H810: Accessibility Ahead

As with many academics, I’m often behind on my journal reading, so I’ve only just noticed that August’s Communications of the ACM contained a news article entitled “Access For All” by Peggy Aycinena, summarizing some recent research work into accessibility initiatives. Quite a bit of what was reported was about communication initiatives:

• Repeating words of TV announcers in Japan by a separate speaker to improve real-time, speech recognition for captioning.
• Wheelchairs that use verbal commands to navigate an automatically built map being developed at MIT.
• University of Washington’s MobileASL project that’s modified a cell phone into a video phone with a split view for American Sign Language users, with one side showing a remote translator and the other the cell phone user, improving communication between ASL users and text relay services.
• The Rochester Institute of Technology is working on establishing a deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) CyberCommunity between different universities with the goal of increasing enrollment in science, engineering, and mathematics at all levels.
• Ladner’s team at Rochester is also developing a textbook translation tool. Textbooks are fairly accessible, but figures, graphs, and charts are still problematic. Their Tactile Graphics Assistant produces texture versions of figures automatically.
• Carnegie Mellon University scientists Tom M. Mitchell and Marcel Just have been using functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to detect when a person thinks of a specific noun–mindreading, sort of–that could be useful in autism, paranoid schizophrenia, and Pick’s disease studie

Not too surprisingly, there was also quite a bit about the web and general accessibility there. Ladner, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, was quoted as saying:

Unfortunately, a lot of Web pages are not that accessible for people who are blind or dyslexic… Web designers use commercial development tools to make this looks good, but don’t create a logical structure behind the page’s that’s navigable with a screen reader. Frequently, there’s also no alternative text inserted for figures.”

I’d have to agree with that. Although tools like DreamWeaver have come a long way, especially with their much improved support for CSS style sheets, it is far too easy to design things which look pretty but which do not meet accessibility needs. Many designers probably do not realize this is the case and their clients, in many cases are ignorant or do not care, being unwilling to “pay for designs that will work with people they’re not intending to sell to anyway.” Simon Harper, University of Manchester researcher and chair of this year’s SIGACCESS conference, agrees that accessibility starts with the design,

It would cost nothing and would be very easy to make a Web site from the outset that’s supportive of accessible technology.

However, as I’ve already said: you can lead the horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Vicki Hanson, chair of SIGACCESS & researcher at IBM’s T.J. Watson Center, is cognizant of this too and thinks it’s a legal thing in the United States and Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI), believes it’s a matter of international law. ICDRI chair Mike Burks comments:

Some people maintain that pursuing accessible technology is too expensive but people in the U.S. who have disabilities have approximately 70% unemployment rate… That’s a huge price for any society to pay for ICT not being accessible to all.”

I think Burks might be stretching it a bit to equate inaccessible ICT to the huge unemployment rate for the disabled, but I can certainly see his point that we are impacting the lives of many, many people in ways that, in many cases, could be avoided with some forethought and care.

In closing, the article quotes Simon Harper about accessibility being about choice:

Everyone of us is bizarrely unique, and in the real world we do things in many different ways… There is no single solution to accessibility technologies. The solution is to have a whole menu of solutions from which each of us can pick and choose.

That is just as applicable to us in designing e-learning, if not more so! Not only does having a whole menu of choices perhaps cater to accessibility, it also caters to people’s individual learning styles. I was just talking on Twitter with Tony Hirst (Open University) about learning styles and personalized course content delivery. With his idea, I would receive the heavily text-based delivery I crave and process better, whereas he would receive the “talking head” content he prefers. Notice the contrast there between more inaccessible video content and accessible text content as well as learning styles? That also resonates with the ideas about universal design.

The seven principles of universal design are:

1. Equitable use
2. Flexibility in use
3. Simple and intuitive
4. Perceptible information
5. Tolerance for error
6. Low physical effort
7. Size and space for approach and use

If you’re interested in reading more about universal design and usability, Sarah Horton’s Access By Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers is available online. The web site contrasts universal usability from accessibility by saying:

Accessibility is primarily concerned with making the content and functionality of web sites accessible–within reach–to all users. University usability goes one step further, striving to make the content and functionality accessible and usable by all.

Life may be unfair, but it is up to each one of us to try to improve the world around us. For educators, that includes making education as accessible as possible.

More information:

• Aycinena, Peggy. 2008. “Access for All” in Communications of the ACM. 08(08). Available online from doi:10.1145/1378704.1378709.
• Center for Universal Design. 2008. “UD Principles HTLM Format”. Retrieved on November 17, 2008 from http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprincipleshtmlformat.html.
• Horton, Sarah. 2006. “Universal Usability.” Retrieved on November 17, 2008 from http://universalusability.com/index.html.