IT Accessibility Review

Volume 1, Number 9

Breaking News

Teleworking Increases across Government

By Daniel Pulliam dpulliam@govexec.com

The number of federal employees working away from the office grew by 37 percent in 2004, continuing an upward trend in telework, according to a new report from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

The report, called "The Status of Telework in the Federal Government," stated that 140,694 federal employees teleworked in 2004, up from 102,921 in fiscal 2003. In fiscal 2002, there were 90,010 teleworkers and in fiscal 2001 -- the first year agencies were surveyed - the total was 72,844.

OPM changed the reporting period to reflect status at the close of the calendar, rather than fiscal year, meaning that agencies had more than a year to boost their telework numbers between the 2003 and 2004 surveys.

Of the 1.8 million employees included in the latest survey, 752,337 were deemed eligible for telework by their agencies in 2004. Of those, nearly 19 percent -- or 140,694 - took advantage of the arrangement. About 14 percent of eligible employees worked away from the office in fiscal 2003.

Language included in the fiscal 2001 Transportation-Treasury Appropriations Act allows agencies to decide which employees can telework "without diminishing . . . performance."

OPM sent the 2004 survey to 86 agencies and 82 responded. Ten agencies reported telework statistics for the first time in this survey. Twelve of the agencies responding did not have telework policies in place and 43 had specified occupations eligible for telework. Thirteen reported that their executives were ineligible for telework.

About a quarter, or 20, of the agencies responding said they purchased equipment for their teleworkers, and 35 expected employees to purchase their own equipment. Thirty-six agencies allowed teleworkers to bring their equipment into the office for repairs.

A 60-day trial period at the Washington Metropolitan Telework Centers resulted in 35 new employees working from remote sites. Twenty-four of those employees continued to use the centers after the trial period ended, according to the survey.

But agencies´ overall use of the centers, which are furnished with computers, high-speed Internet access, phone service, printers, faxes, copiers, conference rooms and break areas, decreased. In 2003, 435 workers used the centers, but in 2004 that number fell to 386, resulting in a $51,219 drop in collected fees.

Agencies told OPM that office scheduling conflicts were the largest barrier to the successful implementation of telework in 2004. That was followed by the nature of the agency´s work. Data security issues ranked as the third-most common barrier.

A handful of agencies are under financial pressure from Congress to step up telework efforts. Language in the fiscal 2006 State-Justice-Commerce appropriations bill (H.R. 2862), signed by President Bush on Nov. 22, requires five agencies to increase the number of employees who work away from the office, or lose out on $5 million each.

The agencies included in the legislation are the departments of Commerce, Justice, and State, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Small Business Administration. These five agencies survived similar scrutiny last year.

At the Commerce Department, 38.9 percent of employees deemed eligible for teleworking in 2004 actually worked away from the office, as opposed to 38.7 percent in 2003. The Justice Department experienced a more dramatic jump, going from 4.4 percent of eligible employees teleworking in 2003 to 40.3 percent in 2004.

About 82 percent of those allowed to telework at the State Department did so in 2004, compared with 1.5 percent in 2003.

Both the SEC and SBA showed a minimal number of teleworking employees in OPM´s 2004 survey. At the SEC, six out of 648 eligible employees took advantage of the arrangement. Only two of 328 employees eligible at SBA worked away from the office.

Percentages of eligible employees working away from the office did increase at both, however, rising from 9.5 to 16.7 percent at SEC and from 8.6 to 9.9 percent at SBA.

Because NASA and the National Science Foundation are now under the jurisdiction of the appropriations subcommittee that handles the State-Commerce-Justice spending bill, they also will be required to certify that teleworking opportunities are available to all eligible workers. But they do not have to show an increase because they were not subject to last year´s requirements.

Side by Side, 508 to WCAG 2.0

By Jim Thatcher

View Jim Thatcher´s side by side comparison of Section 508 Web Accessibility Standards to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0).

Somatic Digital Announces TUI-Enabled Podcasting Development

Publishers can now connect podcasts directly to their printed materials to enable audio supplements to their paper and ink products that can be continuously updated.

Somatic Digital, a developer of the innovative technology-based publishing product known as the Touch User Interface (TUI) announced the enhancement of its Publisher´s Development Kit (PDK) to enable podcasts.

The ability for a publisher to connect a paper-and-ink product directly to a podcast is now a feature available through the enhancement of the BookDesigner software suite. As a result of this development, a publisher can now tie a podcast to a paper-based text, supplement, or magazine. The reader can touch the page and a podcast can be directed to the reader´s computer, and through syncing, to the MP3 player.

This development means a publisher can enable the digital content directly connected to its printed product with the TUI technology to be continuously updated. The podcast can serve as a supplement to the paper-based product affording new revenue opportunities to publishers and authors.

David A Krauth, VP, Product Development, states, "This functionality is easily implemented during the publisher´s design process. All the publisher with a podcast has to do is select this new function with the BookDesigner software during the product development process. It is seamless and easy to implement."

Because of the inclusive nature of the TUI, it is ideal for not only providing regular education students with a multi-modal learning environment, but it will also provide many special needs students with a customizable learning environment that meets the needs outlined in their individualized education plans (IEP). TUI-based books immediately meet the requirements outlined in the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) and the inclusive learning requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and Section 504.

"This seamless enhancement enables a publisher to continually offer a podcast update to the purchaser of a printed product. This continual delivery ability means the publisher can maintain a relationship with the purchaser after the initial sale of the book, supplement, or magazine. This opens up new revenue opportunities while getting and keeping the publisher in the delivery of digital products to customers," states Jason E. Barkeloo, the Founder and President of Somatic Digital.

About Somatic Digital
Somatic Digital, LLC is a developer of the Touch User Interface (TUI) technology. The TUI technology connects paper directly to digital content that can reside on optical media, the Internet, or hard-drives. It enables a bridge over the digital divide because it eliminates barriers that previously prevented people from connecting to digital content. With the press of a finger, stylus or pointer, a physically, visually, or hearing impaired student can gain access to digital content.

Somatic Digital first creates and distributes the tools that easily enable authors and publishers to develop printed materials connecting readers to digital content at the touch of pages in a book. The publisher can easily implement the TUI-based product development process into their existing business systems. The Company´s publisher development kit (PDK) allows for easy and rapid development of TUI-based materials that can be used by all individuals regardless of learning style, special needs or socioeconomic status. Once the publisher has designed TUI based products, Somatic Digital manufactures and helps the publisher integrate the TUI hardware into the production process.

The TUI technology enables publishers to not only create new hybrid products that directly connect to digital content through the paper; it also enables them to inclusively connect the special needs populations, including Braille and auditory content for the blind, sub-captions and ASL for the hearing impaired, and a pointer for those with motor impairments. The multi-modal delivery system can help a publisher provide a National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS), Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, No Child Left Behind Act, and Section 504 solution at the time of product deployment.

For more information, please visit the Somatic Digital´s web site at www.SomaticDigital.com

Contact:
Somatic Digital, LLC
513.225.8765
Email: info@somaticdigital.com

Source: Somatic Digital, LLC

CORDA Technologies Issued Patent on Descriptive Text of Dynamic Charts, Graphs and Maps

CORDA Technologies, Inc. announced it has been issued a patent regarding a method for dynamically generating a textual description of online charts and graphs, enabling the visually impaired to have access to information contained within charts, graphs and maps generated with Corda´s software tools.

"This patent is of particular value to Corda, especially as it relates to the government and socially responsible companies in the public sector," said Neal Williams, CEO of Corda Technologies. "We are the first company to develop the capability of creating automated textual descriptions of charts and graphs. This feature is important for the visually impaired -- it enables them to have the same access to information in charts and graphs as a person with full sight would have by simply glancing at a chart."

The descriptive text enables government agencies to comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires that Federal agencies´ electronic and information technology be accessible to people with disabilities. Descriptive text is automatically attached to each graph so that a visually impaired individual can understand the contents of the graph through the use of a screen reader.

The descriptive text feature is an inherent component of Corda´s award-winning developer tools, PopChart, OptiMap and Highwire. Not only does this feature describe the data, it also provides the same interactive ability and annotations that sighted users would see viewing the graph. For example, visually impaired users can navigate from one text-description to another using drill-down links. Navigation through large amounts of data is simple, fast and convenient.

Patent No. 6,972,763 was invented by Troy Millett, of Lindon, Derrick Shadel, of South Jordan, and Mardell Cheney, of Highland, assigned to Corda Technologies, Inc., of Lindon, Utah.

Information about interactive data visualization and examples of the descriptive text may be found at http://tomcat.corda.com/BCancer/incidence.html and http://tomcat.corda.com/AutoData/AutoData.jsp

For more information regarding Corda, its customers, awards and partners, please visit http://www.corda.com or call (801) 805-9400.

Source: CORDA Technologies, Inc.
Web Site: http://www.corda.com

10 Reasons Clients Don´t Care About Accessibility

By Christian Heilmann

Working as an accessibility consultant in an IT company is a very frustrating job right now. Highly publicized lawsuits and deep-rooted accessibility myths leave us with a lot to explain when the final product does not really help visitors. Our clients simply don´t care about accessibility as much as we´d like them to, and there are several reasons for that.

Reason 1: It´s the Law but There´s None to Follow
Since February 2002, it has been a legal requirement for organizations to make reasonable adjustments to ensure their sites are accessible. The Disability Rights Commission of Great Britain (DRC) issued a revised code of practice for Part 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995, which covers goods, facilities and services. The code of practice explicitly included Web sites under Part 3 of the DDA and includes both those that provide services and goods for free and for payment.

Clients want to hear success stories from market leaders before they spend money. Unfortunately, pointing out that Amazon.com does not have a 450KB rotating logo splash page will not convince inexperienced clients that it´s a bad idea.

Our clients heard that and wondered how to make "reasonable adjustments." They turned to us for guidance, asking about standards and certifications.

But it´s hard to find standards for accessibility. Guidelines are easy to come by, but they´re outdated, not always logical or practical and are written for a world in which user agents (such as browsers) behave perfectly.

They are also a lot more demanding than they look, and encompass a whole methodology including testing with disabled users-something that is conveniently forgotten by a lot of agencies promising "100% accessible, verified Web sites."

When we do follow the guidelines, we still don´t get a certification. A "WAI-AAA" button on our page carries the same legal punch as "Bill´s world of wicked Web sites gives your Web site five beer cans."

Accessibility is about communication and compromise. Nobody expects you to cater for every disabled group because you simply cannot predict all scenarios. You need to go as far as you can but keep an open ear for concerns that are raised before legal action is taken. Our rap now is "Yes, you can be sued for being inaccessible, but we cannot offer you a protection against that as there are no standards to follow." It´s tough to put a price on that one.

Reason 2: There Is No Immediate Benefit There is no immediate, measurable benefit from making a Web site accessible. Web accessibility enthusiasts might point out that is not true as accessible websites are automatically more usable, and search engines can index them a lot easier. That is true, but the benefits of that do not show up immediately-if ever. A fancy microsite or a video ad for a product, however, can trigger an immediate, measurable response in the form of traffic or revenue.

Good usability is a very important element in customer satisfaction, but you will rarely find it on the agenda of a project in the scoping phase (unless of course the project is usability consulting). The argument that search engines are "blind billionaires"-that they "see" the Web like a blind visitor-is also a weak one. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vast field and a lot of competitors fight dirty (e.g., link farms, bridge pages). Large corporations would rather plan for sponsored links and cross marketing than concern themselves with markup techniques to boost their search engine rankings.

Reason 3: Accessibility Is Sold As a Technical Problem A lot of tutorials and introductory accessibility articles are written by Web developers for Web developers. They explain all the ins and outs of the HTML/CSS/scripting we have to worry about, and claim that it is not hard to do. It is true that when it comes to HTML, 90% of the accessibility changes happen "under the hood" and are not that hard to implement. This is also the biggest problem. It´s hard to explain to a non-technical client why you have two development hours on your plan that didn´t result in any visible change.

Accessibility is perceived and sold as a technical issue, and there is little documentation out there for project managers on how to plan and budget an accessible Web site. They think it can be done later or that the developers will automatically take care of it.

If we want to develop a usable, accessible website, the development phase is far too late to think about accessibility. Designing for accessibility means ensuring that:

Text is easy to understand
All image material and colors are unambiguous to various groups of visually impaired users
There are meaningful text alternatives for all content images and multimedia
There is a glossary explaining all acronyms and abbreviations
The navigation and the flow of the site is logical and easy to follow
The maintenance staff of the product knows about these issues or gets trained accordingly

Reason 4: Disability Is Not Something Clients Want to Think About A big problem with accessibility is that we just don´t want to think about why it is needed. For a visual person, there is nothing scarier than the loss of sight. To address accessibility, the client and the designer have to think about what that experience would be like. The Web is still perceived as a medium for the able, the young and the wealthy. If your client sells games online and says its customers are in their twenties and have fast computers with broadband connections, it might be a tough sell to ditch the plan to build 150 links in a four-level, drop-down navigation. Some clients can´t imagine that anyone in their audience would need to use the tab key to move through menus.

In Greek drama, the choir acted as the perfect audience, asking questions and commenting on the happenings. A lot of clients have something like that in their head when they talk about their users. The target audience is not necessarily the real audience, though. Grandmothers might be buying games online for their grandkids´ birthdays.

Reason 5: We´re Past Inventing, We´re Maintaining
As Joe Clark pointed out in his excellent book Building Accessible Web sites, it is a lot harder to retrofit an existing Web site than to start from scratch.

The Web is no longer new. Many companies spent a lot of money on their sites, and it´s not always an option to start from scratch. Building an accessible blog or a 10-page brochure site is a lot easier than cleaning out a 200,000-page monster maintained in an eight-year-old content management system.

It´s even harder if you built the client´s site in the first place. For years, badly planned and executed websites were sold at high prices. Now we have to tell businesses they´ve been had. Nobody likes to hear that he needs to replace an expensive, functional product with a new one.

Reason 6: It Is Not Part of the Testing Methodology
The way we test websites is still rooted in the days of the browser wars. The important questions are:

Does the page work on browsers X, Y and Z on operating system 1 and 2?
Does it work on monitors with 800 by 600 resolution and is everything important visible without scrolling?
Are all images loading and positioned correctly?

We also need a methodology and test plan to address non-visual accessibility issues:

Does the alternative text make sense?
Is the language easy to understand?
Do links on the page make sense outside their context?
Does the page have a logical header order?
Does the page make sense without the style sheet?

Accessibility issues that require human verification are harder to quantify. Some automated verification tools flag these issues as "user checks" rather than "possible fatal errors that need user testing." To clients, a bug that can´t be seen is not worth extra money spent on intensive testing.

Reason 7: Accessibility Seems Like a Party Pooper
Although the Web has been around for quite a while now, technology is still being toyed with. You don´t see newspapers printing at a 45-degree angle or TV news anchors talking "street," but on the Web, anything goes.

Clients want their websites to be interactive-often, this means an interaction-required navigation that creates hardship for some disabled users. Unfortunately, it´s a lot easier to get a budget approved for a project with lots of flashy visuals than for a plan scoping out a very usable and accessible website. After all, the latter requires more client interaction and-gasp-maintenance.

Reason 8: Nobody Complains
It is hard for a client to see accessibility as a need when nobody complains. Many elderly and disabled people don´t claim their government benefits, so it´s safe to say that thwarted website users don´t necessarily complain. "No feedback is good feedback" seems to be the credo for a lot of site owners unaware of how badly their site is performing.

Reason 9: It Requires Involvement
One reason our clients don´t care about accessibility is that it means that they will have to deal with their website. In the low-budget market, clients think that you pay a Web designer to do your website and that´s that. A company brochure is not enough to base a fully accessible website on, and "build it and they will come" does not hold true anymore.

Aside from competitive pricing and a superior product or service, the only way to have success with your website is to give visitors what they want, regardless of their ability and technical environment. Many clients don´t want to be so involved. They can simply give their ideas to the print shop for their brochure, so why should they have to help a designer create and maintain a website?

Reason 10: There Is No Leader to Follow
The saddest reason for client indifference toward accessibility is that there is no leader to follow. Except in the case of Maguire vs. Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG), no one has successfully sued a company for discrimination because of an inaccessible website. This makes it hard to spark a feeling of urgency in our clients. Clients want to hear success stories from market leaders before they spend money. Unfortunately, pointing out that Amazon.com does not have a 450KB rotating logo splash page will not convince inexperienced clients that it´s a bad idea.

Few big corporations follow Web standards, mostly because of legacy systems and methodologies lingering from the days of browser wars.

As the DRC pointed out in its April 2004 report The Web - Access and Inclusion for Disabled People 81% of 1,000 websites failed to achieve a minimum level of compliance. Another problem is the products that drive the Web. There are few content management systems that enforce accessibility testing in their workflow or create proper markup.

The same applies to frameworks like Microsoft´s .NET. Most "accessibility enhancements" mean graceful degradation for browsers like Netscape Communicator or "adding an alt attribute." WYSIWYG editing is a very big selling point for a content management system, but it will inevitably result in malformed markup and bad document structure. Clients don´t care-all they want to do is easily maintain copy. So what can we do?

Gently prod clients in the right direction. Here are some ideas:

Stop selling accessibility as a technical issue. Address it in the scoping and design phase rather than at delivery
Make sure you´ve got your facts straight before releasing another "accessibility" article or blog entry (rounded corners in CSS do not increase accessibility, really, they don´t!)
Make product presentations and assessments more fun by taking away the client´s mouse and changing monitor settings
If you want to support disabled users, don´t stop at one group. "Skip links" helps blind users and keyboard/switch access users alike, don´t hide them!
Send emails to companies every time it is hard for you to use their site. Point out that you will buy the product on their competitor´s site and why.
Step away from the visuals. Embrace Web design as a mixture of good content, proper structure and nice visuals. Start developing sites in the text editor, not in Illustrator.

Source: Digital-Web.com