Look Listen Touch

by Cory Bohon

Universal Access is an interesting topic and while many companies are trying to be innovative in this area, there still needs to be more work with regards to Universal Access and website design. Most web designers (myself included) don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how the end user will access the site. Many of us spend the time to make the site look pretty or achieve an important function without paying attention to things like screen readers, refreshable braille displays, or other asistive devices for the sighted user, tactile user, or auditory user.

Access Keys could be a potential use in designing accessible web pages. By adding a bit of HTML code to a link, we can give a new type of behavior to the web browser. Users can use modifier keys and the specified access key to jump to different links on a web page. While some developers use this type of technology, which has actually been around since 1999, it’s use isn’t as prevalent as it could be.

The UK has actually specified a standard of sorts for access key usage. It goes something like this:

• S – Skip navigation
• 1 – Home page
• 2 – What’s new
• 3 – Site map
• 4 – Search
• 5 – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• 6 – Help
• 7 – Complaints procedure
• 8 – Terms and conditions
• 9 – Feedback form
• 0 – Access key details

While these rules aren’t imposed on web designers, it is considered good use to develop pages using these access keys. I would love to see the US follow similarly for web design principals. If we could start using these access keys on more websites it would make them universally navigatable by different users.

One hitch to using access keys is that the web browser developers all use different modifier keys to make them work. Google Chrome uses “Alt,” Internet Explorer uses “Alt,” and Opera uses “Shift + Esc.” Apple’s Safari is the most confusing of them all, if you are using version 2.0, Mac users use “Control” while Windows users use “Alt”; if you are running version 3.0, Mac users use “Control + Option” while Windows users use “Alt.” How do you convey to your user which key they should use? If the user isn’t tech savvy, how will they know what they’re running, let alone which version? All of these differences pose problems in standardizing the usage of access keys. This is one of the things we’re trying to figure out.

You can read more about access keys on Wikipedia and WordPress.

As you might have seen on this blog, we’re starting a new section of Look Listen Touch called Look Listen Touch Media that will allow us to create screencasts, podcasts, and more interactive material to supplement and show off what we’re doing. We have already published our first screencast to demonstrate what an accessible website looks like. We also have more of these screencasts currently in the planning stages.

We have made the Look Listen Touch Media screencasts available via the iTunes Podcast Directory. This will allow you to subscribe and get all future episodes of our screencasts delivered directly to iTunes (or your other favorite podcast aggregation tool). To subscribe, just install iTunes (Win or Mac), Miro (Win, Mac, Linux), or  Juice (Win, Mac, Linux) and subscribe to this RSS feed: http://www.looklistentouch.org/casts/?feed=podcast

If you are using iTunes, you may go to the following URL to subscribe: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=333189645

Look Listen Touch Screencast 001 from LookListenTouch on Vimeo.

This video is a basic demonstration of a screen reader, software that reads aloud digital information. The voice you hear first is computer-generated.

More screencasts are planned.

Please send any feedback to gwilliams@uscupstate.edu.

Project Description

LookListenTouch is a University of South Carolina Upstate research project exploring best practices in applying universal design principles to digital humanities projects. Initial funding has been provided through the student research assistant program of the USC Upstate Office of Sponsored Awards and Research Support.

Since last week, I’ve been working on this research project with Professor George H. Williams at the University of South Carolina Upstate. We’re trying to find out the best practices for developing accessible web sites while keeping Digital Humanities in mind. We are attempting to turn Omeka, a CMS for digital cataloging, into the most accessible form of accessing scholastic information no matter a persons disability.

While I was thinking about the different techniques we could use to make these accessibility options available, and I pondered a cool idea. What if, in the same way we can use OpenID to log into multiple websites, we could use a standard accessibility options “plug-in” that anyone could install/code into their site to make it more accessible. Different preferences, like the ability to use a screen reader or use a braille display, could be carried from one website to another without the user having to setup these options again.

Perhaps this task could be completed easily with a Firefox extension that could communicate with the code on the website to load a specific CSS file that would allow for better interaction with a screen reader or braille display.

There is the possibility that someone has already come up with and implemented this idea of a tool for universal web accessibility, and if you know of a project that currently does this same thing or does it better, feel free to leave a comment and let us know!

Research Question: How can digital humanities projects with scholarly significance be designed with the needs of vision-impaired end users at the forefront of consideration while still keeping the needs of vision-enabled end users in mind?

Details: This project will pursue funding to create an online, digital archive from the 150 years worth of material in the archives at the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind. The resulting web site will be built using Omeka for a stand-alone digital archive, but the digitized material will also be offered to the South Carolina Digital Library Project. Making this material available to researchers worldwide will contribute significantly to the study of the history of pedagogy and disability.

However, in addition to the task of digitizing the material (which we don’t anticipate will present significant challenges), we would like to investigate and further develop best practices for accessibility in the design of digital archives of this kind (which we anticipate will).

Visually-impaired end users take advantage of digital technologies for “accessibility” that (with their oral/aural and tactile interfaces) are fascinatingly different than the standard monitor-keyboard-mouse combination, forcing us to rethink our embodied relationship to data.

Furthermore, opening up the field of digital humanities to the issues associated with disability studies makes an even broader range of funding sources available.