About Accessibility

Archive for the ‘Accessibility’ Category

Microsoft Office 2010 continues our dedication to making Microsoft Office products more available to people with disabilities, as well as helping all users create more accessible content. In addition to many features that you might be familiar with, Office 2010 includes several new and updated accessibility features.

Accessibility Checker Word 2010, Excel 2010, and PowerPoint 2010 include an Accessibility Checker that helps users create more accessible content. By identifying areas that might be challenging for users with disabilities to view or use, and providing a task pane to review those areas, users can fix potential problems with their content.

Backstage view Actions previously found on the File menu or Microsoft Office button, such as Print and Save, can now be found in the Microsoft Office Backstage view. By presenting commands more logically and providing more detail, users will have more context and information about the commands they use.

Hear text read aloud with Mini Translator At times you may receive email messages or documents that contain words in unfamiliar languages. With the Microsoft Office 2010 Mini Translator, you can point to a word or selected phrase with your mouse and the translation displays in a small window. The Mini Translator also includes a Play button so you can hear an audio pronunciation of the word or phrase, and a Copy button so you can paste the translation into another document.

Add alternative text descriptions to shapes, pictures, tables, and graphics You can now add a description to tables, PivotTables, images, shapes, and other objects, similar to a second level of alternative (ALT) text. This helps authors describe complex content to readers who cannot see those objects.

Use Full Screen Reading view Word 2010 includes a Full Screen Reading view that improves the resolution and display of text for reading on the screen.

Use the keyboard to work with ribbon programs The menus and toolbars in all Office 2010 programs have been replaced with the ribbon. To move through the ribbon with a keyboard instead of a mouse, you can press CTRL+RIGHT ARROW or CTRL+LEFT ARROW on a ribbon tab to move to the next or previous ribbon group tab.

Create accessible web portals SharePoint Designer 2010 includes a built-in compatibility checker for common accessibility standards to help make sure web sites are easy to use for everyone. “More Accessible Mode” in SharePoint Services provides greater accessibility for custom controls.

Source: Microsoft

Google’s wonder wheel is a flash product that hit the market in 2009. This is a good SEO tool and helps in building keywords. However, when checked for accessibility it showed some drawbacks.

Google wonder wheel showing accessibility search resuts

Get the wonder wheel

Google wonder wheel location

The wonder wheel can be found using the steps mentioned below.

• Go to Google’s homepage and type what you are looking for. The search will return results that can be viewed in a number of different presentations – visual forms.

• The left side of the page has a lot of options.

• Click the one that says wonder wheels.
• Sometimes, these options do not show. In such cases, click the More button found on the left hand side.

•When you click the wonder wheel option on the left side of the page the search results are returned in the form of a wheel that has your search query as the center and the important results as out going links.

The wonder wheels are good visual search options and are being tested by Google at the moment. The sphere keeps on building links to other spheres as you keep going deep into your search. Thus, moving forward with your search it very easy.

Accessibility and wonder wheel

When the WAVE toolbar was used to judge the accessibility of the wonder wheel it did not prove to be promising.

The structure – order section of the toolbar was used. The results showed incorrect tab – ability in the flash wonder wheel. In addition, there is no tab-ability in the wonder wheel i.e. there is no cursor movement between the center sphere and the spokes of the sphere.

Moreover, when JavaScript is disabled the wonder wheel disappears from the screen. However, the good point is there exists a <NOSCRIPT> element for the java disabled browsers.

All browsers cleared the test, except for IE8.

The wonder wheel is the Flash product. The flash products are said to be inaccessible. However, work is being done to achieve high level of accessibility as compared to HTML pages. Flash players are required to be included to view flash files on a web page.

There is no back button functionality if you are using a keyboard i.e. backspace button (Pc’s) and delete button (Mac’s). If you are using a mouse, clicking on the back button works fine.

However good the product is it lacks somewhere in the accessibility test.

Accessibility Questions

Questions about accessibility testing, standards and best methodologies are still in the air as more and more people are getting to know about accessibility and its related discussion topics. The simplest of these questions could be the art of testing for accessibility. But, how do we test accessibility? Who does it? What tools are required and in the end are the results optimal?

An eye witnessed so called accessibility test was carried out in a manner neither you nor I would approve. I knew a guy in my university called Joe. He was visually impaired and thus used a lot of assistive technologies to help him navigate the web world. Due to his immense dedication and urge of learning how to make his own way out, he was always experimenting with the new inventions that came up day after day to assist people facing problems similar to his. He managed to have a known arena of his own where he had the best known practices at his service to make him competent with the outside world. His was a struggle that he thought was over. People new or old to the concept of accessibility, were always seeking his advice and awaiting his knowledgeable suggestions to move ahead in their tasks in the related matter. He was a guru – who talked about accessibility and made aware a lot of unknown hidden facts that were not known to the workers dealing directly or in-directly with accessibility in that university.

One of the most common ways to test documents and web pages was using the results of the tests carried out by him. He was always given a preference when it came to talk about the issues that kept popping up with any person that has accessibility issues. It soon became a dictatorship as far as the testing for accessible content was taken into account.

However, no one realized the he uses the assistive technology as he is visually impaired and cannot perceive the

Accessible Web surfer

actual document. What he visions in his thoughts is just what the technology produces as an output. He least understood that the technology could be producing a document that is not similar to the original one, when one sees it. Thus what went wrong in his case was the blind faith that any assistance that he uses to read through his documents and web pages were creating and translating a page 100 percent correctly and thus he had a true translation of the original content.

The actual assessment of the documents, were never fully managed and obtained. The illusion that Joe was doing a perfect job was questioned by a number of people working with the accessibility departments. However, it was a little difficult to make people understand the disadvantages of these testing experiments that were conducted and implemented. It was such an obvious fact that a person who requires assistance for his navigation of web pages can tell people who have sound senses about the errors that the web page might have, though they forgot that they have a better command over their senses.

Accessibility assessment is a huge task and you are responsible for what people hear and interpret. This translation from the visual content to the audible mode has to be precise, as it would involve educational institutions that are using these technologies available to support their distinguished users. Thus, accessibility testing can never be complete and at this point of time is never 100 percent. But we have to strive hard to achieve the highest amount possible with the limitations and advances that we have today.