Joe Humbert - Indiana University / Purdue University Indianapolis
Teleconference Technology Upgrade Possibilities
Gonzalo would like to share links. He asks: Is there a free, accessible way to share links?
Mary has used Skype , and AOL Instant Messaging . She knows those are accessible
EtherPad is another possibility, which Mary and Brian will try and test before the next teleconference.
GoogleDocs - Currently, NFB has filed a complaint with the Department of Justice alleging that Google Docs is not accessible. Here is a link from March 15, 2010 for more information. NFB vs. GoogleDocs (Link retrieved on April 7, 2011)
Another possibility is Adobe Connect starting in May, once the new version has been implemented and tested for accessibility.
Accessibility Jiras
Forums and Messaging
Questions on Jiras have been asked to the list, especially related to the Messaging and Forums tools.
A lot of the documentation that came with the patches for these tools appear to be in French.
Brian will have to do a one-to-one screenshot and do a match comparison, because none of us understand French, the language that the documentation appears to be written in.
Third Party Accessibility Certification
There has been some discussion on other e-mail lists related to third party certification.
Ian Dolphin, who could not attend the previous teleconference, has expressed serious interest in making Sakai accessible.
He said he would be willing to spend up to $50,000 for an accessibility certification.
Discovering Which Tools Are Used Most Frequently for Accessibility Testing and Certification
There is a need to determine which tools are used most frequently, in order to make the third-party certification accessibility evaluation the most efficient that it can be.
Brian met with the people who work with developers Oncourse at IU. they gave a report on which tools have content put into them and which tools actually get installed to a course site so Brian now has a sense of what tools are used at IU.
The most used tools include Melete and Portfolios.
The Accessibility WG has not really looked at either of these tools
Michigan State uses Angel, not Sakai.
There is a multi-institutional survey that goes out every year to determine which tools get used.
The Accessibility Wg could also conduct our own survey. That way, it would be easy to find out which tools each institution is using.
Gonzalo would be interested in helping create a survey on surveymonkeyy.com or some other place. Mary and Brian will work on the survey. Mike has volunteered to help compose questions for it.
Sakai 2.9 UI Updates
A nightly server rebuilt every 4 hours is available for use in testing 2.9 for accessibility.
Gonzalo has outlined what he believes are some ways to get a "snappier" portal. The link where that pertains to accessibility concerns, a walkthrough script for testing, and where to test is Sakai 2.9 Accessibility Discussion
Voiceover Issues
A student at Indiana University Bloomington tested the Chat tool using the accessibility walkthrough script.
He was not able to access the information in the action (gray) menu bar of the tool itself.
For example, if there is an unordered list with links and role marked up as menu and individual links marked as menu items, Voiceover only announced the word "menu," and he couldn't figure out how to get inside of the menu.
He has used Voiceover (VO) for 2 years. He is also rather smart, and a competent VO user.
It may be he also has habits that could prevent him from getting into the menu. He was using the arrow keys and other shortcut keys to navigate the page.
If he pressed Tab key to go through the page, he could get to the links, but he was insistent that VO would not tab through the page. he says tabbing through is a crude way to navigate.
Quite a few of the tools are marked up with the ARIA menu items, so if this is a VO/Safari issue, it could be an accessibility concern.
Safari is not listed as a supported browser in Sakai.
More VO users are needed to do Sakai testing.
If students, staff or faculty are using VO and are interested in accessibility testing, please contact the WG.
Possible solution: according to the code, if it was marked up as toolbar, it might be more meaningful.
The student tester also went to GoogleDocs, and the items marked up in GoogleDocs using menus were also inaccessible.
So VO has a problem with that particular ARIA role, and is an accessibility issue.
The student tester also downloaded the latest version of WebKit because he thought ARIA roles would be better supported. However,VO and that version of OSx were not accessible.
A group of people (including Mike Ellege) put demonstrations of a dropdown menu using ARIA. It was tested with Internet Explorer and JAWS over a year and a half ago.
The links for the dropdown menus, both accessible and inaccessible versions with videos, from Mike Elledge's group are:
These should be tested with VO and Safari to see whether they work or not.
Icon coding style used in the Wiki Tool
On the Wiki tool, the user could tell the difference between the 2 "home" links.
When he was going through the icons in that tool, VO announced the graphics for the printer and RSS icons.
The images are loaded in the background with CSS, An empty link with a title on the link itself, and CSS is loading the graphic.
The icon announcement is different for a JAWS user. Because there is no image, JAWS sees the link as an empty link so JAWS reads the title. But VO is looking at the image loaded in background by CSS.
The Reset and Help icons load a transparent icon, and they have an image element in the resulting HTML code with alt attribute. JAWS announces the child text for that link, and it also seems to work with VO.
Perhaps a best practice document can be created to show this is how you create graphic. VO was reading URL of CSS of background image.
Ray Davis is working on .jsf accessibility
Sakai preconference
Brian got approved for a four-hour preconference workshop session on how to do accessibility reviews of Sakai. He is awaiting possible approval for his other submissions.
Topics he will cover at the preconference workshop include going through the Firefox accessibility protocol, showing both accessible and inaccessible tools. He will also show Jiras that have been closed and implemented.
He is showing the most common accessibility issues first and workin on the more difficult issues toard the end of the workshop.
The purpose of this preconference workshop is to hopefully get more people to come to accessibility reviews.
Brian is open to input. He wants to make sure it's meanigful and useful.