Suggestions for the WaSP Accessibility and Education Task Forces
Published 26 Jun 2005
In addition to the Education Task Force that I mentioned earlier, the WaSP has set up an Accessibility Task Force. Members of the WaSP are asking for suggestions for the task force here and here. There have been some great suggestions, and a few university people have piped up.
In an attempt to not have the voice of higher ed (which I feel has some additional/different concerns to those of the rest of the web world) lost in the shuffle, I thought I’d post my suggestions here, and open up the comments for other higher ed folks to add their insight. If you’re like me, you could use all the help you can get with these issues— the WaSP is asking for input, so let’s give it to them! :) I will post this URL back to the other sites, so the WaSP can hear our thoughts.
My top 3 suggestions for the Accessibility Task Force
- Work with vendors to make their products more accessible and produce better code. There is much talk of working with CMS vendors about this, which is a great start, but in higher ed we are also dependent on vendors for many other services, such as student information management (Banner, Peoplesoft, etc), courseware (Blackboard, WebCT, etc), fundraising (Blackbaud, etc), and institution-wide calendaring and scheduling, to name a few. The quality of the web output portions of these products in my experience, in terms of both accessibility and web standards, is poor. Please feel free to add to this list of services and vendors— these are the ones I have experience with, and I know there are many more.
- Encourage development of affordable server-side accessibility checkers. Higher ed sites are perhaps the largest sites on the web, and they are decentralized. It is difficult for the web team to assess the accessibility of the site as a whole without an automated process to at least alert them to potential problems. Automated checkers can’t assess everything, but they are at least a start. Unfortunately, their price is out of reach for many web teams.
- Encourage development of affordable and efficient video captioning systems. For better or worse, online video is being used more and more in education. To meet accessibility requirements, this video needs to have
realtimesynchronized captioning. We have been stymied many times by how to make this happen with the staff and resources we have available.
My top 3 suggestions for the Education Task Force
This one is a bit tougher. I have no knowledge of or influence over curriculum issues, and one of the main goals of the Education Task Force is to get web standards worked into the web design and development curriculum. Maybe those of you who are also faculty members will have more insight into this.
- Help us educate the administrators that web professionals are indeed professionals with a lot of expertise to offer. I think that many administrators don’t understand what it is the web team does, and don’t seek their input on important web-related decisions. Folks are often surprised when I explain that the web world is a huge discipline with many subfields, areas of expertise, and standards. In my experience, administrators don’t realize that when they are choosing tools such as web-based fundraising systems, they could benefit from getting my advise on which of these systems will work best with the university web site. In other words, if the tool is web based, it needs to be evaluated both in terms of how it fulfills the specific business need, and in terms of the quality of its web implementation.
- Develop a repository of resources for us to draw from when dealing with non-web professionials who maintain institutional sites. Higher ed web sites are by nature decentralized, and often folks with no web training are tasked with maintaining departmental sites. It would be great to have some good resources to give them to help them out with this— some basic web education materials aimed at the layperson who has no desire to know more than they have to. In my situation, I have little time to train decentralized web maintainers; I need a way to tell them what they need to know in a clear, short, useful way.
- A repeat of number 1 above. We really need our vendors to make their products output standards-based code if we want to move university web sites toward full standards-compliance.
And of course: education, education, education. There are still a lot of folks within the university setting (not the web teams, but the others involved in putting up web sites) that don’t know about the benefits of using web standards or what it takes to really make a site accessible.
What are your thoughts?
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Commentary
Derek Featherstone writes
Jun 27 at 04:17 AM #
Andrea – Just saw your post on uweb-d and thought I’d come over and check out your post. You make some excellent points about “other” vendors. I’ll make note of this (I’m on the Accessibility Task Force), and present your thoughts to everyone else. You’ve also given me an idea for a blog post, so keep your eyes open!!
I’ve heard from many of my friends in education that the situation hasn’t improved much (FYI – I used to be a high school teacher and then moved into accessibility consulting/web development/training, and have worked with many educational institutions on both short and long-term contracts for specific projects) From what I recall, we’ve been fighting the vendor battle for ages. You rhymed off a number of software products that I’m familiar with, and while the obvious task for the task force will be working with specific assistive technology vendors, we’ll also be working with other groups/vendors to (hopefully) help them start producing more accessible, standards-based code. Its very simple, really – Garbage In, Garbage Out. You want to do the right thing, but you can’t because of what some other third party piece of software is producing. Blech.
On the education side, I’ll agree wholeheartedly – you can always use more resources. I’m not on the Education Task Force, but with a teaching background, I’m very interested in what happens there.
Many thanks for your feedback – it is much appreciated, and I’m looking forward to hearing more from the higher education community!
Andrea writes
Jun 27 at 09:00 AM #
Thanks for your comments Derek! It’s good to know that WaSPers read uweb-d, and that you are so open to ideas and suggestions.
I know the Accessibility Task Force has a huge job ahead of them, and there is a lot if work to be done with the assistive technology folks, so thanks for taking the time to listen to what we have to say. Hopefully the uweb-d folks will chime in with a lot of good ideas—they usually do!
Deirdre McGlynn writes
Jun 27 at 05:27 PM #
“Encourage development of affordable and efficient video captioning systems. For better or worse, online video is being used more and more in education. To meet accessibility requirements, this video needs to have realtime captioning. ”
Just want to emphasize in case it is not clear that a live web cast would require real-time captioning (very expensive to produce) to be accessible and that most online video clips require only synchronized captioning to produce (not as expensive – esp if text-to-speech software is used to speed up creating the transcript – a time-consuming task which is often the bottleneck in the process). Simply making transcripts available does constitute not equivalent access.
Also, raising expections for publishers of online content to caption their video content needs to be done – I’ve talked to sales reps from various textbook publishers and many don’t even know if their electronic materials are captioned or not (and as a general rule, they are not)
By the way, CNN’s new free video service has no captions – the email I got back from them asking about this said that captions are not provided due to “constraints of content”, whatever that means.
Chip Diffendaffer writes
Jun 27 at 07:56 PM #
I’m just glad to see a proactive approach being taken by the WaSP group. We, of course, have centralized most of our web services, but it does create some limitations on content due to time constraints but we are able to watch accessibility and standards closely.
Once the everyday products we use begin adapting properly to standards, life will be so much better.
Andrea writes
Jun 27 at 09:58 PM #
Dierdre: Thanks for the clarification—I did misspeak above. The time constraint of producing synchronized captions is what gets us—the transcription process is very inefficient for us. We haven’t even been able to think about real-time video…
Chip Diffendaffer writes
Jun 27 at 10:46 PM #
By the way, I’ve still yet to e-mail the New Riders’ chief about the idea that circulated at SXSW for creating a web design book that included the “real” things that students need to learn in a curriculum-like book. I haven’t seen a single, condensed text that contained an accessibility overview, standards discussion, and project management basics before delving right into framed-based, blinking HTML.
Eric Hobart writes
Jul 18 at 04:08 AM #
Andrea:
I saw your post on uweb-d.
I’m wondering if anyone has answers to these questions:
Is there a central resource that lists Web case law pertaining to Section 508 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act? It seems to me that a demonstrated real possibility of a suit being filed against a university because it’s site is inaccessible would be a great lever to persuade PR and Communications folks that accessibility should be a primary concern.
Fear of having your university’s name in a newspaper’s banner headline announcing a civil suit would be a great motivator for marketing-minded people, and might help make the case for something beyond ensuring all images have alt tags.
It might be easier to promote universal Web accessibility if that fear were coupled with broader “diversity” efforts.
Also, I rarely hear anyone reference Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act when they talk about federal Web accessibility law, and I wonder why.
It specifically refers to univesities and seems to say any institution with a program that receives federal money must not bar anyone from participating because of a disability:
“Sec. 504.(a) No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States, as defined in section 7(20), shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance or under any program or activity conducted by any Executive agency or by the United States Postal Service.”
So if universities indirectly receive federal funding through student loans, does 504 apply?
Or am I interpreting “disability” wrong?
Thanks to anyone who can offer additional clarity.
Andrea writes
Jul 22 at 05:15 AM #
Eric: Goood questions, and ones that I can’t answer off the top of my head. I will pass on your questions to the accessibility gurus I know and see if they have any answers for you.
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