Although the mills have been immune from most legal challenges, the issues of papers for sale without authorization from all the authors may have some teeth. According to a recent U.S.A. Today article, one judge found a company liable. Of course, the company appealed and now it is in U.S. District Court.

The paper mills are preparing for trouble ahead though. ProfEssays.com (which sells custom papers) noted that "All custom essays and term papers completed by (the) company's writers will be double-checked with the newest anti-plagiarism software." And a corporate spokesperson for schoolsucks.com comments, "We avoid all those issues because we're totally free."...except for a pesky monthly membership fee to join and access the archive.

The Art Option

Each montage uses about 12 pictures, but repeats them from multiple angles. Depending on what you enter you get some very interesting results. I first tried a "pretty" picture by entering "aurora". As expected, the montage pulled in some lovely aurora images, but it also pulled in a B-2 bomber and a pinup model (named Aurora).

Click image to open in new window.

FYI - I tried multiple aurora attempts to see if I could remove the bomber and the bombshell, but no luck. They seem to be stuck in the queue (more on that later). In fact, based on what I found on the Spock montage, I think the tool is designed to throw the most diverse set of images together that it can.

The Social Option

What's more interesting (and devilishly entertaining) is to enter a famous name (or your name) and you will see what the Internet thinks of you.

Some, like Farrah Fawcett, are eerie since her montage features her swimsuit picture as well as later pictures of her illness. You see what was lost in terms of looks, but what was gained in terms of character and dignity. Others, like Kate Jackson (the "smart" Angel) are interesting because her montage pulls up an early publicity photo which I will only describe as "saucy" and not all what I would expect from her current persona.

You can expand it further and enter things like "Wonder Woman" (some pictures are fashion fierce and others warrior fierce) or "Israel" (got a rife, a flag and a bikini)...or whatever. Needless to say, I and others have imagined some interesting applications for a media studies or woman's studies class.

I was adventurous and entered my name and got this montage.

Click image to open in new window.

The result was no photos (Yes!), but lots of images I uploaded including the svasti (the new friendlier name for the swastika in Unicode). It's a little scary because it looks very questionable out of context. The Arabic bismallah image also appears along with my Facebook network. What do these images add up to really?

The montage tool does point you to the original image, but just the image. Without the original page or blog entry, many of these images are very perplexing out of context. So the result is that the montage gives you a surface, slightly kicked up view of a topic...kind of like real life perception of casual acquaintances or a 5-minute news segment.

In one of those weird Internet search coincidences, I ran into this blog entry about the pronunciation of certain Chinese consonants. If you go to the site, something will leap out immediately - it is written in Chinese. I should state right now that I know almost zero Chinese characters, and few of my students do either. In fact, it's genuinely frustrating that I can't read the entire entry because I know I'm missing lots of key context. However....I was still able to extract some useful information and showed the students that they could too.

One helpful piece of information is that there were some diagrams showing the pronunciation of certain "letters" in pinyin along with an IPA transcription. For another, there was a bibliography listing at least one key article in English. Sweet!

Believe it or not, many of my students appeared to enjoy this little exercise. Part of it was because a lot are taking Japanese (one student could read some of the characters), but I think part might because it was a real world scenario. However, I think they also appreciated that there was some hand holding (I said that it wasn't a Chinese reading exercise, but a spot the citation/transcription exercise). I was also able to explain why you might need to do this (i.e. you are not a Chinese expert, but need some information).

So my personal teaching lesson is that I have to do a better job of translating what linguists do to a classroom context. Between working on this and talking with other instructors, I am beginning to really appreciate how much content experts "automate" their analytic skills. Unpacking it for learners can be hard (that's why I could probably use an instructional designer for a linguistics course).

However, it's definitely worth the effort. Those times when I see a spark of enlighetnment in a student's eyes are amazing.

One way use the color coding, but enhance usability for color blindness users is to bump your greens towards a blue. Blue is a good color because it typically appears blue to users with different types of red/green color blindness (the most common type of color deficiencies). So instead of a pie chart with lots of yellow slices, the color deficient users would see blue and yellow - which maintains a hue distinction.

You can see a demo below.

Red-green vs red-blue pie chart.

Same chart in protonopia color blindness filter view.

The first image shows two pie charts in which red is "Bad" and "Good" is green in the first version and a bluish cyan in the second. The next shows the charts in one of the Photoshop Color Deficient Proofing views. The red/green original becomes mustard yellow and brown while the red/cyan version has both blue and brown. Neither matches my original artistic vision, but at least the one where blue is maintained shows more of a difference.

Windows, JAWS & IE Still Rule

There wasn't an explicit question about Mac vs. PC, but when the top responses for screen readers (JAWS, 66.4% and Window Eyes, 10.4%) and browser (IE 6/7/8, 70.9%) are all Windows-only...you don't really need to. It's ironic that Internet Explorer is the most preferred browser, since it is known for its non-standard quirks and thus a major headache for Web developers. Nevertheless, it is still the standard for the screen reader community.

One visually-impaired user even considered a recommendation to use Firefox an accessibility barrier. If you need to learn a new interface by speech only, you could see that a switch to a new application is not necessarily a trivial matter.

Some Flexibility

On the other hand, there are some bright spots for the Web developers. One is that 8.9% of users use Apple's VoiceOver as their primary screen reader and 14.6% of users report commonly using VoiceOver. Apple appears to be a viable system for some users. Users are also willing to user Firefox and Safari. About 18.8% use Firefox as the primary browser and 39% report using it at least some of the time.

Other important metrics include how often the screen reader is updated and proficiency. Most users (83.6 %) have upgraded their browsers in the past year; this is important for Web developers since many accessibility code recommendations typically work only for newer screen readers. The more recent the technology/recommendation, the newer the screen reader has to be.

Proficiency is another metric, since many accommodations may require that users know to switch into different modes. For instance, JAWS contains table mode and forms mode where the special tags actually do their magic. If users don't know these modes, then a page would be considered "inaccessible" even with the technology properly implemented. Fortunately....only 4.7% of the users surveyed considered themselves beginner in screen reader usage and over half (52.6%) considered themselves expert.

On the other hand, it's not clear if the respondents are true representatives of the population. This was an opt-in online survey, so the population could be skewed towards more advanced users who are aware of the WebAIM organization or online accessibility resources. For instance, this audience is also 50% on mobile devices, which indicates a certain level of affluence and technological sophistication.

Social Media

Social media tools (Facebook, Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, etc) did fairly well. For most of the tools, over 50% of the users rated them as "somewhat accessible" or better. The two lowest scoring tools were LinkedIn (only 38.5% considered it "somewhat accessible" or better) and Facebook (58.7% consider it "somewhat accessible" or better). Compare this with Twitter which is rated 91% (with 61.9% of users rating it as "very accessible").

There are still concerns, especially if the tool is relying on Flash, but developers of social media are getting the job done, whether it be through standards compliance or through accessibility testing.

Problematic Issues

Technologies identified as being problematic included Captcha and Flash. Although Flash can be made accessible, the perception is that it probably isn't (62.2% agreed that Flash content was somewhat or very unlikely to be inaccessible). If nothing else, Adobe has a PR problem with the screen reader community (and probably a PR problem with the Web developer community as well).

Another interesting problem reported is "ambiguous link text" - that is a link whose destination is unclear out of context. The classic example are multiple "Click here" links. In principle, this is easy to solve, but lack of awareness means it's extremely prevelant...especially in a lot of content management systems which program canned link text statements. A good example of what to do can be found in Movable Type (i.e. Blogs at Penn State platform). The output generally includes distinct links including the blog title (which doubles as the permalink), tags and categories.

The last set of major problems included:

• Improper or missing image ALT Tags - A file name (e.g. Photo1356) is not a good ALT tag, but that's only option in tools like Flickr.
• Complex forms - Web forms (including login screens) can still be a major barrier unless they are properly structured.
• Unxpected screen changes - Web 2.0 tools need to announce when content changes. This can be implemented via ARIA (and Javascript) or some other technology.
• Poor Keyboard accessibility - I suspect this is going to be a bigger problem for Penn State as veterans enroll in college. Many may be having various hand mobility issues depending on their injuries.

Javascript Enabled...Sort Of

One preference Web developers will like is that only 50% now disable Javascript. Javascript can be accessible...so long as it is properly coded. On the other hand, there are still a lot of people disabling it, so you may want to use non-Javascript options for simple interactivity (e.g. non-Javascript date stamps, CSS rollovers vs Javascript rollovers).

Another good piece of news is that Skip Link technology has minimal impact. It should still be included, especially to skip the main navigational link block, but doesn't need to be implemented everywhere.

Use H tag Headers

An accessibility recommendation the community stresses is to break up content into headers (e.g. H1,H2....). In fact the survey indicates that most users (50.8%) prefer to scan though headers if the page content is long. That is, it seems like users still want a sense of overall information architecture. And don't forget the benefits of descriptive headers for your Google search ranking!

Images....Again

In terms of images, users definitely want ALT tags, even for decorative images (77.3%). So if your page has a cute cartoon lion, go ahead and describe him in the ALT tag.

A preference that may cause more of a headache are preferences for complex images (e.g. a bar graph or map). Web developers may be using the LONGDESC attribute or D link to send users to a different page, but most users (55%) actually want the description on the same page. But here, there is divergence - of the 55% mentioned, about half want the description right after the image (no link) and the other half want the description, but as an optional link. The remaining 45% either want want the link on a separate page (19.8%) or in the ALT text (19.8 %).

WebAIM says there is no clear consensus, but I do see a general preference for staying on the same page for the image description (either text or ALT tag) and not linking out (sort of like how visual users don't want to click a link to open an image in a pop-up window).

What you can do may depend on context. There are times when it makes sense to have a visible description for everyone, and others when you need to split the description for visually impaired users as a separate entity. The long ALT tag would be an ideal situation here, but JAWS may still have a 155 character limit (grrr). So....if you do have to go to a separate page for the image description, make sure you can link users back to the main text

A Positive Note

Any user of a screen reader can tell about the many problems encountered in everyday browsing, but the plurality (46.3%) feel the Web is becoming more accessible. It's slow progress, but at least it's progress.

There are some use cases listed on the site as well as the first draft of the markup, but it looks like a psychology degree would be helpful here. Interestingly, a lot of it has to do with concepts like "arousal", "friendliness", "dominance". At first glance, the values seem a little more related to body language (and inferring emotion from body language).

I can see some very legitimate uses for a markup schema like this, but I also have to confess being a little spooked. How accurate will an "automatic recognition" system be and will it hold up in court? Stay tuned, I guess.

Here is a site in my bookmark archives which I apparently liked at one point. Today, though there were some problems with the images loading so this is what I saw:

So what was this site about? If you said Underground Railroad, you should consider becoming a psychic.

Now let's show a good example from PBS where ALT Tags are implemented. Can you tell where the images used to be? I'll let you ponder that. You should however, be able to determine that you are on a site about fireworks...even without ESP. You can also see that there is a main menu to the main PBS sites including a program listing and the PBS store.

Click Image to open larger image

Below is the same site with images displayed. The main menu is now a set of images and the header includes a nifty image of a firework shell exploding with embedded links. Although there is some extra information with the images, in terms of navigation, I would say the site was very functional without them...because of the ALT tags.

Click Image to open larger image

When I was a grad student, I was introduced to the concept of a "neural network". The extremely simplstic idea is that individual neurons do one limited task and then send data to another neuron to do the next task.

I think the best example of a neural network I know is modeling color vision. For instance, you can begin with sensor neurons which detect different levels of light (e.g. detect level of red light vs detect level of green light). The sensor neurons can then send their input to another set of neurons which only have the job of this light level data into a simple calculation called "hue identification" (e.g. 100% red + 100& green = yellow), and then sends that data to another system (e.g. the general visual system then object recognition then word recognition etc).

Each neuron is fairly limited in function, but the architecture is set up to perform complicated tasks very quickly.

Getting back to Google, Severance showed a video about how a search query works. Between load balancers, data storage, querying and instant HTML publishing, a typical query can actually hit 1000 servers in less than 2 seconds. Holy You Know What!

More interestingly, Google apparently uses cheap servers. Apparently they use truck trailers worth (as in they plug in entire trucks of servers into a server farm). And apparently, they must have data centers all over the world. This apparently explains how Google mail can be efficient south of the equator when otherwise the Internet tends to slow down (at least between the hemispheres).

Severance called this "building a brain", and for once I don't think it's hype.

TechForumOct2009.v8.ppt

The second presentation will be given October 12 at the University Libraries as part of Accessibility Awareness Week. A few more concrete examples of accessibility accommodations are given.

LibraryOct12Pyatt.ppt

This is a great Flash demo that shows that while there is a relatively large amount of diversity in Africa, the home of homo sapiens (at least beneath the skin), it's much smaller in Europe and Asia. In fact, it's so small that the Asian and European circles are almost right on top of each other. That's a lot of people with a lot of common DNA!

My Testing Notes

A lot of documentation happens because I am attempting to explaining something in a way that is comprehensible to me. For instance, when I first began exploring the wonders of Unicode and Accessibility, I encountered a lot of information which told me what to do but not HOW to do it.

For instance, in accessibility, a common recommendation for rollovers is "Use stylesheets". OK, but ... could you be be more specific? Is there code out there I can borrow? Back in 2001, it was hard to find good resources, so yes I tested (a lot) and I have shared (see http://webstandards.psu.edu/accessibility/tech/rollovers).

Now if I can get stuck, I can copy and paste the code I need. This is one reason why there is so much parallel documentation out there - the "official" documentation isn't providing enough detail (or the right kind of detail).

If You Mandate...Please Provide a Path

This leads me to my next point is that I believe that if I make a recommendation, that I am obligated to point you somewhere which tells you how to accomplish this (even if the recommendation is to hire a programmer).

For instance, if I recommend using Electronic Reserves in ANGEL, I know I can point users to either http://angelkb.ais.psu.edu/article.asp?article=1325&p=2 or http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/reserves/angel.html for the how-to. Because, if I don't, who knows if the instructor will take the time to figure it out?

Unlike a video game or cruising iTunes, I'm convinced instructional tools are generally considered work tools for many instructors and not something you want to spend time "exploring." Hence I do tend to structure docs in small just-in-time pieces which are optimized for searching (if not browsing).

Build it and They Will Come

I've been involved with "growing" a number of communities, but honestly the most "action" I get from the outside world is (ahem) the Unicode information. A lot of times it's to correct a typo, but sometimes it's a request for more information (the answer of which may get incorporated into the site) or just new information. It is more collaborative than it first appears.

On a slightly higher level, building decent, comprehensible instruction does lend your site an air of trustworthiness. If you can write material people can understand, you probably know what you're talking about. As a result, I do get some interesting referrals from time to time.

Room for Improvement?

Of course there's always room for improvement. For instance I always struggle with how to connect the pieces I have scattered about. I had one person looking at the Spanish accent code page ask if I could develop one for French. Clearly the navigation wasn't working for that person...

Another struggle is to satisfy all audience needs. Some people need all the details, but others find it overwhelming. Some people need video, and others get by on reading with images. I know I skew in one direction, but is it always the right direction?

And finally, I have to confess the other reason I love documentation - I'm good at generating it. I say with this with the humility of someone whose ITS Training attendees give so-so marks for presentation but very high marks for the written documentation.

It's at times at these, that I am grateful I can point confused students to quality documentation!

If you still want more explanation - I believe that my "space" is wherever educational issues and technology issues overlap. While I don't work with EVERY issue, there are lots of possibilities including supporting services such as ANGEL or blogs, developing online courses or online multimedia projects, consulting with instructors wishing to use new technology, working with the labs and researching issues such as accessibility, copyright for new media...and of course Unicode.

The text is much more clunky than the picture I think.

Too Much Technology?

A side issue for instructional designers is whether we are technologists or pedagogical specialists. I admit that pedagogy is important, but I do believe that technology is the more marketable skill, but I don't have a problem with labelling myself as a technologist.

Tell an instructor you want to improve his pedagogy and most will glare and comment that everything has been working quite well for them and does not need to change. One in fact told me that theory was nonsense in comparison with practical experience (those who can't do real teaching teach instructors?) We all know that's not true, but the battle to convince faculty that pedagogy theory is valid is as difficult as convincing people that speaking like an Texan does not mean you are stupid.

On the other hand, if you are available to help faculty improve their teaching life and help those pesky students learn more with the magic of technology...there seems to be more interest and more openess to change. It's the technology that's changing, not their pedagogy!

So I think I am one of many instructional designers who walk a delicate line of pretending to be a techie, but really suggesting ways that you can redesign assignments...so that the tech part works more smoothly. If I during a hands-on software training sessions on iDVD for faculty, we accidentally suggest ways that a video assignment might be tailored for a class (or learning objective), then all I can say is so be it.

I will admit there is a danger though - the tech part does come with the "tech support" challenge. I would say that the more interesting parts of my job are design and consulting, not say, testing audio links in a course or answering help desk questions. There is a valid point that in that ID's have to show that they offer something different from other technology professionals, and that does happen to be pedagogy (or experience with effective technology in educational settings).

I think the difference is that I am still happy to embrace technology, but at a higher level then just creating a Web page (we know many high schoolers who can do that). After all the most exciting thing about all of this is that technology can make us question our pedagogy, and at the end of the day, it is the improvement in teaching that makes this all worth it.

Compelling Video

For many classroom video projects, the goal has been to encourage students to be creative, to develop a rich narrative or even arouse the sense or emotions. Successful projects have included hip-hop videos, mini dramas, slide shows, or readings of family memoirs.

What they have NOT been are research papers. In fact, when one instructor reported that students read content over a series of bullet points, his comment was "the content of that film was actually excellent...but it was tortuous to watch".

As a culture, we generally have the expectation that a video is going to somehow engage us beyond the mere data. Either the images/music will be dynamic, or there will be some sort of "plot" or "parody" or there will be a "story" behind the history. This can be a good goal, but it's not the goal of research.

Compelling Research

There are many types of research methodologies, but most of them actually involve placing data over emotion or plot. A NASA researcher may count ring bands in Saturn, an anthropologist may observe behavior in unusual groups (maybe even watchers of reality TV) without passing judgment or a linguist may collect data from sources ranging from epic poetry to the most obscene pieces of graffiti - again without passing literary judgment.

Boring? Maybe. Critical? Yes. Because at some point, we may draw a hypothesis (maybe) on what we think is going on. But for many researchers, I think there's always a background concept that any conclusion may be overturned at any time by new data. Maybe a satellite will get closer to Saturn, or yet another piece of ancient prose will emerge from the dirt or they will find a better way of observing TV viewers. Some findings may seem definite, but really it could be reinterpreted in the context of a new finding later on. In other words, there is really no ending - only a series of ongoing chapters.

Why the emphasis on lack of judgment? Because many disciplines know the dangers that emotion and a predetermined conclusion can lead to. Archaeology is full of stories of governments using "data" (or lack thereof) in a constant game of historic one-upmanship. Similarly, linguists know that many people have used data on language origins to reinforce old ethnic tensions. We can all tell a compelling "story", but is it the right one? Is it the one we meant to tell?

I don't know, but one thing I can say is that a lot of good research it is really bad video. Interestingly, my "favorite" pieces of research are raw data points. It may be a map of data points, a chart of numbers, or a word list pulled from a dictionary. I may have an interpretation, but really, it is beneficial if multiple researchers can examine the same data and draw their own conclusions. Not only is this bad video, but it's probably bad PowerPoint too!

Back to Video

Now that I've taken a side trip to the researcher's ivory tower, I'm going to come back to earth and say I do believe that the narrative video does have a place in the academic curriculum. As much as I may love words lists, I also know that most non-linguists find it gibberish (much as I would an astronomical table).

At some point, the scientific community has to find a way to disseminate key findings to the public, and video is a great way to do that. Thus far, most academics have left it to others to do the task of dissemination - whether it be journalists, video producers, free lance writers or Star Trek writers. Now I will say that these folks have produced some fine work, but in a lot of cases, the results seem a little dubious.

Perhaps the lesson of video is that academics need to find a way to take what they have learned and repackage it in a way that is compelling to the average educated adult, yet accurate enough to be useful. Because a better informed society just makes better decisions. On on a more personal level...although this skill might not help a researcher get the next NSF grant, it may make more NSF grants possible in the future.

And Back to Rigor in Video

Before I could press the "Submit" button, I realized that there is an ethical component to consider. There are actually are academics who have mastered this skill of presenting academic information to the public, but sometimes it can be presenting disinformation to the public. I think this is where academic rigor is important in video - it just isn't the same role as in an written thesis. Maybe responsible videos will include a written component for video projects. It works for PBS.

In Word

Some tips for creating accessible content in Word are the following:

• Use a legible font - Times New Roman is a default, but it isn't so legible. Verdana and Arial are classic sans-serif choices, but you may want to try , but if you prefer serif text, you may want to consider Palatino or Bookman Old Style. I am also a fan of Chalkboard (versus Comic Sans) and Optima.
• Use Heading 1, Heading 2 styles - In many contexts, these Word styles will correspond to H1,H2 tags in HTML. Even if your Word file is headed for Dreamweaver, using these styles may mean they convert to H1/H2 in a cut and paste operations.
• Use the list tool in Word (instead of using Option+8 to manually insert bullets). Again, the list will be recognized as UL or OL lists in other documents.

Convert to PDF

I will assume that you will take the free option and print as a PDF file in the Mac print dialogue. The result is that text will be preserved as text, but it will not be "tagged" into levels according to Adobe Acrobat.

Printing to PDF is not inaccessible, but it is not as accessible as it could be.

Adding Tags in Acrobat Professional

Now comes the finicky part.

1. Open the .pdf file you generated in Acrobat Professional 9.
2. To see if a document is "tagged", open File >> Properties. In the pop-up, there will be a Tagged PDF field at the bottom. If it's set to "No," you have to add tags.
3. Click OK to close Document Properties window.
4. Now go to Advanced >> Accessibility >> Add Tags to Document. A processing slide bar will be displayed.
5. To actually see the effects of tagging, so to Advanced >> Accessibility >> Touch Up Reading Order. You should see a pop-up window along with series of gray boxes with numbers in the upper right. The numbers indicate that the order the block will be read in.
6. To add an ALT tag to an image, make sure the Touch Up Reading Order window is active. Then select an image and right-click (or control-click) and select the option to add an ALT tag. Note: Beware of multiple images together. Apparently the PDF conversion merged them into one big image (Sigh).

There are more accessibility tools to explore including a Tag tab and the table cell editor, but I think you get the idea....

Online Content from "Non-Professionals"

One of the bigger challenges here at Penn State is that "online content" is actually being developed by instructors and students. In theory, we would like all "online course content" to be accessible, but if that were true literally then we would require that every podcast file be transcribed, every Office document & PDF file be tagged, every page generated by a content management system be accessible, and every image labeled with an ALT tag.

This can be done but it requires time and worse, some specific training. Yes, you can an ALT tag to an image in Word, but you have to know to right click and look for the "Alternative Text" field (and it only works on Window). Similarly, you can tag a PDF file, but you need to check the advanced menus in Acrobat (currently costing about $60) to make sure it is done right. This is much more difficult than clicking a "Convert to PDF" button (and more expensive as well).

The allure of the current online tools is that they are easy. Anyone can make a video, but right now only a few can make one with captions.

Mac Developer/PC User

An quasi disturbing accessibility trend I am noticing is lack of information/ability for Mac developers on how to make output accessible. Although most tools such as the JAWS screen reader assumes a Windows audience, it is a fact that many multimedia developers, particularly those for video or Flash are on a Macintosh.

This wouldn't be a problem except that the accessibility community seems to write many tutorials assuming everything is produced on Windows. The worst case is Microsoft Office which allows users to add ALT tags to images in Word or Powerpoint...but only in the Windows version. The only way an image in a Mac Word doc can get tagged is to export it to some other format, like HTML.

Many accessibility tools are also Windows only. There's an excellent Office Accessibility Wizard , but guess what...it only works on Windows. Admitedly, most users are on Windows, but again NOT everyone and possibly NOT developers who might be charged with this (because they are on a Mac). There are locations where multiple platforms are available, but not everyone's budget can support both...And in any case, it is a major inconvenience to switch between two platforms.

Debugging Flash

Perhaps one of the most serious problems facing accessibility is developing and debugging accessible Flash content. The good news about Flash is that it works across platforms. Which is why it is being incorporated into so many tools from YouTube to Adobe Connect and more. Flash video is truly the wave of the future.

The bad news is that building in accessibility is complex (you need to build in keyboard alternatives, alternative text descriptions for screen readers and check color contrast...somewhere in the application). Worst of all - it's difficult to discern if the developer has done this. Unlike straight HTML which have checkers like WebAIM WAVE and Cynthia Says, there are no tools to check Flash accessibility without doing something drastic such as disabling the Flash player or testing in JAWS.

There are lots of interesting Web 2.0 tools out there, but it's very difficult to evaluate if support for screen readers, captioning or keyboarding have been built in without checking the vendor specs or running it on JAWS. If you don't have JAWS (say, in a Mac only shop) and can't find vendor specs - you have to assume it's inaccessible. Too bad.

I may think the application is the coolest thing I have seen in a while, but can I recommend it? Sure, but somewhere in the back in my mind I'm thinking "We need a backup."

Dreamweaver Model

Although I am describing three different scenarios, they are symptoms of the same problem. At the moment accessibility is treated as a fairly arcane topic requiring lots of technical knowledge and even hacking of code.

I don't think it has to be this way. One reason I keep recommending Dreamweaver is that their accessibility tools are so easy to find and use. For instance if you drag an image into Dreamweaver, a pop-up window prompts you for an ALT tag. Once you fill in that field, you are done. There are similar prompts for forms, tables and even inserting Flash movies. I suspect that this strategy could be implemented in many more tools such as Word, Flickr or PowerPoint.

Expanding to Flash, could it possible to add more visible prompts to add alt text and keyboard alternatives? It sure would help developers understand that they should be there. The great thing about the prompts is that they recognize that accessibility should be part of the workflow, not an afterthought that only happens if a problem is reported.

Wrapping this blog post, I think my other point is that developers are an important an audience to consider. Browbeating them will only get the community so far (especially if "developers" include teenagers and busy instructors). It really is important to consider how accessibility tools can be just a little more accessible.