IT Accessibility Committee April 2005 Newsletter

PROGRAM NOTES - PAST AND FUTURE

On April 1, Jason Gleman from the Department of Civil Service (and a member of the IT Accessibility Committee) presented an excellent session on CSS at the monthly meeting of the Forum's Webmasters' Guild. Jason's presentation is loaded on the Forum's site at: http://www.nysfirm.org/documents/html/wmg/css-4-1-05/index.html. In addition to showing how several page development problems can be solved with CSS, Jason's presentation contains extensive links to valuable CSS resources.

On April 12, from 1:00 - 4:00 p.m., the first of what we hope will be several Accessibility Clinics will be held in the OFT Training Academy - special thanks to OFT for their commitment to this effort and all their assistance in making it happen. This first session will focus on creating accessible forms using CSS, and will be led by Mike Short. Jeff Bennett from OFT, a skilled JAWS user, will also be available for those of you who want to know what your forms sound like to a visitor using a screen reading program. This session filled up within a week of being announced, and there is a waiting list.

We're looking for topics for future sessions. If you have any ideas, or any particular areas that are troublesome for you, please contact Debi Orton (dorton@goer.state.ny.us) or Mike Short (mbs1@cs.state.ny.us).

On May 6 from 9:00 - 12:00 p.m., representatives from OFT will be addressing the Webmasters' Guild on several issues of particular interest to web designers, and we'll hear from a New York-based, veteran-owned NYS company, Intercon, Inc., about their AccessibleFormNet product. This product is in wide use by the GSA.

The first half of this session will be a presentation on NYS Technology Policy P04-002 and NYS Mandatory Technology Standard S04-001, Accessibility of State Agency Web-based Intranet and Internet Information and Applications. Patrick DeCastro and Marilyn Cordell will provide an overview on both the policy and the standards, and members of the IT Accessibility Committee will be on hand to help with advice on implementation issues. The NEW State Banner, which was released this week, will also be on the agenda.

In the second half of the program, Joe Ingrato from Intercon Associates http://www.interconweb.com/ (External Link) will demonstrate AccessibleFormNet. From the promotional material, this product "*can save filled forms, just the user's data (saved in XML format for maximum portability), or both. Accessible FormNet exceeds 508 Legislation requirements." For those of you wrestling with the conflict between the convenience of PDF forms and the accessibility requirements of your audience, this should be an informative presentation.

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OTHER NEWS

The Committee web site at http://www.nysfirm.org/committees/access/resources/5-13-04/ has recently been updated. We're always looking for suggestions on improving this resource, so if there's something in particular you find useful (or NOT useful), please let us know.

The April IT Accessibility Committee Meeting will be held on Thursday, April 14 from 2:30 - 4:00 at the Forum offices, 411 State Street, in Albany. Among the topics on the agenda will be a review of the NYS policy support section of the Committee web site, discussion of ideas for a regular Committee e-mail newsletter, our site redesign contest to disprove the conception that "accessible = boring," and a review of the April 12 Accessibility Clinic and planning for future Clinics.

For more information about the projects the Committee is working on, as well as what happened at our last meeting, visit http://www.nysfirm.org/committees/access/meetingsummary/March2005-Access-Minutes.htm.

ALSO ... The Office for Technology has released a new accessible web banner for agencies to use on their home pages. You can find more information about the banner and implementation instructions at http://www.oft.state.ny.us/ecommerce/banner/policy.htm (External Link)

WEB PAGES OF INTEREST

Accessible HTML from PowerPoint Presentations - This is an excellent article from the WebAim site, which includes a download link and installation notes on a tool to create HTML from PowerPoint presentations: http://www.webaim.org/techniques/powerpoint/ (External Link)

PDF-to-Text Conversion Tool - Lynne Lundh from SUNY Orange has "*found a tool that was able to handle it [PDF-to-text conversion] very well, so I wanted to share it with you. The website is http://www.pdfutility.com/ (External Link), and it is the new utility at the top of the screen: PDF Text converter. In case anybody else contacts you, this seems to be a good one." We thank Lynne for sharing the tip.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or recommendations, please contact one of the Committee co-chairs, Debi Orton (dorton@goer.state.ny.us) or Mike Short (mbs1@cs.state.ny.us).

NOTE: Many of you indicated in our Web Developer Survey that you wanted to receive news on accessibility topics via an e-mail newsletter. Providing this news to you in a short, newsletter-style format is a pilot offering along those lines. We'd appreciate your feedback so that we know if you find this information worthwhile, and would also appreciate any ideas you have on future topics that might lend themselves to newsletter format.