Tagged: accessibility

30 Days of Academia: Your Guide to Routledge in April 2011


Over the course of April, Routledge are giving free open access to all Education journals, with no academic subscription or institutional affiliation necessary and no strings attached.  The Routledge stable includes some mighty journals for those involved in Technology, Disability and Education, including Disability and Society, the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research and Studies in Higher Education. Together, these journals and their peers offer access to hundreds of pieces of groundbreaking research.

To celebrate, from Friday April 1st onwards, I will introduce and link a selection of papers that have been hugely influential in developing and challenging my thinking on disability, technology and education. This curated compilation represents a guided tour of some of Routledge’s ‘Greatest Hits’, to inform readers outside universities (in particular, techies, geeks, accessibility professionals, and others) and, I hope, help open up and apply disability theory and digital inclusion research for debate amongst new audiences. The list will also have relevance for scholars and academics in the field, and those whose universities do not currently subscribe to these journals (for example, my own institution, the University of Nottingham, does not supply access to the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, I have my associate lectureship at Sheffield Hallam to thank for this particular literature hack!).

So, over the course of April I invite you to join me as I introduce each paper. You can subscribe to the blog to receive an alert via RSS feed or email when each post goes live, or simply drop by in over the course of the month and see what my suggested bibliography has to offer. If you are considering compiling a similar list in conjunction with Routledge’s Education free-for-all, be sure to signpost below. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

W4A Web Accessibility Conference


On Monday the 7th Internation Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility begins in Raleigh, USA.  This year’s conference theme is Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?. I’m pleased to say that a paper I’ve co-written with Brian Kelly (UKOLN, University of Bath) and David Sloan (Digital Media Access Group, School of Computing, University of Dundee) has been accepted for the conference. David will be presenting the paper on Monday 26th April at 11am (4pm GMT). I’ll link to our paper ‘Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World’ as and when it becomes available following the conference.

If you’d like to follow the conference remotely, consider using micro-blogging site Twitter or Accessible Twitter, either as a registered user or bystander. I’ll be following David’s reports over the course of the W4A Web Accessibility Conference at @sloandr, as well as Brian’s during the parallel WWW conference via @briankelly.

If you’d like to know more about both Twitter and it’s role in facilitating my collaboration with Brian and David, Brian has blogged about our first virtual meeting.  

Otherwise, you may have noticed it’s been pretty quiet here at Lewthwaite Towers as I press on with my PhD and complete my ‘Exploring Disability History’ teaching at Sheffield Hallam University. The last two months have been hugely rewarding, hopefully I’ll be putting more into the public domain over the next few weeks – not least because May 1st is Blogging Against Disablism Day! If you’d like to actively take part in this great online festival, be sure to visit the brilliant Diary of a Goldfish.

British Sign Language and Accessibility


Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had a lot of hits from people looking for online learning materials to support a new term of CACDAP courses in British Sign Language (tap BSL into the search box if you’re looking for links to video resources). As a result I’ve been thinking about the BSL resources found online more generally. On Tuesday I was at AbilityNet’s ‘Accessibility 2.0: a million flower’s bloom’ conference. An early tip was Australian presenter Lisa Herrod (@ScenarioGirl), a consultant from Scenario Seven, and expert in User Experience for Deaf users. Her talk ‘Understanding Deafness: History, Language and the Web’ blew this subject wide open.

Lisa’s presentation and slides are now available via AbilityNet. A transcript will become available soon.

Lisa’s presentation was a timely reminder of the ways in which Deaf people are often overlooked in internet practice and research:

people tend to group deaf, Deaf and Hearing Impaired users into one big group of people who “just can’t hear. Most of us know someone that has diminished hearing through age or industrial damage, noise etc. But few of us understand Deafness from a cultural, linguistic perspective, i.e. from the perspective of those Deaf who use sign language as a first language and may not be fluent in English as a second language.

British Sign Language is the first language for approximately 50,000 Deaf people in the UK. This gestural language is wholly different to spoken and written English. Lisa highlighted how developments from texting through to video conferencing have had a huge and positive  impact on distance communications for the Deaf community. In this sense Web 2.0 provides powerful tools for Deaf people to come together. However, Lisa also showed how internet resources can cause problems for Sign Language users due to an over-reliance on large amounts of complicated text; text that assumes a fluent native speaker.  In short, Web 2.0 is effective for Signed collaboration, but the textual basis of content is still a problem.

So far, these observations have clear intersects with accessibility issues for foreign language speakers and people with print impairments such as dyslexia. However, a specific barrier unique to Deaf people online can come in the form of video captioning. In discussion, Lisa identified a vital distinction between captioning and subtitling. Captioning reports speech directly into text, whereas Subtitling is more interpretive and intended for quick and easy understanding.  Where a person with dyslexia might watch and listen to a video rather than read a text, with dubbed versions available to French or Chinese viewers, interpretive subtitling allows a Deaf person to understand and take in visual content.

Another powerful message from Lisa’s presentation relates to the global status of BSL more specifically.  Early in her talk Lisa refuted a common popular misconception that Deaf people across the world have the same signed language.  Spoken English and American English are nearly identical, but British Sign Language and American Sign Language (ASL) are very different. In fact, ASL has more in common with French Sign Language due to a shared linguistic ancestry stemming from the 1800s. As with the development of any language, Sign Languages have grown out of small communities and expanded simultaneously from disparate beginnings. This history forcefully underlines the difference between ASL and BSL, but what does it mean for the web?

BSL speakers are a linguistic minority online. American English is a dominant internet language, and in my experience, American Sign Language also dominate searches and resources. BSL is from the same family of languages as Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and New Zealand Sign Language, but the American orientation of internet culture made it difficult for me as a BSL beginner to find resources relevant to the UK beyond established portals and communities. In these terms, British Sign Language must be prioritised online at every level.  Other accessibility concerns may be solved or mediated with international expertise. But the national and linguistic independence of British Deaf culture means that accessible video/text and BSL materials must be prioritised in the UK.

Time for me to sign up for BSL Level 2.

Web 2.0 Accessibility


Last week I blogged about the InterFace Symposium in Southampton. As with many events, the organisers sought to enhance delegate experiences and communities using a mix of social networks and other Web 2.0 tools (a Ning social network, Micro-blogging with Twitter, online publishing with Scribd).  It can be difficult to quickly assess the accessibility of such services and make decisions as to which service is most appropriate – or at least it was until JISC TechDis and Southampton University pulled together to create Web2Access.

Web2Access is a great reference site for anyone wanting to make more informed decisions about applying web 2.0 tools in an accessible way.  The resource allows you to search for information in different ways. You can search by activity (for example, collaborative writing or ) and Web2 Access will then give you a percent score on the success of those applications in accessibility terms. So at time of writing Twitter scores an overall 88% , Accessible Twitter scores 95%, Facebook 69%, Ning 72%.  These ratings are subjecting and based on manual and automatic tests.  If you follow links for each individual service, you can discover more detailed information about how each service scores for users with different disabilities.  Alternatively you can browse by Disability or using the Search box on the website front page.   There are also useful pages describing how the sites listed have been tested, answering Frequently Asked Questions and linking to useful e-Learning resources.

If you are involved in organising teaching and learning and are wanting to make more use of Web 2.0 services in your e-learning activities, or if you are interested in how Web 2.0 can supplement your existing methods, or events in an accessible way, Web2Access provides a rule of thumb for most situations.

iPhone 3Gs Accessibility results


Images of iphone with alternative high contrast text on screen
Images of iphone with alternative high contrast text on screen

Yesterday Apple announced the next iteration of the iPhone, the 3Gs. The good news is it’s more accessible. Tim O’Brien offers a promising and comprehensive analysis of Apple’s recent developments in his article  New iPhone 3G S, More Accessibility.  This comes highly recommended.

Accessibility and Hierarchies of Impairment


Following on from yesterday’s MRL lecture, I was fortunate to talk with Prof. Dame Wendy Hall about my research and a short paper I’ve written on ‘Aversive Disablism and the Internet’, borne out of Blogging Against Disablism Day. This paper has been accepted for the 1st Symposium for Humanities and Technology Interface 2009, at the University of Southampton in July. The Symposium looks to explore many of the themes of Web Science advocated by Dame Wendy and other Soton and MIT colleagues, alongside more diverse interdisciplinary projects.

Interface requires that all delegates present either a Lightning Talk of 2 minutes, or a poster presentation.  I’ve pulled on my size 6.5 Lightning Boots, and opted for the former presentation style – and in conversation with Dame Wendy had a chance to rehearse my pitch on aversive disablism and it’s relevance for advancing debate and action on digital inclusion. Professor Hall immediately related this notion back to W3C web standards and asked my view on this – was I stating that (dis)ablism occurred at this level?  This turned the conversation to hierarchies of impairment.

Within accessibility practice (as in many other spheres) research and resources frequently prioritise certain communities and their requirements above others for a nexus of reasons.  In brief terms, hierarchical views of disability and impairment have been researched since the 1970s, but in 2003, Deal published Disabled people’s attitudes toward other impairment groups: a hierarchy of impairments (Disability & Society,18:7,897-910) to explore potential inter-group discrimination amongst disabled people.  Deal’s thorough review of the literature relating hierarchic understandings of impairment by both disabled and non-disabled people is essential reading.  Deal concludes with a call for research in this area, and notes that:

…it is important that, whilst disabled people fight a common cause in seeking equality within society and the removal of discriminatory practices, strategies for attitude change are targeted in a manner that makes them most effective. This may include focusing attention on impairment groups that face the most discrimination in society (i.e. those ranked lowest in the hierarchy of impairments), rather than viewing disabled people as a homogenous group.

Deal’s later PhD research explores the nuances of this hierarchy. His thesis Attitudes of Disabled People Toward Other Disabled People and Impairment Groups from 2006 can be found hosted at the Enham Research pages.

When relating these sociological frameworks to the internet, there is no doubt that, in pro-disabled accessibility discourse, certain groups are privileged above others. Whilst there is increasing sensitivity to this in Computer Science, with developers and researchers working to close the distance, this reasons for this divide are under-theorised within ICT discourse.

Much accessibility research focuses strongly on achieving accessibility for people with mobility, sensory and some text impairments – this is clearly important work, however, it does not represent the totality of necessary accessible practice.  For example, when Brian Kelly and others cited limits to the W3Cs Web Accessibility Initiative in their paper 2007 Accessibility 2.0: People, policies and processes they upheld Joe Clarke’s observation that the WACG development process lacked adequate provision for users with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties.  Kelly et al also cited Lisa Seeman’s formal objection to WCAG 2.0, requesting that implicit claims that the guidelines did cover cognitive disabilities be omitted from the guidelines’ abstract altogether.  I would argue that this is one example of an occassion where cognitive and learning disablities have been afforded lower status in development discourse history and suffered aversive disablist outcomes as a result.

Clearly, accessible practise contends with the grey areas of potentially conflicting subjectivities. But viewed in light of Deal’s call to arms; adopting theory and strategies emergent from disability studies in the heart of mainstream internet practice would, I feel, create stronger debate pushing foward positive outcomes for all disabled people.  Is this a matter for a ‘Disability Web Science’?

Cheap Braille for Business Cards


Update: A more recent post on this subject is available: Feel Good (Braille) for Business Cards (2011).

Due to an imminent change of name, I’m currently in the process of updating all my personal effects.  Nottingham’s School of Education supplies basic business cards to all PhD students, however, in an effort to make myself as accessible as possible, I’ve begun pursuing a braille option to increase the accessiblity of my communications arsenal.  People who read braille are in the minority amongst visually impaired people, so I will be exploring other avenues simultaneously (large print cards are an obvious first step).  But if you’ve investigated braille and always thought it out of your price range – consider AZZABAT.  The website is in the process of being updated – but in terms of supplying Braille Business Cards, their claim that they are “First for Accessible Products for the Blind and Visually Impaired” is not overstated!

AZZABAT supply transparent braille stickers that can be applied over a normal sized business card, or anything else.  As with talking labels this gives them a lot of flexibility.  This format allows one card to hold two sides of braille text (important considering the 30+ font size of standard braille, and the traditionally tiny format of the average credit-card sized business card).  Prices are also remarkably low, at 20p per unit ($0.39) with no set up fee and no apparent minimum order (as of today’s date).  Postage is extra, but reasonable.  Amazing, considering that a straw poll average of alternative printer quotes start with a one-off set up fee of around £150.00 ($300.00), too much for many individuals.

I’ve ordered two sets of 50, one set covering my name and organisation, the second disclosing my email and phone details.  This gives me not only braille business cards, but also stickers with braille contact details that can be applied to academic posters, or anything else, without concealing printed text.