Elizabeth Pyatt's TLT Blog

Within a PDF or even stylized text on a Web page, an important accessibility question is whether a piece of verbage is really text or is an image of text. For accessibility, this is important for determining whether you need to worry about the ALT tag or not.

A simple text for differentiating text versus image is to move your cursor to the text (mouse or arrow keys), then selecting it (mouse or SHIFT+arrow keys). If you are able to select/highlight each character one by one, then it is text.

However, if your cursor highlights the entire text piece all at once, then you probably have an image. For a PDF based on a scanned document, that means you won't be able to select ANY text on a page, which can be inconvenient for both sighted and unsighted users.

WCAG 2.0 Note

One item from the WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines is that if you have a choice between using stylized text or an image, choose text. Not only does it make accessification for screen readers, but it reduces file size and makes the page more accessible for low vision users.

WCAG Guideline 1.4.5 - If the technologies being used can achieve the visual presentation, text is used to convey information rather than images of text except for the following

Last semester I got to teach a sociolinguistics course (connecting language and social issues) and got ro reconsider what the capstone assignment should be. The content of the course is diverse enough that the traditional assignment has been a final paper rather than an exam.

However I realized a few semesters ago that the traditional undergraduate paper has its drawbacks, the worst being that the traditional paper format is much too easy to plagiarize. The goal of an undergraduate assignment is usually in-depth research and critical review, but not necessarily creation and dissemination of new knowledge (their skills may not be ready for that yet). Maybe the traditional paper is overkill?

Project Blog Instead

To break the mold for both the students and myself, I decided that the final assignment would be for students to use the Blogs at Penn State to create a mini-informational site. The topics would be similar to a final paper, but the product would be different.

To my delight, I think the experiment worked well. The quality was about the same (and probably better in a few cases) and I really think it did filter out of lot of potential plagiarism bombs (it's not easy to use your "blog voice" and plagiarize). I also liked that the new format finally made me really think about what process students needed to follow, the timeline they needed to stick to and what the grading criteria should be.

It also allowed students a little more creativity than a traditional paper might allow (I got some great examples of African-American English in the media). As with any new process, there's room for improvement, but the process below worked overall.

Timeline and Steps

This is a new enough concept that students needed handholding and a clear timeline. This semester, I started right after Spring Break and had weekly assignments/discussions of what to do.

1. Consultations on Topics - I find this is critical for any course in which I assign papers. Students need to figure out what an appropriate project scope is and be interested in the topic.
2. Create Blog and Post Topic - This ensures that students are being introduced to the tool early on and NOT in finals week. This also commits them to the project in a way that just claiming a topic does not.
3. Post Scholarly Bibliography - I ask for three scholarly sources...to get them into the library. This is the week that I explain that Wikipedia is a start, but not a "scholarly source".
4. Post Popular Media Sources - An important aspect of most sociolinguistic issues is popular perception versus the reality of the linguistic interactions. Thus most topics are covered in popular media significantly differently than academic sources.
5. Linguistic Data Exercise - The homework includes exercises designed to showcase techniques to properly including linguistic data. This is also a good week to discuss how to avoid plagiarism.

Final Criteria

The actual Web page had to be completed during finals week and I made a few requirements.

• 5-10 unique pages (any organization of their choosing).
  I think this was really important to helping students think about their content. Even if they were to purchase a paper, they would have to read it in order to split it up.
• About page, Bibliography required

Grading was done on several criteria including these:

• Quality of bibliography
• Quality of linguistic data included (a requirement)
• Relevance to sociolinguistics
• Coherence of writing

While not all the results were perfect by any means, I did like how this evolved into a way that I could keep track of student progress. I knew who was getting into problems early on, and I got to steer a few in the right direction.

More importantly, I think students did feel a little more ownership for this kind of project than a traditional research assignment. Although there were definite research quality requirements, students did have more latitude in terms of their voice (academic vs. informal) and there are definitely more media options.

If I teach this course again, I am definitely keeping the assignment as a blog.

Sloan-C is a huge conference and I got a chance to view presentations on a number of topics. I did find a few recurring themes though.

Mobile Tech in Education

I went to several report outs on different mobile projects including one from University of Minnesota and one from Penn State World Campus. A few common themes did emerge.

1. Students still find mobile a check in and passive viewing device rather than a production device. Having had to check e-mail and take notes all week with just mobile, I would have to agree here. I am able to use mobile to take initial camera shots and jot impressionistic notes, but I end up editing them later on my laptop.

2. World Campus experimented with delivering a lot a materials such as the syllabus, flashcards, readings via Mobile, but one thing students requested was a Calendar synch function. a function much used on actual mobile users.

3. Students are happy to participate in iPad loaner projects, but resent having to return it.Unlike laptops and cameras, most mobile devices are deeply tied into a person's profile and data is hard to transfer elsewhere. One person suggested that a mobile device requirement might be better than a loaner project.
4. Students generally liked mobile, but many actually observed that games like Angry Birds were awfully distracting. I agree again, but I would ask if we can take better advantage of that feature? Can we include clicker integration, Twitter integration? In the same vein, can we design small games which can tie in to specific objectives? Flash cards are nice, but it would be nice to move beyond that also.

OER Movement

There was a lot of discussion about the implications of Open Education Resources and how we should move forward. A keynote from Cable Green suggests mandating lower prices from textbook publishers since many purchases of K-12 textbooks are subsidized by tax dollars (and even many higher ed textbooks are brought with federal loan money). I understand his point, but with a policy mandate that large, I always feel we need to review overall implications. Some laws with great intentions have had some very bad unexpected consequences.

Another issue that recurs is how to actually work with OERs. Making syllabi, lecture notes and even recorded lectures is one issue, but how do students access instructional support? A missing piece is mentoring. A few people noted that mentoring networks could be added to this puzzle, but again who trains the mentors in what the content means? Without this piece, even a learning community could feel isolated.

I think making content open is a valuable piece of the puzzle, but I hope we don't think it will replace what happens on campus. For the past 10 years, a variety of educators have predicted that the "traditional campus" will disappear, but I am more doubtful. The "traditional" environment has provided a number of social advantages not afforded in an online environment from spring dances to drinking beer with your advisor in grad school.

For better or worse, getting a Cisco certification or reading a Yale syllabus isn't the same as actually attending a 4 year college, and I think we need to remember that.I think this is where proper use of social communication tools will help, but that will be much more than just posting a syllabus in Facebook also.

You may have heard recommendations that a site in Dreamweaver is 1) more prone to being inaccessible and 2) difficulty to accessify. There are some nice accessibility benefits to using a CMS like Plone, Drupal or Movable Type. BUT if you are tied to a Dreamweaver-based environment DON'T PANIC.

Under the right conditions, a Dreamweaver site can be made to be 100% accessible...because at the end of the day its the code being created, not the tool that really counts.

Accessibility Advantages of a CMS

With a good CMS, you can get two huge advantages.

1. The templates out of the box often generate accessible code. For instance an accessible CMS includes an accessible search box and properly tags site navigation with appropriate list/header tags and often uses CSS to boot. That is a lot less work for a Web developer.
2. A good CMS also include a good WYSIWYG editor that supports accessibility in content from people who do NOT know HTML. It should be easy to insert sub headers, lists and ALT tags on images. A killer CMS will even give you good tables. That means accessibility can be accomplished without looking under the hood - yeah!

So...Why Dreamweaver?

With all the advantages listed above - why would anyone remain in Dreamweaver. One answer is the ability to customize code and CSS. A CMS can be customized, but a user has to investigate the CSS closely. Dremweaver is essentially a blank canvas.

If your scenario is one experienced Web person maintaining a relatively small set of pages, Dreamweaver can work.

The other advantage is the accessibility tools. To this day, I have not seen a better tool for generating accessible tables and forms quickly and cleanly. Dreamweaver also does a good job at CSS maintenance and other important tasks.

I'm on a lot of CMS platforms, and as crazy as it sounds to some, I use Dreamweaver to edit more complex content portions than cut and paste. Sure, I could use Notepad, but I've killed a lot of data tables that way. Dreamweaver has nice dual views that help keep track of WYSIWYG and code.

Static Site Tricks

if you are a Webmaster ready to migrate to a CMS (yet), you can manage to get some accessibility implemented with a few of these tricks.

1. Remember Global Search & Replace - Dreamweaver will let you replace one snippet of code with a more accessible one on multiple pages in one shot.
2. Consider Server Side Includes (SSI) - You can get some of the benefits of a CMS by using server side includes to insert template headers, footers and so forth on multiple pages.
3. Master your CSS - Dreamweaver will readily allow you to use CSS, but you have to follow through with it. CSS mastery is equally important if you want to tweak a CMS theme. Whenever possible, replace an inline formatting command with a link to a style sheet and you will go a long way towards a cleaner and more accessible site.
4. Use the Dreamweaver accessibility tools they gave you - Include an ALT tag when you insert an image, a caption and headers when inserting tables and all those IDs and LABELs if you are designing a form. It will never get any easier than at that time.

Why I Keep Advocating Dreamweaver

Far from being an accessibility barrier, Dreamweaver has the potential to be a powerful tool for a lot of Web developers semi-familiar with HTML but not quite comfortable with Notepad or BBEdit.

In fact, Dreamweaver is the platform of choice for the Lynda.com seminar on accessibility as well as is a platform for a WebAIM accessibility plugin. I'm glad I'm not totally alone on this one.

The content generated by the Blogs at Penn State is generally accessible, but you can adjust the CSS of your blog to enhance accessibility.

Where to adjust CSS

The CSS of any blog can be adjusted in the Templates.

1. Log in your blog at http://blogs.psu.edu.
2. Under the Design menus, select Templates.
3. Click the link for Stylesheet - Main corresponding to "styles.css".
4. The page will typically include "@import" statements. You can add additional specifications beneath these statements.
5. Click Save & Publish when you have added additional statements.

CSS for Header Tags

If you develop portfolio pages or long blog entries, you may want to include subheaders. Although the HTML Editor does allow you to increase sizes, it is not really "standards compliant."

If you are interested in generating properly nested headers, you should know that the blog title is an H1 and the title of each entry or blog page is an H2. So I've been using H3 and H4 for sub-headers within an entry. Unfortunately the CSS files for most themes do not display distinct H3/H4 at all.

/* Additional Classes Outside Theme */
.asset-body h3
{font-weight: bold;
font-size: 1.3 em}

.asset-body h4
{font-weight: bold;}

An issue I and others have been working on is figuring out how to explain accessibility. What is it? What do instructors have to do? Can it be under 15 min? No problem...

The Obvious Challenges

Obviously this is a challenge for several reasons. One is that most existing material is targeted for Webmasters. This is somewhat helpful for the instructors who have brushed up on their HTML, but not so great for those who primarily work with Word, PowerPoint (or maybe GoogleDocs and Blogs).

The other vexing problem is that accessibility implementation looks different on every tool. We can say "Use semantic headings", but in HTML that means use H1, H2, H3, while in Word and ANGEL, it means use Heading 1, Heading 2 Styles.

Same Questions, Different Paths

What I finally did realize was that though the tools were different, the issues are the same. So, the trick to figuring accessibility for any new tool is to answer a core set of questions, such as the one below.

This is accessibility boiled down to a few simple questions (which is the underlying principle of WCAG 2.0). What instructors and webmasters have to follow up with are the implementation techniques for each tool, and that is where the research complexity comes in.

For instructors though, these questions and links to some key tools may provide a route to quick answers.

One of the dreams of solving the captioning backlog is to rely on speech recognition. I do have to say that speech recognition is far more effective at time than I would have dreamed, but still my intuition has told me it's not entirely working. A fascinating article from Robert Fortner on "The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition", essentially backs up the intuition with some hard numbers. He notes that accuracy has not improved much since the early 2000s and that in most cases, the rate is not within human tolerance (humans apparently have about a 2% error rate and even that can lead to some pretty ridiculous arguments).

When Speech Recognition Works

Speech recognition can be effective in two situations

1. Specific context (airport kiosk, limited menu commands) - even here though it should be noted that it's pretty darn easy to frustrate the average health insurance voice recognition system so that they give up.
2. Specific speaker - Speech recognition is effective when trainied on a single voice, and the training time is shorter than it used to be. For captioning purposes, this means that if a single speaker makes the original audio (e.g. faculty lecture) or someone else repeats what's on the audio (the captioner), speech recognition is pretty effective.

By the way, in the recent Second Accessibility Summit, Glenda Sims noted that correcting an inaccurate transcript is more difficult than starting from scratch.

What Speech Recognition Is

To understand why speech recognitin isn't improving, you should consider the task it's trying to perform. When human ears listens to language, it hears a stream of separate words and sounds and groups those into words and sentences. The reality is that speech is a continuous sound waves with very subtle acoustic transitions for different sounds (see images below, the bottom ones are the spectograms that phoneticians use). Your ears and brain are doing a lot of processing to help you understand that that person just said.

Your brain not only breaks up sound waves, it also accounts for the acoustics of different genders, different regional accents,filtering out different types of background noise and it probably includes some "smart guessing" on what a word is as well (which doesn't always work). It's no wonder that replicating the functionailty of the mechanism is taking time.

Ingoring the Linguists

There's one factor that Robert Fortner points to - speech specialists are not always involved. As one IBM researcher claimed "Every time I fire a linguist my system improves"...but apparently there is an upper limit to this without more information. Maybe it's time to start rethinking the problem and if the programming team might need some outside experts.

In the spirit of continuing to clean my desk, my next book to review is The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. I think a lot of people at ETS are familiar with the book, but I think it's worth explaining exactly how the wisdom is generated.

The term "Wisdom of Crowds" seems to suggest a scenario where people make decisions as committees, but that's not what it really is. Rather the "wisdom" comes from being able to tap into the results of multiple individual decisions rather than relying on a single committee or expert.

A classic example is a contest to guess the weight of an ox. Individually, the guesses varied widely, but the average of the guesses was within one pound of the actual weight. It wasn't the case that the group decided the weight of the ox, but rather that the individual guesses added up to the correct answer.

I admit that I've always been a little skeptical of "collaboration" because I often equate with group think, but this kind of collective wisdom still values individual diversity. In fact, Surowiecki argues that you get the best results specifically when you can factor in individual input.

There are a lot of interesting applications to this concept in the book, but I think one of the most important is ensuring that you really ARE getting a diversity of opinion. One reason that anonymous voting is so important is that it does insure you are getting an accurate opinion from individuals and not votes partially based on social pressure.

Another situation this applies to is getting feedback from your students. I think a lot of us have experienced the eerie silence that follows the instructor's request for an answer, not to mention the awkward nods of agreement with slightly puzzled faces. Are the students agreeing with you or just trying to mirror your opinion?

One reason I like the concept of clickers is that it does enable the kind of high volume individual input needed to assess your students' actual thinking. We talk about how it can assess misconceptions (true), but sometimes it can access a wisdom you didn't know was there.

Earlier this week, I was talking about gender stereotypes in language and asking students if they could identify some stereotypes. In more than one case though, I saw some puzzled looks. I began to realize that some of my research may be getting out of date, at least in their circles.

I'm also reminded my personal guideline of multiple tabloid sources. If one tabloid claims a movie star is an alien spy, it's probably a lie. But if two more or tabloids independently have the same story...it is probably true.