IT Accessibility Committee September 2007 Newsletter

### Edited by Joel Obuchowski

NEXT COMMITTEE MEETING

Thursday, September 13
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 later this month, and the AT Expo next May.

We will also be welcoming representatives from HiSoftware, the vendor selected to provide a NYS-specific validation tool, to our September meeting. They have agreed to come and provide a overview of what we can expect over the next few months as the NYS Validation Tool takes shape. If you're interested in the validation tool, we strongly encourage you to attend our September meeting to hear all about it.

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.

FEATURE ARTICLE

NEWS

WGBH Receives $600,000 Grant to Develop Solutions for Captioning Handheld Media for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Citizens

August 28, 2007

WGBH has received a $600,000 grant from the Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (http://www.ed.gov), to support its groundbreaking efforts to make handheld media accessible for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, President Henry Becton Jr. announced today.

Titled "Captioning Solutions for Handheld Media and Mobile Devices" (award number H133G070122), the grant provides WGBH's Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) with $600,000 over three years to research and develop technical solutions for delivering captioned content to iPods, cell phones, PDAs and other mobile devices.

"From TV programs to school science experiments to corporate training presentations, more and more video content is being delivered through handheld media," said Larry Goldberg, Director of Media Access for WGBH. "Yet the 28 million Americans who are deaf and hard of hearing can't fully benefit from this content because it lacks captions."

Currently, Goldberg said, none of the existing technologies for producing and distributing content via mobile devices possesses the technical requirements needed to transmit captions. In addition, the few video-enabled handheld devices that have the technical capability to receive captioned content don't offer any controls that would enable deaf or hard of hearing users to access those captions.

Through the grant, WGBH will research ways of embedding captioning solutions within handheld devices and develop prototypes that will serve as proof-of-concept models for the mobile technology industry and public policymakers. WGBH also will explore and develop strategies for captioning media that is streamed directly to mobile devices via wireless networks, multi-channel DTV distribution or downloaded to desktop computers and then transferred to mobile devices.

Technology partners that will provide development platforms for WGBH's research include AOL®, Hewlett-Packard Company, the Open Media Network and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Content partners MacNeil/Lehrer Productions (producer of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) and Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, will join WGBH in providing a range of video content to be viewed on project prototypes during user testing by people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

WGBH made history in the 1970s when it invented captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing TV viewers. It later pioneered Descriptive Video Service® (DVS®),which provides blind and visually impaired viewers with an audio narration of a program's visual elements, before developing MoPix®, its patented system that provides captions and descriptive video for feature films. More than 300 theaters in the U.S. and Canada now offer the MoPix technology, enabling patrons with disabilities to enjoy first-run feature films at the same time as their sighted and/or hearing family and friends.

This year, WGBH marked the 35th anniversary of the first-ever captioned television broadcast: an episode of WGBH's beloved cooking series, The French Chef with Julia Child.

"As content continues to migrate from TV to the Web and now to mobile devices," Goldberg said, "it's gratifying for WGBH to receive funding that will support our continuing efforts to make all media accessible to people with disabilities."

RECENT NEWS

From WebAIM:
Steppingstones Project on Web Accessibility and Cognitive Disabilities in Education

WebAIM, through its partnership with the National Center on Disability and Access to Education, has received funding to help web developers consider issues of cognitive disability in their designs. The Phase I Steppingstones of Technology Innovation grant, awarded by the US Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), is a two-year development grant with a focus on producing a tool intended to help Web developers create web content that can more readily be used by those with cognitive and learning disabilities. If the tool has the expected impact, it could assist in improved outcomes for students with disabilities in education.

WebAIM will focus efforts on developing a set of evaluation rules and algorithms to be added to the popular WAVE evaluation tools (see http://dev.wave.webaim.org). The intent of the new functionality is to provide developers with feedback on how their web page designs might impact users with cognitive or learning disabilities. A Steppingstones Phase II proposal to test the broad impact of the tool use will be submitted at the end of this development phase. The project includes a partner, Adobe, and an active Advisory Board comprised of individuals with expertise in web accessibility, cognitive and learning disabilities, education technology, K-12 systems, and individuals and parents who have children with cognitive and learning disabilities.

For more information, see http://www.webaim.org/projects/steppingstones.php

RESOURCES

Free validation tool for Firefox

Many web developers have come to rely on Firefox for its arsenal of "extensions", especially the free web development tools. One of the most useful tools is the HTML Validator, a little package that resides on the right-hand status bar and lets you know how many validation errors and warnings can be found on the page being displayed in the browser. The HTML Validator comes in two flavors, HTML Tidy, and one that uses the W3C's DTD rules. You can find more information about the HTML Validator at http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/new_install.html.