You Are Here: IT Accessibility Committee July/August 2007 Newsletter
### Edited by Joel Obuchowski
NEXT COMMITTEE MEETING
- Thursday, September 14
- Forum Office, 411 State Street
- 2:30pm - 4:00pm
The main focus of this meeting will be to catch up on all the Committee's activities since the June meeting, the progress of the NYS Validation Tool, and to discuss plans for the GTC event and the AT Expo next May. We look forward to another high-energy cycle of Committee work in the coming year, and would like to invite all of you to participate. Come and help us make a difference!
UPCOMING EVENTS
Forum Annual Meeting
The Forum's Annual Meeting will take place on September 14, beginning at 10:30 a.m. at the Desmond Hotel and Conference Center on Shaker Road. As part of this event, the coveted "Best of the Web" award is given to one State organization and one local organization. The entries are required to conform to the State's accessibility policy and standards, and validation for compliance is once again being done by the Forum's IT Accessibility Committee.
Committee Working on Webcasting Session at GTC
On September 25, the Office for Technology, the Office of General Services, NY Network, WGBH/NCAM, and the Forum's IT Accessibility Committee will sponsor -- and webcast -- a session on New York's experience after a few months of webcasting public meetings. The session will run from 10:30 until 12:00 noon. We will also be taking questions e-mailed to us from audience members. The e-mail address to be used will be provided at the start of the meeting.
Julie Leeper Evans will update attendees on upcoming policy and reporting requirements, a representative from OGS will help us identify resources and facilities that can be used for webcasting, Sara Hill from the NY Network will provide some lessons learned on webcasting, and Jennifer Sagalyn from WGBH will be on hand to discuss captioning options. Finally, we will host a panel discussion including several agencies who have been on the front lines of webcasting. As mentioned earlier, this session will be webcast for those who cannot attend the event in person.
We will be sending out more information about this event as the date nears.
NEWS
Forum Annual Meeting
The Forum's Annual Meeting will take place on September 14, beginning at 10:30 a.m. at the Desmond Hotel and Conference Center on Shaker Road. As part of this event, the coveted "Best of the Web" award is given to one State organization and one local organization. The entries are required to conform to the State's accessibility policy and standards, and validation for compliance is once again being done by the Forum's IT Accessibility Committee.
Contract Expected Soon in Validation Tool Procurement
Contract negotiations between the Forum and the selected bidder for the New York State Standards Validation Tool are underway. A signed contract is expected by the end of August. Development work on the tool will begin immediately after.
The vendor has met with representatives of the IT Accessibility Committee and the Webmasters' Guild to discuss the project management approach to be applied.
More details will be available next month.
MAGpie Training A Success
On August 14, the Forum sponsored two half-day sessions in the use of MAGpie, a free captioning tool developed by the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), an affiliated organization of WGBH, Boston's public broadcasting corporation. Geoff Freed from NCAM was the instructor and made people feel at ease with the package. Many participants were surprised to find how easy it was to use. The Office for Technology made their Technology Academy available for the training, and 26 people went through the 3-hour class.
If your agency would like to start captioning their own webcasts and video files, contact Debi Orton (dorton@goer.state.ny.us) for information.
RESOURCES
Accessible Survey Tool
After nearly a year of searching, an accessible online survey tool has been discovered (see feature article for background). That tool is SurveyGizmo, and you can find more information on the web site http://www.surveygizmo.com. The tool also allows you to create surveys that can be accessed via the Blackberry's web browser. OFT has purchased an Enterprise license for this product and we are investigating ways in which other agencies can take advantage of this license to create their own surveys.
New W3C Markup Validator Unveiled
W3C Markup Validator2007-08-08: W3C's most popular service just got better, prettier, faster, and smarter. The W3C Markup Validator (http://validator.w3.org) has a new user interface and a validation engine with improved accuracy and performance. Among new features are an automatic cleanup option using HTML Tidy, and checking of HTML fragments. Driven by W3C as an open-source software project, the markup validator is made by Web professionals for Web professionals, and aims to be a major step in any Web development quality process. Read the change log ( http://validator.w3.org/whatsnew.html) for a list of all changes and new features.
FEATURE ARTICLE
WORKING WITH VENDORS...IT WORKS!
by Debi Orton
Many of us on the NYS Forum's IT Accessibility Committee field questions from agencies and vendors asking, "Is it accessible?" Unfortunately, that answer is rarely a simple "yes" or "no." Like the difference between red and blue - all the shades of purple in between - there is a lot of room between accessible and inaccessible.
This summer, I had several queries from an agency looking for an accessible online survey tool. Out of all the survey tool providers out there, they were able to find only one who seemed to "get it," that is, who knew what was required to make something accessible.
The agency in question set up two sample surveys using this tool and asked us to evaluate them from an accessibility standpoint. Both failed the normal tests - the W3C HTML Validator, Cynthia Says for both Section 508 and WCAG 1.0. At the agency's request, we contacted the vendor of the tool in question and pointed out the shortcomings. It was a Friday in late July, so we had low expectations that we would be able to get any resolution to the issue.
In the past, when we have tried to explain problems to vendors, the likely response was a polite brush-off. But lately, things have been changing. In the example cited above, the vendor was most interested to not only hear about the problems, but to solicit our suggestions for how they might fix them. This time, the vendor brought the design team in over the weekend to remediate the templates used to generate the surveys, and the result on the following Monday was a survey that was accessible to a person using a screen reading software package.
Yesterday, a vendor e-mailed a pitch to develop a solution for all of our Executive Order #3 needs. (For those of you not in State government, this refers to Governor Spitzer's push to have all public meetings webcast in an accessible format.) I took a look at the solution, and it did not look like anything else I'd seen. The screen was divided in half, with a small video window on the left half and a text box on the right with the audio portion of the program scrolling as one large blob of text with a light yellow highlighting on the current block of text.
We asked one of the Committee members with a hearing impairment to take a look at it, and he wrote up a thorough evaluation, which, with his permission, we forwarded to the vendor. The vendor wrote back, "Thank you...I appreciate your forwarding this on to your friend for evaluation and the feedback. I will pass this on to our team, as we continue to evaluate and make changes to the 'closed captioning' portion of our services and implement new processes. This is invaluable feedback!"
This particular vendor did not make any promises to repair the problems, and one observer said that the response sounded like "canned" language. However, the vendor may begin to think about captioning a little more carefully, and that's a good start.