Look Listen Touch

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.