disabilities use are the most common technologies. So you want to make it as robust as possible.

There’s a review of what’s coming in terms of the categories in Version 2 of the document. It’s subject to change since the document is not yet finalized, but they’ve moved away from a technical-standards and technical-aspect viewpoint toward a categorical and principle standard viewpoint with Version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I think that’s going to be one of the greatest strengths of the second version.

Another question that has been brought up is whether there will be a transcript available for this presentation. There will be a transcript available.

“Do you have some good online resources that people could look at for additional information on the topic?”

Paul Bohman: That’s a good question. The first one that comes to mind—of course, it’s a biased perspective—is our own website: webaim.org. What’s offered there is a collection of tutorials and articles and general information about web accessibility, as well as resources about Section 508. If 508 compliance is an issue for your college, you might check out www.Section508.gov. If you’re interested in technical specifications and the international work group that creates the international guidelines, then you could check out the website of W3C, which is the World Wide Web consortium: www.w3.org.

Then you go to the Web Accessibility Initiative. There are a lot of resources there. There are several books on the market. If you go to your favorite website for buying books, and type in “web accessibility,” three or four titles will come up.

There are other ways of getting the information. At WebAIM we also give web accessibility workshops. We’re not the only ones. If you do a search of web accessibility consultants or web accessibility workshops or training on the web, you’ll find a substantial list.

On our website, if you go click on the tab “getting help from others,” we have several people listed there. This is not a comprehensive list.

I’m coming close to the end of our time. I want to encourage people who have last-minute questions to submit those. I’m going through my e-mail program to make sure that I didn’t miss any that were submitted.

It looks like I might have missed one. It says, “Does having a home page where the graphic changes throughout the day create issues in regard to assigning alternate tags? For an image that changes, are there problems with the alternative text?” If you have an image that does change its content and if that content is important to understanding the page or to understanding the purpose of that image, then the alt text is going to be an issue. Those alternating images are not necessarily key content for the web page or for the website in general. Often they’re just decoration. For example, on a university home page you might have a picture of some students walking to class and another picture of the campus with snow on it and another picture with the campus in summertime. Are those critical to understanding the meaning of the home page at the university or college website? Probably not. You may be able to write a generic alternative text that mentions the photographs of the campus, or says the slogan for the university. There’s more than one way of accomplishing the goal.

Or you could provide “null alt text” or “empty alt text.” When you provide alt text for an image, you can do it in a mark-up. It just says alt equals some attribute in quotes. For example, since I’m at Utah State University, I would say alt equals quote utah state university end quote if that’s what the appropriate alt text image would be. If we’re talking about alternating images of the campus that aren’t particularly important to the overall content, you may just want to put alt equals, quote, quote, with nothing in the quotes. The result will be that people with a screen reader simply won’t read the image. That may sound like a bad thing, but in this case, it’s probably a good thing, because it allows them to move efficiently through the unimportant content.

Obviously, you don’t want to apply that to every image. You want to apply it only to the images that are not important, and you want to apply meaningful alt text to meaningful images. Once you start thinking along those lines, the appropriate solution for a specific situation becomes more self-evident.

A lot of what I’ve been talking about has been related to the visual disability category. We’ve heard the screen reader mention alt text a few times, but I want to emphasize that visual disability is only one category.

There are visual, motor, hearing, and cognitive disabilities and a kind of epilepsy as the extra category. All of these categories of disability are important to keep in mind. We have to make content accessible to the blind, but also to the other categories of disabilities. Overemphasizing one disability may encourage people to create content that is less accessible to the other categories.

A potential conflict is that of visual disabilities versus cognitive disabilities. For example, since images are not useful to someone who can’t see them, people may provide just a text-only version and think that will solve all of the problems of accessibility. It may be more accessible to a blind person, but a text-only website is definitely not the solution for people with reading disabilities. In fact, the opposite is true.

You would want to provide more illustrations, more video, or Flash interactive content, if appropriate. Wherever appropriate, you want to provide the extra visual stimulus or information to supplement the text, just as you want to provide the text to supplement the visual. You want to make the content as universal as possible for as many people as possible. How do we accomplish that if we are not supposed to have images for one group and we’re supposed to have them for another? Because of the structure of HTML, the alt text exists in the mark-up itself, along with the image. So you don’t have to provide the alternative version. You don’t have to go to the text-only version. The text-only version is already there, as long as the alt text is present. Someone with a screen reader goes to one source page, one web page, and gets essentially a text version. If that same page has a lot of photographs or images, then the visual person gets those as well. So you’ve killed two birds with one stone and you’ve accomplished both goals with the same page.

We’ve talked about a lot of issues. In closing, I would like to reemphasize the fact that disability access to the web for people with disabilities, especially in an educational context, even though it does have a lot to do with technical standards, is not really the heart of the issue. The heart of the issue is making educational content and educational opportunities available to people with disabilities.

The numbers of people with disabilities who live in poverty, without the education that they perhaps would have wanted, the number of people with other disadvantages associated with those disabilities is heart-breaking. From a social justice standpoint, there are things that we can do about it. Making web content and instructional content accessible to people with disabilities is one of those things. If we can make a difference by making web content accessible, then why not give it a shot?

The second point I want to conclude with is that it’s not something that just happens. We can say that we want to feel good about what we’re doing, but if we’re not actually making it happen, it won’t. There has to be some sort of system in place based on some sort of policy that should be discussed at the level of the college. The specifics should be decided by all the stakeholders, but there must be something in place: a system of training, a policy to work toward, and a way of determining whether the policy is actually having the intended effect.

Those are my concluding words. I appreciate the attention that you’ve given me, and I wish you the best of luck with your efforts in making web content accessible.

Pamela Cress: Paul, thank you so much. This has been a really informative time. I think there’s a lot more that you could share with us, but you’re probably starting to get hoarse. I do want to thank also Carrie Logback, who has been our transcriber, and I would like to remind everyone to please go to the webcast web page and complete the online evaluation of this webcast. It’s very short and sweet. It won’t take you more than a minute or two. The archived audio file and the text version of this webcast will be available at that same page. Thank you for joining us.