You Are Here: IT Accessibility Committee December 2005 Newsletter
### Edited by Joel Obuchowski
MEMBERS URGED TO "ADOPT A SECTION" AT DECEMBER COMMITTEE MEETING
In preparation for several Spring presentations, we need to update portions of our Curriculum. To keep this task from becoming overwhelming for any one member of the Committee, we are asking each committee member to consider adopting a section of our Curriculum site to review and recommend updates. Please take a few minutes and look over the curriculum section http://www.nysforum.org/accessibility/resources/curriculum/index.html 
to see if there's a particular section that catches your interest. Marilyn Cordell and Betsey Miller from OFT have volunteered to review our newly redesigned "NYS Policy & Standards" section.
We will also be discussing a project that we've asked a student from SUNYA to tackle: to take a random snapshot of agency web sites prior to the joint GOER/PEF training series on Successful Web Communications. Our goal is to assess the same sites again after training has been completed to quantify any improvement.
The December committee meeting will be held on December 8, from 2:30 - 4:00 at the Forum offices, 411 State Street, Albany.
SUCCESSFUL WEB COMMUNICATIONS ENROLLMENT STILL OPEN
For NYS Executive Branch employees represented by the Public Employees Federation (PEF), or those employees who have been designated Management/Confidential, there is still time to register for one or more of the Successful Web Communications series of courses being sponsored jointly by the Governor's Office of Employee Relations (GOER) and PEF. The series consists of two tracks, one for executives, public information officers, and program managers, and a technical one for the people doing web development. These classes are free of charge for those in the target population.
The classes will be held in Albany, Rochester, and New York City. The first class is held on December 5, and the series will end in May, 2006. You'll find the more information, including class schedules and registration instructions, on the GOER web site at http://www.goer.state.ny.us/train/WebCommunications/ .
IF YOUR AGENCY HAS EMPLOYEES WORKING ON WEB DEVELOPMENT WORKING IN WESTERN OR DOWNSTATE NEW YORK, PLEASE SHARE THE URL WITH THEM AND ENCOURAGE THEM TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS OPPORTUNITY.
If you are interested in taking the classes, but do not belong to one of the covered employee groups, please contact Debi Orton at dorton@goer.state.ny.us. The committee may be able to arrange a special offering on a for-fee basis.
W3C RELEASES NEW DRAFT OF WEB CONTENT ACCESSIBILITY GUIDELINES v. 2.0
Last week, the W3C released a new working draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(WCAG) v. 2.0. This new release includes "HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0," "Appendix B WCAG 2.0 Checklist," and a lengthy document entitled "Understanding WCAG 2.0."
You can access these documents from http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-WCAG20-20051123/ .
Look for more information on this new draft in the coming weeks.
WebAIM TUTORIALS AVAILABLE
The current version of the popular "Web Accessibility In Mind" site, a.k.a. WebAIM, home page contains links to several useful tutorials. WebAIM's mission is to expand the potential of the Web for people with disabilities by providing the knowledge, technical skills, tools, organizational leadership strategies, and vision that empower organizations to make their own content accessible to people with disabilities. The tutorials available include "Links and Hypertext," "Skip Navigation," "Fonts," and "Typographical Layout."
In addition to publishing some of the content from the "WebAIM Guide to Web Accessibility Techniques and Concepts" as a preview of their full CD-ROM (available for purchase), the current home page also includes links to working with the AIS Web Accessibility toolbar for Internet Explorer, and one to working with Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. Both are extremely useful tools, and if you're unfamiliar with them, here's your chance to get a guided tour.
You'll find the WebAIM site at http://www.webaim.org .
REQUESTS FOR ASSISTANCE SENT TO VALIDATION VENDORS
The IT Accessibility Committee has sent letters to the validation vendors identified in the survey taken earlier this year, requesting assistance in setting up a script or other solution by which web developers could test their pages for compliance with New York's hybrid accessibility standard. To date, HiSoftware, the maker of AccVerify/AccMonitor and Cynthia Says, has responded, and they are interested in setting up a web-based demonstration of how their product can be customized to test for compliance with NY's standards. We have agreed on a mid-January time frame, and if there is sufficient interest, we may be able to have HiSoftware come to Albany to demonstrate their products' ability to meet State web developers' needs.
Stay tuned to this newsletter and the listserv for more news about this project in early January.
NEWS ITEMS
IBM ANNOUNCES NEW PRODUCT TO BENEFIT HEARING IMPAIRED
The Human Language Technologies team at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., has developed a product that will provide deaf or hearing impaired individuals to caption television shows and web casts on demand. The product is an outgrowth of work done for Honda, to invent an interactive speech recognition system for the carmaker.
Bill Stark, project director of the National Association of the Deaf's Captioned Media Program, says that there are 28 million Americans with hearing impairments who would like the hearing to try watching a webcast or TV show with the sound off. "You don't get a lot out of it. That's what the deaf get," Stark says. "We're talking about people being deprived of equal opportunity to learn, enjoy and appreciate."
The IBM team is researching ways to make captioning easier, cheaper and faster by automating the process using voice recognition software.
That's critical for the Web because online audiences generally aren't large enough to justify the high labor costs associated with TV captioning, which is performed by specially trained stenographers who can transcribe spoken language at a rate of 225 words a minute.
It's expensive to transcribe every webcast, especially when there is no guarantee a deaf person might want to view it, says Sara Basson, IBM's program manager for accessibility services.
"Imagine an agency has 500 hours of webcasts. Sending that off for stenographic transcription and getting it realigned with the video and so on is something that will cost between, depending on where you go, $500 to $1,000 per finished hour. That is daunting for an agency and even a corporation," she says.
The IBM research team started a project called CaptionMeNow to create a tool that would caption a webcast only when a deaf person asks for it. "When someone who is deaf or hard of hearing comes across that webcast and wants it captioned, they click a CaptionMeNow button," she says.
The video is processed through IBM's speech recognition system and automatically captioned. Because speech recognition software still isn't perfect, the transcript then could be routed to a human editor for quick fixes before posting online.
The CaptionMeNow project builds on IBM's earlier work to help a Canadian university caption lectures only when deaf and hard-of-hearing students are present in the classroom.
IBM is using the technology to caption Web lectures for company employees - and it's not only popular among the deaf.
"It turns out hearing employees are also using the technology," Kanevsky says. "We found that even hearing people sometimes prefer to read a lecture, because they can read very quickly."
Currently, CaptionMeNow integration is offered as a service, with each installation uniquely tailored for the customer's specific needs. However, technology created for people with disabilities has often migrated into the mainstream in the past.
Everyone calls their bank today using an automated-voice system that grew out of voice synthesizers developed for the blind, Basson says.
Closed captioning often is turned on for the benefit of the hearing as well as the deaf in noisy environments such as airports.
IBM is even morphing the CaptionMeNow technology to aid the hearing in a project called TransformMeNow that translates captions into different languages.
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Excerpted from a 10/25/05 article by Julie Moran Alterio, published in the Westerchester, N.Y. newspaper The Journal.
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FIREFOX 1.5 DUE
After several months of testing, the Mozilla Corp. is scheduled to release the latest version of the Firefox browser, 1.5, on Tuesday, December 6. This is the first major upgrade to Firefox since November of last year. New features include automatic update, faster back/forward page viewing, and of interest to accessibility advocate, improved support for cascading style sheets standards CSS2 and CSS3. Also supported is JavaScript 1.6.
Firefox 1.5 also sports a new tool, dubbed "Clear Private Data," that lets users remove personal data such as the browser history, saved passwords, cookies, and authenticated sessions with a single click or menu pick.
The Mac OS X edition (10.2 and later) has been improved to allow easier migration from Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Firefox has won over a significant number of Internet users, most of whom have deserted Microsoft's IE. According to Web metrics firms, Firefox owns between 8.6 and 11.5 percent of the global browser market.
INTERESTING LINKS
W3C Offers "Quality Tips for Webmasters": http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/
Online Version of the Yale Web Style Guide: http://www.webstyleguide.com/index.html
COMMITTEE REACHES OUT TO PRIVATE SECTOR
On November 16, Committee Co-chair Mike Short recently delivered a keynote talk on Usability and Accessibility for Your Web Site to the Capital Area Technology Association's monthly meeting. The presentation was well-received, and the audience had lots of questions.
As a result of this appearance, we have been invited to participate in the NYS Local Government IT Directors Association's Spring conference in May.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL!!
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If you have questions or topics you'd like to see covered in our monthly newsletter, please contact Mike Short (mbs1@cs.state.ny.us), Debi Orton (dorton@goer.state.ny.us) or Lisa Ryan (lryan@MicroKnowledge.com) to let them know.