Synote and LexDis cross the Atlantic once again!

Posted on November 8, 2009 by E.A. Draffan

Both Mike and E.A are heading off to the States this week to talk about the Synote, LexDis, and Web2Access.

As the press release says, Mike is “going to present the latest developments in his award-winning web-based Synote at a symposium at the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre, New York on Monday 9 November.

It will be the first time Synote will be shown with its additional ability to “synchronise live notes taken using Twitter with synchronised lecture recordings and transcripts created using IBM’s speech recognition software.”

E.A. is off to the 12th Annual Accessing Higher Ground – Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference in Colorado on Thursday 12 November to show how Seb Skuse, Russell Newman and Chris Phethean have developed a suite of accessibility tools that can help to make access to the web easier. This work has come about as a result of the findings of the JISC funded LexDis project which, as someone said “refuses to die!” Students are still coming forward with new strategies for the way they cope with their “Technology Enhanced Learning” (to include e-learning and mobile learning) environments and E.A. is keen to continue with this work so that the database can be kept up to date with the latest ideas.

The press release ends by saying: “In her presentation, E.A. will highlight the need to enhance the knowledge of a wider network of ‘informal experts’ and academic staff to enable them to introduce disabled students to the many web-based tools which are currently emerging. This would allow disabled students to further develop their skills and perhaps in time also become informal experts who would be willing to share the strategies they have developed with others as can be seen on the LexDis website.”

Global AutoCorrect developed by LexDis Participant

Posted on October 9, 2009 by E.A. Draffan

Neil Cottrell has just spent some of his university days developing a software program to help his ideas to flow and improve his spelling whilst writing lengthy Psychology essays.

The problem is if you use a normal spell checker that underlines all the errors you make it tends to disrupt your thought processes. Neil discovered that if he used Microsoft Word’s AutoCorrect this speeded up his writing, however this did not work with every application. This meant Neil was doing a lot of copy and pasting into Facebook and online emails to make sure they were correct.

The idea of making a program was borne out of frustration and Neil felt his spelling was not improving. So Global AutoCorrect slowly developed from his ideas thanks to a series of IT tutorials and a considerable amount of time in front of his computer. The results can now be seen on Neil’s website where there is a video explaining it all – tutorials can also be viewed via YouTube.

Neil is planning to release the first version of his program during Dyslexia Awareness Week November 1st – 7th 2009. To find out more information or to contact Neil please go to the LexAble website.

Access Tools Menu for a Mac USB Pen Drive?

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Chris Phethean

With the Windows version of the Access Tools menu undergoing tests before it is released, time has been spent looking at whether a Mac version of the system should be developed.

An important factor in determining whether this should be undertaken is what portable applications are available for the Mac. Freesmug provides a selection of common applications in portable form, although there are not really any portable accessibility tools available. This is not a huge problem, as Mac OS X has accessibility features built in, so these would be available on any Mac without the need for a portable version. The range of portable applications is also much smaller than for Windows. This would limit the added benefit that a pendrive could provide.

A small test was undertaken to investigate what kind of menu systems could be used on the Mac. Three portable Mac applications (Portable VLC, Portable Firefox and Portable Sunbird) were downloaded and placed onto a blank USB drive. It was immediately clear that the applications were a lot simpler than their Windows alternatives, with only a couple of extra files in each folder, along with the application itself. Using the Cover Flow view in Finder, there is a visual way to scroll through the folders (which are decorated with the application’s icon), open the folder, and then easily locate the application. The other views in Finder all provide a similar organisation, although Cover Flow was visually the most pleasing.

To simplify this further, a Smart Folder can be used. A Smart Folder can be used to organise common files, without worrying about their location. This means that a Smart Folder could be created that would contain just the application files for all portable applications available. By creating a new Smart Folder using Finder, the word “Portable” was used as the search term. This located everything on the machine (and connected devices) with “Portable” in its name, which found the applications on the pendrive, but also a considerable number of other files. For this reason, the search was then limited by ‘Kind’ to search for particular types of files. Selecting the ‘Kind’ as Applications meant it would now only show Applications that had “Portable” in the name. This limited the results to just our portable applications.

Creating the Smart Folder to search for all Applications with "Portable" in their name

By selecting ‘Save’, it was now possible to place this Smart Folder onto the pendrive, and take it from machine to machine, where it would always show shortcuts to the portable applications, without the rest of their associated files. The folder was named ‘Menu’, as it provides similar functionality. The user can open this folder, and scroll through the available applications just as a user would scroll through the application list on the Windows pen drive version. Cover Flow and the other view modes are still available for this, which provides an attractive visual interface.

The contents of the pendrive - the Menu smart folder, and the three application folders

The Mac pendrive Menu folder displaying as icons. Only the applications themselves are shown.

Because these features are built into Mac OS X, along with the lack of portable accessibility tools and small selection of portable applications in general, it has been agreed that producing a Mac version of the Access Tools menu would not be worthwhile.

Access Tools Menu Beta Testing

Posted on September 10, 2009 by Chris Phethean

After making some changes to the layout and interface of the Access Tools menu, it has now been distributed for beta testing. The new design makes the menu much more stable and prevents some of the early problems that were occurring when resizing the text.

Additional features have been added such as the ability to change the titles of applications and documents with the use of the right hand mouse button once the pointer is over the individual item and also to resize dialog boxes and increase text sizes, change colours etc with keyboard commands. The help file has the short cut key commands and software applications can be added to the menu via the folders found on the pen drive.

The underlying code has remained relatively constant, and has so far been able to create the application list in the menu with very few problems. This stability has allowed a longer period of time to be spent on refining the interface and improving the accessibility features of the application, which initial tests have shown to work well.

The possibility of a Mac alternative will be investigated in the next few days, along with an in depth look at what portable accessibility tools are available for the Mac.

In the meantime, development will continue on the Windows version in response to any issues that are raised during the beta period, to ensure that the final version provides the best possible experience to all users.

Access Tools Menu showing the list of Accessibility Tools and Applications that are installed.

Access Tools Menu showing the list of Accessibility Tools and Applications that are on this USB drive.

Update on Web2Access criteria

Posted on August 17, 2009 by E.A. Draffan

In the last week we have had many discussions about the evaluation checks and criteria we have been using on Web2Access. E-mails from Mary Jane Barnett from the University of North Texas have helped to highlight some issues that have been of concern… “I have wondered why some of the sites have such low ratings on the deaf/hard of hearing evaluation.”

The toolkit for evaluation is progressing well and we needed to make sure we had a fair cross section of evaluation checks for all disabilities. Those who are deaf or have hearing impairments may have the most problems with media content online, but not being able to hear videos is very different from the issue of not being able to see the animation or scenes and yet we had both under the title of Multimedia. A decision was made to divide this check into two separate tests: -

Do all pages with audio or audio/video features relevant to the content offer alternatives? 0=No chance to add alternatives. 1=Possible to add text summary (number of characters may be restricted) 2=Possible to add full text transcript 3=Possible to add captioning and a text transcript. Sign language seen as an option that will be commented on.
Do all pages with video /animation features without audio or complex scenes with verbal descriptions offer alternatives? 0=No chance to add alternatives. 1=Possible to add text summary (number of characters may be restricted) 2=Audio description or extended text description. 3=Extended audio description with text description

Mary Jane made a further comment about how we reach the final results and we had to admit that any ranking really was not very relevant with the percentages in place. So this part of the evaluation will be removed. The icons represent the four criteria for each test and are set out in line with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and our own experience and those of colleagues on web accessibility.

Each service is evaluated against the test criteria and how they impact on a range of disabilities. Sadly there is no way of accounting for individual skills and use of assistive technology. This is why we choose to evaluate using freely available screen readers that do not require the skills of more complex screen readers and we admit we are rather harsh with our marking .

Mary Jane Barnett is on the Advisory Committee for the Expanding Accessibility Project of the North Texas Regional Library System as an Independent Librarian/Consultant and has been amazingly helpful with all her comments. Her final point was about making sure everyone knew what products, services or applications we were evaluating for accessibility. Off the cuff I said: “We sometimes find different wikis or blogs are actually developed using the same service such as Word Press or Mediawiki so we tend to skip that sort of repetition. We choose those applications that have a free version and avoid those that require downloading onto a personal computer. Finally all the sites need to be truly interactive to qualify as Web 2.0 rather than Web 1.0.

Thank you Mary Jane for being such a wonderful critical friend! See you at Accessing the Higher Ground Conference in November, when I shall be presenting on all our projects! Please add comments folks!

Browser plug-ins or add-ons can help accessibility

Posted on August 14, 2009 by E.A. Draffan

Safari, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox all have a collection of small utility applications to enhance web surfing.

There are now many ways of changing the look and way your browser works when you are working within web pages. Depending on your chosen browser you can add a series of toolbars or additional menu buttons and even complete search bars such as the one offered by the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox users.

Mozilla Firefox appears to have the largest collection of add-ins that can help with zooming with Nosquint for example, colour changes with Accessibar, text to speech – FoxVox, dictionaries – the British Dictionary as well as evaluating web pages for accessibility with such tools as WAVE and the Firefox Accessibility Extension add-ons.

Tim O’Brien has a blog about “A Collection of Accessibility Add-ons” for Firefox.

Microsoft have a similar page of add-ons for Internet Explorer and the Web Accessibility toolbar developed by Vision Australia can help with web page evaluations. There is also iespell checker

Mashable have provided their top 10 safari plug-ins and there are many more for Mac users on PimpMySafari. The most useful ones that may make life a bit easier when surfing are found under the ‘interface section’.

Critical Friends provide helpful comments.

Posted on August 5, 2009 by E.A. Draffan

Over the last week Deb Viney, Ginny Stacey and Mary Eld have been kind enough to give up time to visit us and work with us on our projects as critical friends. We really are very grateful for this help.

The pen drive /memory stick / USB flash drive, (debate as to the best name!) with its accessible menu – is this for staff or students? If both. what does each group need in terms of applications and guides and how do we divide up the folders? Should we be able to access the applications immediately without having to go through a series of folders or categories or does there need to be a tree structure?

When it comes to overall design – do we need logos for the applications and icons for some menu items as well as text which can be enlarged? A decision was made to use a colour contrast calculator to stop bad colour combinations when users change text and background colours to suit their preferences.

The Study Bar update on the previous blog has covered many of the aspects discussed in our meetings. It was felt that it was important to improve aspects of the text to speech, as decisions about the items to be added to the tool bar had largely been dealt with by comparing the bar to the JISC TechDis User Preferences toolbar.

Web2Access walk-through to check the criteria has been completed, but it was clear that when discussing aspects of the evaluation for Web 2.0 services, there needs to be a considerable amount of support for some people. The issue of who was going to use the site arose and what were the criteria for our choice of Web 2.0 applications – this needs to be added to the site! Perhaps we could say services chosen should:

allow for interactions.
have no download requirements
offer free access not just a free trial.

A visit to Jane Hart’s Social Media toolkit provide more ideas for which Web 2.0 applications are used in elearning situations as well as other tools for learning.

The search facility has been added to each page on the Web2Access website and the anomalies that have arisen with the scoring are under discussion with the realisation that listing all those that have identical results is not very helpful.

A question was raised as to how the percentages were worked out. It was noted that the criteria for the tests provide the results not how accessible the site is for a particular disability against another disability or application. A phrase to explain this issue and the ongoing debate about the scoring and how it is illustrated is on the list of tasks to be completed!

Our explanation of Web 2.0 needs to be expanded and for whom the site has been designed as this came up whilst going through the test criteria. It was felt the site is helpful for developers in its present mode but if we could add more supporting materials it would be useful for a wider audience. We may also need to change some of the technical language used!

The Accessibility Cloud project was mentioned in passing and meetings with experts in the field of linking data are being set up in the coming weeks.

StudyBar – the cross-browser toolbar

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Seb Skuse

The aim of the StudyBar project has been to create a toolbar which can be used in all modern browsers (FireFox, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome, Safari, Opera), which provides users with customisation options and tools to aid studying. StudyBar is an improvement upon the current Techdis Toolbar, which currently only works in Internet Explorer.

There are currently toolbars out there that offer some of the desired functionality, but as of yet there is nothing to provide everything in a concise package, let alone to any browser. To allow us to develop for multiple browsers we have opted to use the JavaScript language (which is interpreted by the browser itself, and supported by every browser – one installation package will work across the board, and even the possibility to be ported to mobile platforms at a later date) which gives us much finer control over the page than traditional toolbars.

During the prototyping phase it was discovered that most browsers have disabled JavaScript from performing page-manipulation on remote pages for security reasons (see Same Origin Policy). Because of this reason, we have opted to use GreaseMonkey, a technology that allows JavaScript to be stored on a user’s computer and used on any web page, therefore not having to deal with the Same Origin Policy.

At this stage of development we have spec’d out the technologies that will be used, and are currently working on:

Dynamic toolbar items.
Text To Speech Server based on the Festival engine.
A SpellChecker with intelligent suggestion.
Preset CSS style loading into webpages.
Increase/Decrease text size on page.
Alter colour of toolbar.

These functions will be available to any page that the user is viewing, using any of the aforementioned web browsers.

At the current stage of development, very rudimentary versions of almost all of these features are present, although slightly buggy. More features will be added as the development time passes to bring it in line, and hopefully surpass current toolbar featuresets.

AccessiBlog

Accessibility Projects at the University of Southampton

Global AutoCorrect developed by LexDis Participant

Access Tools Menu for a Mac USB Pen Drive?

Access Tools Menu Beta Testing

Update on Web2Access criteria

Browser plug-ins or add-ons can help accessibility