Excellent, so today I'd like to talk about
accessibility basics. So this is for people who
are new to accessibility, but also a good
refresher if you don't know too much about
accessibility too. And I suppose everyone kind
of has their own way of doing things. This is, I
suppose, the AccessibilityOz way of
doing things. And AccessibilityOz is,
as I said, an Australian company,
originally Australian but we have a U.S.
company. We have clients around the world.
Probably our biggest known clients are
McDonald's and California Community Colleges
in the U.S. and Birmingham Commonwealth Games
in the UK. We have quite a few Australian clients
as well, because this is where we started out.
If you would like to follow
any links that I mention or get access
to this PowerPoint, please go to the URL
pz.tt/a11ybasics22
and we'll put that in the chat as well,
and we'll also send it out to anyone
who's registered as an attendee.
And basically that's how you can get all
the information. Now, if that system, which
has the links and the PowerPoint, is
inaccessible to you, just send us an
email and we'll send all that
stuff to you via an email in an accessible way.
So thank you for being here today.
I'd like to acknowledge the Yugambeh
people as the traditional owners of this
land. I'm coming to you from the Gold
Coast at the moment, and I've been up
here about six months. I used to live in
Melbourne. And the Yugambeh people
are very well known in the Gold Coast
and are still quite involved in the Gold Coast.
Okay.
Sorry, I'm just going to take my watch
off so it doesn't distract me.
I'd like to start off by
introducing you to the members of my
team or members of my team in 2018.
This is when we all met at CSUN. We are a
small group. As an accessibility company,
when I started it I wanted to make sure that it was
accessible to people with disabilities in a
number of ways, not just making websites
and things accessible but also
making sure that we provided employment
opportunities for people with disabilities.
And so, we wanted to make sure that we
represented the current population
statistics when it comes to people with
disabilities. So about 20% of the
population has some kind of significant
disability, so we wanted to say that that
would be represented in our company as well.
And I'm actually very proud to say that 60%
of my staff have some kind of
significant disability that affects
their daily life, because we have been
very positive in trying to hire
people who have disabilities and have a
lived experience.
Some of the disabilities
that my staff have had or previous staff
have had or do have at the moment is dyslexia,
moderate vision impairment,
epilepsy, migraines, severe vision
impairment, physical impairment,
PTSD, Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis
and cerebral palsy. And one of the things
to remember is it's not just about
vision impairments. A lot of people when
they talk about accessibility talk about
screen reader accessibility and the
accessibility to people who are vision
impaired. It's absolutely essential and
very important, but it's not the only
thing about accessibility, and actually
the largest group of people with
disabilities in the world are people
with mental health disabilities, which
WCAG doesn't even cover. WCAG being
the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,
which is what we all use to make sure that
websites are accessible.
A little bit about our services,
but this won't take long I promise. We do
basically auditing: mobile testing,
websites, web applications, native apps,
video accessibility, user testing,
accessible Word, PDF, HTML. We do a lot
with support hours and we provide access
to something called OzWiki, which is a
database of accessibility errors,
screenshots, code and solutions, and I'll
talk about that towards the end. And
training, not so much on site anymore
but a lot of online training, and we'll be
offering some of that later on.
And also accessibility during the web
development life cycle.
Now I also just want to mention that we
are using the auto transcription feature
in Zoom, and so we've found that it's
actually quite accurate, but when we post
this seminar online on our website, we
will revise the captions to make sure
that they are perfect. So if you find
that the captions are not working, please
let us know and I promise that we will find some
better solution next time, and you can
access this webinar online with
proper captions in the next week or
so. But as I said we have tested it and
we do find the transcription in Zoom is
okay. Please let us know if that's not the case.
A little bit about me: I started in
accessibility in 1998 when I worked on
the very first accessible website in
Australia. In 2000 I created Australia's first
automated accessibility testing tool
called PurpleCop. For those who have been
in the accessibility industry as long as
me: firstly I don't know why you're
coming to an accessibility basics session,
but secondly I called the tool PurpleCop
because the first automated accessibility
testing tool was called Bobby, and its icon was
like an English policeman, an English
bobby. That's why I called my tool PurpleCop.
Puns, they survive through the ages.
I was an invited expert to the W3C
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Version 2 Working Group, and I spent
six years with the W3C
contributing to the guidelines.
Then I worked on the Melbourne 2006
Commonwealth Games, and I managed
usability and accessibility services at
Monash University for six years.
I founded AccessibilityOz in 2011 and
we released OzPlayer, our accessible
video player, in 2013, so if you're
interested in accessible video players,
please have a look at our website.
OzPlayer is free for not-for-profits
with a revenue under a million
dollars, websites that have less than
10 videos and personal sites. It's
half price for education and government.
Definitely have a look at that if
you're looking at video players. And then
we released OzART, which is our
AccessibilityOz automated
reporting tool, which is our automated
accessibility testing tool, in 2014.
I spoke at the United Nations on the
importance of web accessibility in 2015.
I spoke about the Black Saturday
bushfires in Victoria and how
a huge proportion of the people who died
were actually people with disabilities,
almost I think 49, 50% of people who died
were people with disabilities, which is
of course much higher than the proportion in the
actual population. And how web accessibility
and accessibility of especially emergency
information is really important.
2018, I was nominated for the
Australian of the Year. 2018 to 2020,
I chaired the ICT Mobile Site and Native
App Testing committee, which I'll talk
about in a moment. And in 2020 I think, I
won the inaugural Australian Access
Award Person of the Year.
So we're doing this because we wanted to
make sure that everyone who's coming to
our mobile training next month has a
basic understanding of accessibility. And
so basically next month we're running
two, we're repeating it, we're running it
twice. We're running mobile site and
native app accessibility testing. We're
running a workshop. And so the
sessions are on the 6th of July and the
14th of July. And so you can come to the
morning session on the 6th and then the
afternoon session on the 14th or something
along those lines, or the morning session on the
14th and the afternoon session on the 14th. So it's
broken up into the morning and afternoon.
And there's a minor cost associated with that but
please have a look at our blog post and
we'll also put in the chat how you can
register for that, but we'd really love
to see you there, and we can talk
about the mobile site and native app
accessibility testing guidelines that we
think everyone should be using.
Let's talk about accessibility.
That's what we're all here for.
So, online accessibility is the ability
for a person with a disability to
understand and use a website, application,
intranet, mobile app or program. Basically
if it's online in terms of using the internet,
then it's accessibility. But then of
course you've got desktop
applications, which don't necessarily use
the internet which we also cover as well.
So, it's governed by a whole variety of
different policies around the world
and laws around the world. In Australia,
it's the Australian Human Rights
Commission Disability Discrimination Act:
Web Advisory Notes. In the U.S., there's a whole
carpet of laws: Department of Justice, OCR,
Section 508, Section 504, CVAA,
Department of Transport, etc. In the UK,
there's the Equality Act, there's the
Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile
Applications). And in the EU, there's EN 301 549.
Now, as a company that has staff and
clients around the world, we do know
about these policies, but thankfully
you actually only need to do one or two
things to make your sites accessible
around the world and that is to follow
the W3C Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines, Version 2 or Version 2.1,
and we would also recommend
that you follow the ICT Accessibility
Testing Symposium um Mobile Accessibility
Testing Methodology. So basically you
don't need to have a huge understanding
of those policies if you know WCAG,
which is the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines, and you have this
mobile methodology, then you'll be fine
in terms of making your content accessible.
So, what is the ICT Accessibility Testing
Symposium um Mobile Accessibility Testing
Methodology, which is such a mouthful?
Okay, so in late 2017,
all the accessibility testing specialists
got together at a conference called the
ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium um,
and at the end of this testing conference,
which is very aimed at industry, so
accessibility testers,
we have a town hall and we say
"What is it that the industry really
needs right now?"
And at the end of 2017,
the overwhelming response was mobile
accessibility guidance. So all the
accessibility companies had their own set of
guidelines when it came to mobile. It's
very very clear that WCAG, even
though it applies to mobile and that
means native apps and mobile sites, it
still misses a whole lot of things
when it comes to mobile accessibility,
and the really obvious way of
explaining that to people with a very short time
is keyboard accessibility. WCAG
requires that everything is
accessible to the keyboard, but it does
not require that everything is
accessible to the touch or the mouse
user. So there's a whole bunch of
guidelines that all those different
accessibility companies had come up with,
because they knew that just following
WCAG was not sufficient to make mobile
sites and native apps accessible.
So, as a community we got together and we
amalgamated all these guidelines because
we knew that WCAG 2.1, which was an
update to WCAG, was coming out in
2018 and we thought "Yay! WCAG 2.1 is
going to address these things."
Unfortunately, WCAG 2.1 when it came
out didn't address these things, and I
suppose the best example of that is that
of all the mobile guidelines that we
amalgamated, all the mobile guidelines we
could get our hands on, there was one
requirement which was across all
guidelines and that was touch target
size, so that you had an adequate touch
target size when you actually tapped on
your mobile phone.
That requirement is in WCAG 2.1, however
it's relegated to Level AAA, which is the
highest level of the guidelines and it's
where I say "Level AAA is where success
criteria go die."
So we knew that no one would follow
it, and so this was an area where the
community had overwhelmingly decided
that there was a very strong requirement for
accessibility and WCAG had said "No, it's
not the case," or the W3C had. So
we at the next ICT Accessibility Testing
Symposium decided to get together and write
these mobile guidelines, which is what
this workshop in July is about.
Now, you might say "What on Earth are you
people doing?" but it's actually very very
common for the accessibility industry--
can't speak for other industries--
very common for the accessibility
industry to get together as a group and
make their own guidelines. In
fact WCAG, didn't come from the W3C. It
came from the accessibility community
and it was on version five before the
W3C picked it up and actually turned it
into WCAG1. It's been done
with HTML, it's been done with XHTML, it's been done
a number of times in the accessibility
community. So this is not unusual at all,
and it probably has to do with the fact that
technology is very complex, people with
disabilities have very specific assistive
technology needs that change quite quickly,
and the W3C and policymakers just don't
really keep up to date with it.
So what we tend to find is the community
comes up with these guidelines and they
get adopted by the W3C. So this is the
Mobile Accessibility Testing Methodology
and where it came from.
Anyway, enough of that.
Let's talk about online accessibility.
Why is online accessibility important? It
allows people with disabilities to
access information like anybody else.
So for example someone who wants to read
a novel can go online, purchase a Kindle
and have it read aloud to them, whereas
previously there were these things
called books on tape and the thing is
that yes, you could buy a tape. It would cost
money, but there's also a really
reduced number of books that are
actually on tape, and if you had any kind
of non-mainstream tastes then
you wouldn't be able to read the stuff
that you wanted to read.
It also allows people to interact with
others without being categorized as
disabled, and this is a really big thing
because people with disabilities are
still very much discriminated against in
our community. There is still a kind of
acceptance of the concept that people
with disabilities are somewhat lesser or
somewhat less worthy than everyone else,
and you can see that with movies like
Million Dollar Baby and Me Before You.
They're movies where people acquire a
disability -- it's quadriplegic in both cases --
and decide that their own life is not
worth living and basically commit
suicide. Now this would not be acceptable
when you are talking about any other
minority group. It would not be
acceptable to say "I am trans, and therefore
I'm going to commit suicide." No
one would say that that was a good movie
to make. No one would accept that
movie. No one would accept a movie
that said "Oh my gosh, I found out that my
parents were Jewish, and therefore I'm going to
commit suicide." That's abhorrent to people.
However, when you replace that with
someone with a disability, all of a
sudden that seems okay.
So this whole ability to interact with
others without being categorized as
disabled is incredibly important to the
disability community, and that's why it's
really important that you don't disclose
if you know people have a disability. And
this is especially important with the
advent of social media. People with
disabilities can interact with others
and they never have to indicate
that they're vision impaired or they're
in a chair or whatever.
There's actually a story of a woman
who played Second Life. I don't know if
Second Life still exists. But
basically she went to Second Life as
what she called a "norm," which is a normal
person. She went to a club, she partied
with people, talked to people, etc. etc. And
then she left and she came back in a wheelchair,
because in Second Life your avatar can mimic
the disabilities that you have.
And all the same people ignored her.
Now how does that make sense? It just
doesn't make sense, but it's just part of
the inbuilt discrimination that people
with disabilities have all day, every day.
It also allows them to undertake activities
which they're not otherwise able to do.
So for someone who is vision impaired or
is a paraplegic or something
along those lines, being able to do their
grocery shopping online is absolutely
amazing. Even for people who have
long COVID, who find walking
down the street exhausting, making that
online shopping experience accessible is
incredibly important to them. And
we take for granted that we can
just "Oh we've run out of milk. We're
going to run to the store." It's really
important that people with disabilities
have that opportunity as well.
So I know I've mentioned this a couple
of times, but how many people are we
actually talking about? It's about 20%
of the population, and that is across
developed versus non-developed
countries, and it is about a billion
people. So we're talking about a lot of people.
And of course due to the aging
population, this number only increases,
and that's because 80% of all disabilities are
acquired. So the older a person gets, the more
likely they will acquire a disability.
So the older a population gets, the more
disabilities will be in that population.
So what are we talking about in terms of
actual types of disabilities? We're
talking about disabilities affecting
vision, disabilities affecting how the
mind interprets information, disabilities
affecting movement, disabilities
affecting hearing and disabilities
affecting mental health, which is not
covered in WCAG.
So when we're talking about vision
impairments, we're talking about things
like blindness, color blindness, glaucoma,
cataracts. And this is a tactile
example of how people assist people with
severe vision impairments. On the left
you have a globe of the world and each
country has its own tactile sensation.
This is useful for someone who is
vision impaired so they can determine
the size and the shape of countries,
whether they're next to other
countries, etc. And on the right is a 2-foot
version of the Chrysler building so
that a person with a disability can,
using their hands, get a sense of what
the Chrysler building looks like or
how the Chrysler building is shaped.
How do people with vision impairments
use the web? They have assistive
technologies such as screen readers or
braille readers, which convert basically
what we see on the screen to audio or to
braille; however, they rely on the code of
the website, so something that may
look great, seem like it makes a lot of
sense, may be absolutely gobbledygook for
a screen reader or a braille reader.
Then you have braille keyboards or large
size keyboards and on-screen magnifiers.
User techniques include things like
increasing text size and increasing
color contrast. And I'm just going to show you a
couple of videos now about screen readers, and I'm
going to show you just the beginning of a couple
of them. And these are linked, so you can watch the
whole one if you want to. Now this very first
one is incredibly old, but it's the absolute best
screen reader video that I have ever come
across. I mean, I think it's over 20 years
old now. And we are actually
as AccessibilityOz, we have staff with vision
impairments using screen readers and we have
been working on creating a screen reader video
which kind of incorporates all of these, but
we haven't done that yet.
[Music]
I'm Neal Ewers. I work with the Trace Research
and Development Center here in Madison,
and one of my jobs is to look at all applications,
web browsers, word processors, etc., to
see how well they work with screen readers.
- [Screen reader] A screen reader is a piece of
software that allows the user to hear via
a speech synthesizer.
- Or touch via a braille display the information
on the screen. The screen reader will follow
along and say exactly what I am doing.
- [Screen reader] Synthesizer test.doc.
- [Neal] Synthesizer test.doc, that's the one we want.
- [Screen reader] This is the eloquent speech
synthesizer. Most synthesizers are able to
speak at a variety of speech rates and a variety
of vocal pitches. Many speak with different
voices and some even speak
in different languages.
- [Neal] I can ask the screen reader to tell me
various things about what I am reading, for
example, if I an on a title, and I press Insert F, it's
going to tell me some information about the text.
- [Screen reader] Character formatting, Times New
Roman, 16 point, bolded, style heading one, line
spacing single, paragraph formatting, aligned
left, outline level one.
- [Neal] That's a whole bunch of text but what I
discern from that is it's a title, it's a certain
style level in Word, and I know that it's a font size
bigger than what I've been dealing with, but
I only did that because I thought I was on a title.
The point is it takes an awful long time for a
screen reader user to get a layout even of a
simple page. One of the things I can't do is use the
mouse. I can move it along on the mouse pad, and I
have no clue where the mouse pointer on the
screen is. What screen readers have done to help
get around this is to allow the user to use the
number pad keys to actually move the mouse
pointer. The screen reader gives gives me an
ability to read by sentence by doing
Alt down-arrow.
- [Screen reader] This is the eloquent
speech synthesizer.
- [Neal] Or I can read by word.
- [Screen reader] Pitches. Many. Speak. With.
- [Neal] or by letter.
- [Screen reader] space W I T H space.
- [Neal] Once again, I'm only using the keystrokes
that you could use in Word. I am only reading a word
at a time. If I were able to see the screen, I would
know that there were a couple titles on the
screen that are in bold letters, and they're
centered, and they're in larger text. I can't see
that, so the problem a blind user has is that one
begins to read not knowing anything about the
layout of the page. The only way you know what's on
on the page is when you get to it.
Greg Vanderheiden, our Director, has often
referred to it as the soda straw approach. You are
looking through this small hole. You're reading
one word at a time, and that's all you see, and that's
all I hear, until I get to the next word.
I have no clue that down halfway down the page is a
bold heading. Just the other day I was reading
something that made no sense to me whatsoever
until I got to about what I assume the middle of
the page was, and then what was on the middle
of the page said "Read the text below and use these
instructions to fill out the top part of the page."
Well jeez, you know if I had seen, I would have gone
right there. But my problem as a screen reader
user is I can't. Another application that is used
a lot by people who use screen readers is the
World Wide Web. Let's say I wanted to go to the Trace
page. I type it in.
- [Screen reader] T R A C E . W I S C. E D U
- [Neal] And hit enter.
- [Screen reader] Enter. Page has 40 links, Trace
Research and Development Center, graphic Trace
Center, College of Engineering,
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
- [Neal] What you heard it say, is, it told me how many
links were on the page, the title of the page.
Now that said graphic, because if the graphics
had been on in the browser, there would have been
a picture there of that text, and because
graphics were off, we use the Alt text, which tells
me what the graphic would have been. One of the
things the screen reader allows me to do is bring
up a list of links so I can really get an overview
of just the links on the page. If I do Insert F7--
- [Screen reader] Links list dialog, links list view,
frequently asked questions.
- [Neal] So I can arrow down now, and I know that
everything I get to is a link.
- [Screen reader] What's new at the Trace Center,
Help using this site, List information and archives.
- Screen readers allow me to basically have
access to the printed page, which I've had before,
but it's mostly been in the form of people reading
books to me on tape. There's a lot less time taken
now for me to do things. There a lot less work
involved. There's a lot less dependence on others
for reading stuff to me. I have done this often
enough that I get used to reading pretty rapidly,
so one of the things can do is actually speed up
the way in which the screen reader reads.
- [Screen reader] 53.
- [Neal] the higher the numbers go, the faster it goes.
- [Screen reader] 64, 75, 86, 97, 108, 119.
- [Neal] This is about the speed at which I read,
So if I tab back to the OK button, and then we read
the document.
[Screen reader reads the document very rapidly]
- You understood that, right?
[Music]
And then this is an example of, once again an old
site, but about how bad things can go wrong for a
screen reader user if it's not coded properly,
even if it looks okay.
- [Narrator] Please press Alt and Enter to view this
movie full screen.
This video shows two versions of the
Amazon site in IBM's Home Page Reader.
Read the captions for more information.
- [Screen reader] amazon.co.uk. Welcome.
ref equals cs underscore nav underscore tab
underscore gw slash 202 minus 0 million
958 thousand 69 minus 6 million 723 thousand
823. Ref equals cs underscore nav underscore
tab underscore ys slash 202 minus 0 million
958 thousand 69 minus 6 million 723 thousand 826.
File open. Open. Type a web address.
Open file name. Open amazon underscore.
Open OK. Connected to C.
Amazon.co.uk.
Welcome. Start of map with four items.
End of map. Welcome. Your store. Books.
Electronic and photo dot. Music. DVD.
Video. Software. PC and video games.
Home and garden. Toys and kids. Travel
- [Gian] So as you can see, incredibly different
depending on exactly
how it's coded. So definitely make sure
that your developers know what they're doing.
And I'm just going to swap that.
Excellent. let me know if you can't see the screen.
Okay, so, then we have types of cognitive
impairments. Now a lot of people think when it
comes to cognitive impairments
we're talking about intellectual
disabilities. Now that is a type of
cognitive impairment, but there are a lot
of others as well.
There's things like epilepsy and
migraine. I personally get migraines.
I've had migraines triggered six times
now with content that I've been
testing. It's not fun.
Dyslexia. Aphasia. Bruce Willis has
just been diagnosed with aphasia, so he's
decided he can't be an actor anymore
because of aphasia, where he has
problems with understanding tone. So if
you're interested in that, that's
definitely something to look at.
Things like problems with memory and
reading disabilities.
This is just an example of how people with
disabilities don't always, and often never do,
think of their disability as a problem.
They see having a disability as
being integral to who they are.
This is Melissa McCracken. She paints
the gorgeous paintings on your left, and she
says, "Until I was 15, I thought everyone
constantly saw colors. Colors in books, colors in
math formulas, colors at concerts. But when I
finally asked my brother which color the letter
C was (canary yellow, by the way) I realized my mind
wasn't quite as normal as I had thought.
Basically, my brain is cross-wired. I experience
the wrong sensation to certain stimuli. Each
letter and number is colored and the days of
the year circle around my body as if they
had a set point in space
But the most wonderful brain malfunction
of all is seeing the music I hear.
It flows in a mixture of hues, textures
and movements, shifting as if it were a
vital and intentional element of each
song. Having synesthesia isn't
distracting or disorienting. It adds a
unique vibrance to the world I experience."
So the paintings that you can see,
the paintings are certain songs that she hears,
like Smashing Pumpkins, "Tonight, Tonight" and
"Life on Mars" by David Bowie. At
AccessibilityOz we actually have one of
her paintings. It's absolutely gorgeous,
so definitely look her up because she
has some absolutely amazing artwork.
This is an example here of an Easy
Read activity. You do need to consider
people with intellectual disabilities,
especially if it's something like
you're a government department, you're
providing information to the entire community.
Easy Read is, as you can see, breaking
things down to one sentence with an
associated image. You can't do this
yourself; we can't do this ourselves. We
have a specialist company that assists
us with this because it's a very specific skill.
Here you've got a page about the
coronavirus and it has a picture of the
virus and it says "Coronavirus (COVID-19)
is a virus," and virus is bolded,
"that has affected many people around the
world." And then you have a man coughing
with a little virus icon. "A virus is an
illness or disease that can spread
easily from one person to another," and
then a virus with some arrows and it says
"Coronavirus is spreading quickly.
Coronavirus has been called a" -- and in bold --
"pandemic." So this kind of stuff is
really important to share with people who
might have intellectual disabilities,
and there are ways that you can help them.
One of the things that I used to do at Monash is
we used to run what we called a Writing for the Web
workshop, however it was actually
accessibility but we knew that if we called it
Accessibility, no one would come, even if we made
it mandatory. So we did make it mandatory, and we
still had people say "But do we really need to come?"
Yes, you really need to come. If you
put content on the Monash website -- we had
five and a half thousand content authors --
then you need to know this stuff.
So I get people showing up to this
Writing for the Web workshop saying
"Disabilities? People with
disabilities? But we don't want stupid
people at our university." And
that's not having a go at Monash. A lot of
people have said that to me in my life.
And this is just an example of
what it's like to kind of have a
cognitive disability and how it doesn't
actually affect your IQ.
So bear with me while I open it for you.
This is what we call a decoding activity,
recognizing phonemes. "Phonemes are the
building blocks of language represented
by letters of the alphabet. They are the
component sounds of spoken words. Most
people automatically hear, for example,
that the word "goat" is made up of three
sounds: "guh," "oh" and "tuh."
Reading requires the ability to map the
phonemes we hear to letters on a page
and vice versa. But what happens when
this basic skill, called decoding, doesn't
come automatically? Imagine struggling to
sound out every word because you can't
distinguish among the phonemes." This
is a phoneme translation key. When you
see the letter Q, you need to pronounce
it as if you saw the letter D or T. When
you see the letter Z, you have to pronounce it
as if you saw the letter M. When you see the letter P,
you have to pronounce it as if you saw
the letter B, etc.
So let's begin.
This is the passage that we're trying to
interpret, and I will read the first line.
"We begin our trip at a familiar place, a
body like yours and mine."
Anyone want to try for the second--
actually, no, none of you can because I
can't give you audio.
So, I'll just give you a little bit of
time to just try and work that out yourselves
while I have my coffee.
[No audio]
So one thing that you might find after
you have attempted to
translate it is that it actually is
easier to translate the more you do
it, and the reason why is because
most of us, almost all of us, are born
with a particular reading architecture
in our brain. We know how
to interpret and decode these phonemes.
If you were born in an alternate universe
tomorrow, or if you're -- not born -- if you were
transferred to an alternate universe
tomorrow that used these phonemes, you'd
pick them up by the end of the day. However, there
are some people who can never pick up the
phonemes, and that's because they lack that
language architecture. Now their IQ
hasn't literally dropped 100 points. It's just
literally that they cannot decode the phonemes.
So they struggle to understand every line,
like you struggled to understand the first line.
Now I personally have done this exercise
many many many times. It's from a
great website called Misunderstood Minds.
Fantastic website, definitely worth looking at.
Also quite old but still brilliant.
So anyway, I can recognize the phonemes,
so I'll read out this passage to you now.
"We begin our trip at a familiar place, a
body like yours and mine. It contains 100
trillion cells that work together by design.
And within each one of these many
cells, each one that has DNA, the DNA code
is exactly the same, a mass-produced resume.
So the code in each cell is identical, a
remarkable but valid claim.
This means that the cells are nearly
alike but not exactly the same.
Take for instance the cells of the
intestines; that they're vital is
certainly plain. Now think about the way you
would think if those cells were the
cells in your brain."
One of the things that you might have
missed while you're trying to decode it
is that it's actually a poem.
This kind of information is often lost
for people who have cognitive disabilities.
One of the things that people with
cognitive disabilities use are screen
readers, because it reads aloud the
content on the screen and they might
have difficulty reading the content.
So what does that mean?
That means that the order that the
content is read by a screen reader needs
to match the visual order of the
content on the screen.
That kind of information is something that
a lot of developers aren't aware of, and if
you're interested in orders and things like
that there's some great videos on our website.
Screen readers are one assistive technology
that people with cognitive disabilities use.
Speech recognition software, hover
highlighting and dictionary software are
others. Their user techniques include
decreasing color contrast. For people who are
dyslexic, low color contrast,
especially pastel colors, are much easier
to read than really high contrast colors.
Now that's directly paradoxical to what people
with vision impairments need. So what do you
do? What you do is you don't force
colors on your users. That means you put your
colors in your style sheets, you don't put them
in the HTML of the page, or you perhaps even
provide a color picker to your users.
It's actually one of our clients,
Griffith University, who came across that
information about people
preferring decreasing color contrast,
because they provided a color picker and
their official colors were black, red
and white, and they actually found that
80% of people who changed the
colors reduced the color contrast,
didn't increase it.
Types of physical impairments: things like
cerebral palsy, motor neuron disease,
Huntington's, Parkinson's, quadriplegia.
What does this mean? It basically means
that they cannot access the ordinary
input devices that we are used to. Either
they can't use a mouse or they can't use
keyboard or they can't use a touch
screen or they're using some kind of
assistive technology that mimics those
input devices. Assistive technologies
that mimic those input devices are
things like joysticks, modified or
on-screen keyboards, touch screens, head
wands, switches, speech-to-text.
And they can also be restricted just to
the keyboard or increasing text size.
For example, a joystick is something that
mimics the mouse, and so if you move the joystick
to the left, it will move the mouse 10
pixels to the left. Now if you have a
link that's only two pixels wide then
someone who's using a joystick can never
access that link.
We've got a little video for you.
Now this is a guy, he's very -- once again, old video,
still brilliant -- very into gaming.
Just have to bear with the gaming references.
[No audio]
[Video game sound effects]
- [Mike Phillips] There we go.
- Okay.
[No audio]
- Everything is okay?
[Video game shooting sound effects]
- [Off screen] He's instant messaging 4, 5 people at
once, and working on a novel right now,
he's doing some back and forth with that.
- [Mike] Going back to Hell.
[No audio]
- Oh.
It's that lovely?
- [Gian] So, what you can see
flashing on the bottom left of his screen is a
on-screen keyboard, and he is
manipulating that with just a thumb switch.
So let's talk about types of hearing
impairments, people who are deaf or hard
of hearing. And their assistive technologies
are things like visual alerts for audio alerts.
David Sullivan, if you have a comment
please add it to the chat.
User techniques include open or closed
captioning by the author and volume control. And
just because we have to have a cat video,
here is a cat that has learned sign language.
The guy is deaf and he taught his cat
the sign for food, so the cat's not just
saying "Put that in my mouth," it's
actually signing, and in signing without
eye contact initially, you wave a hand or
lightly touch the arm and the cat does this.
And then we've got types of mental
health impairments, such as depression, PTSD,
anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder.
There are assistive technologies that
people with mental health impairments
use to assist them. One is
Spotify. Music is is often something
that's very useful for people with
mental health disabilities. And reader
view, which is an option on mobile, and
also using their mobile, avoiding
movement and, of course, trigger warnings.
If you grew up in Australia, you'll
remember basically what we
call trigger warnings at the beginning
of TV shows, like AO, adults only, etc. etc.
That's the kind of stuff that we're talking about.
Let's talk about accessibility complaints.
The very first litigation ever in the world was
in Australia. The Sydney Operating
Commission of the Olympic Games was sued
by a vision impaired man in 1999 and the
court ruled in the plaintiff's favor and
actually fined SOCOG $20 thousand.
Now, $20 thousand doesn't sound like much, but
the plaintiff actually said that it would have
cost them $16 million to make the site
accessible. The judge deemed it would
have cost $10 thousand and he doubled that
amount. However, Bruce McGuire, who's the guy who
sued them, his legal fees were in excess of
$500 thousand, and the plaintiff had to pay that.
So, it was quite expensive for SOCOG.
Back in 2014, Coles was sued by a
vision impaired person.
She'd actually worked with Coles for a couple
of years -- for free, which in itself is problematic --
and had worked to make sure their app
was accessible so that she could buy groceries.
And then Coles, unbeknownst to the
people who were working with her,
released a new app and it didn't work
at all. Now this coincided with our
conservative government firing, or
retrenching, the Disability Discrimination
Commissioner, which is a real problem because 47%
of the complaints that the Australian
Human Rights Commission gets
are regarding disabilities.
So she didn't have any recourse, so she sued them.
Now, it was settled out of court and the
rumor was the sum was about half a million
dollars, but there's NDAs in place.
In the USA, the big one was Target was
sued for having an inaccessible
website by the National Federation of the Blind.
They settled out of court for $6 million, and
their legal fees were in excess of $3.5 million.
They also pay the National Federation of the
Blind $250 thousand every year
to make their site accessible.
The government of Canada decided in
mid-2000, I think 2015, that they weren't
going to-- maybe earlier than that--
follow WCAG2, they'd follow WCAG1 instead.
And a vision impaired employee sued
them saying she couldn't
access promotional opportunities, as in
to get a promotion, because she
couldn't use the websites. And the judge
basically said "Yes, you need to make
everything WCAG2 compliant within 15 months."
The next big one was Netflix, and they basically
were sued because they didn't have captions on
their content. The interesting thing about that
is that they said that they couldn't provide
captions because that would be breaching
copyright laws.
So anyway, they were fined $795 thousand,
and they actually did manage to caption
all their content within the required two years.
The interesting thing is that they released
about six months later a TV show
called Daredevil about a blind superhero,
and so who is going to want to
watch a movie about a blind superhero?
Probably blind people. And it didn't have
audio descriptions, which are the
equivalent of captions but for vision
impaired. However, they did release
audio descriptions within three days.
So generally in the industry we think it
was probably more like a marketing ploy
than anything else. And the audio descriptions
are absolutely excellent, so if you want to
see some good audio descriptions then
absolutely have a look at them.
And I just want to talk briefly about
accessibility and, I suppose, disability.
The concept of independence. "No one is
actually independent. We are all
interdependent. The difference between
the needs that many disabled people have
and the needs of people who are not
labeled as disabled is that non-disabled
people have had their dependencies normalized."
For example, the need for glasses --
I'm wearing glasses -- is a dependency that's
normalized. If I didn't have access to glasses,
I would not be able to drive. I would not be able to
probably do the work that I do. However,
society doesn't label me as disabled
because of that, and it doesn't judge me
much for having to wear glasses. It's something
that is normalized in our society, and if you
think of something a little bit more extreme:
I have a friend in Sydney who runs for a couple
hours every morning. He's an absolute
machine, and he works on the 30th floor
of a building in Sydney. Now, he
jogs up those 30 floors every morning. He
jogs down at lunch and back up
after lunch and then at the end of the
day. And he has meetings all over the
building. He always uses the stairs.
This is something that I would say
not many of us could actually do,
and so we have been provided an
assistive technology to get to the 30th
floor, which is called a lift, and that is
the only difference really. There's more of a
there's more of a difference between us
and him than there is between us and
someone who can't walk up one flight of
stairs. So that's something to think about
when you think about people with disabilities.
And then very briefly, I'm going to go through the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
So, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
are written by the W3C, which is an
international, vendor-neutral organization.
Version 1 was released in 1999;
Version 2 in 2008; and Version 2.1 in 2018.
They're talking about releasing Version 2.2
in September this year.
It was written by accessibility specialists,
people with disabilities and software vendors.
There are three conformance levels:
Level A, which is the minimum level;
AA, which is the medium level; and
AAA, which is the maximum level. Across the world,
AA is the legal standard, which means you
need to meet Levels A and AA.
Conformance is for full web pages only.
So you can't achieve it if you say "Our homepage
is accessible except for the ad banner."
And only complete processes can be
accessible. So if you have a four-page
form and your third page is inaccessible,
then the entire four pages are inaccessible.
And also, only accessibility supported ways
of using technologies are used to claim
conformance. What that means is if
you use a technology, you have to use the
accessibility features inherent in that
technology. For example, if you use
PDFs, you have to tag them with
accessibility features.
There's also non-interference clauses.
If technologies are used in a way that are
not accessibility supported, then they
must not block the ability of users
to access the rest of the page.
There are four non-interference clauses:
audio control, no keyboard trap,
three flashes and pause, stop, hide. They're
definitely worth looking at if you've got, say,
some archival content or something like that
that you're not going to make accessible.
I know we're running late on time,
so I hope that you can stay with me but
if you can't, we'll put this webinar up
and you can watch the last couple of
minutes on your own time. And then
I'll be around for questions. I'll be happy to
answer questions after time.
There are four principles of WCAG:
perceivable, operable, understandable and
robust. Each principle has a number of
guidelines, for example, perceivable.
There's 1.1 provide text alternatives for any
non-text content so that is can be changed
into other forms people need, such as large print,
braille, speech, symbols or simpler language.
However, that doesn't really tell you what you're
supposed to do. So, under each guideline, there
are a number of success criteria such as
Success Criterion 1.1.1: Non-text Content.
All non-text content that is presented to the
user has a text alternative that serves the
equivalent purpose except for certain
situations. Once again, that doesn't really
tell you what to do. So each success criterion
has a number of techniques. For example,
H37: using alt attributes on image elements.
So the techniques are what are really helpful
when it comes to looking at WCAG, especially
from a developer perspective. And there are
a whole lot of techniques in WCAG. There's general,
HTML and XHTML, CSS, client-side scripting,
server-side scripting, SMIL, plain text, ARIA,
Flash, Silverlight (for anyone that still uses
Silverlight. Welcome to the 21st Century), PDF
and then there are common failures.
So, what are your legal requirements? Well, I
can tell you what your legal requirements are. I
don't need to know who you are, what
company or government or anything that
you represent. Your legal requirements are
WCAG2, Level AA. In some cases, your legal
requirements might be WCAG 2.1, Level AA,
but WCAG2, Level AA is basically
what is required across the world.
We do have some additional resources.
Talked about OzART, our automated
accessibility testing tool. If you're
interested in that, let us know.
I'm just to show you a couple of things.
Basically, OzWiki is under Products, and we will
give you access to OzWiki for six months as an
attendee of this presentation. Just go to the
OzWiki link here. OzPlayer, you can get heaps of
information there. Then we have what we
call Accessibility Factsheets. These are
really helpful for developers or testers,
and they're in a bunch of different categories:
images, PDF, video, interactive maps, HTML5,
content, JavaScript, tables, coding, keyboard,
source order, forms and mobile
And they have a whole lot of information:
correct and incorrect code, etc.
We also have a series of what we call
accessibility expert interviews or
Accessibility Voices, so interviews
with experts and their ways of working with
accessibility, etc. Also we have what we call the
CCC developer videos, which will be really
helpful for your developers in the
areas of HTML, forms and ARIA.
And, let's see. As I said, there is
the Mobile Site and Native App Accessibility
Testing Workshops that we'd love to see you at.
Please reach out if you have any questions.
Thank you, and I'm here now to answer
any questions that you may have.
It sounds like there-- oh, okay, Ji Yong Lee.
"In Australia, there are accessibility
regulations about website, mobile app, TV and
home appliances private companies, not public."
No, so there are requirements for public
and private companies or organizations
in Australia. So, in Australia, basically what
you have is what we call the Australian Human
Rights Commission Disability Discrimination
Act, which says that you can't discriminate
against people with disabilities.
So you can't provide something
that the general population can access
that people with disabilities can't
access. So the actual Disability
Discrimination Act doesn't tell you
specifically what that encompasses. There
is a section called the Web Advisory Notes,
which then says "Hey if you're talking about web
then you need to follow the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines. But the Disability
Discrimination Act actually says you can't
discriminate. Whatever you do, whatever
you provide to the community, you can't
discriminate. So whatever it is, it's a washing
machine, if it's TV, if it's a fitness session,
whatever it is it needs to be accessible.
Do I have any recommended tools to
use to help make content accessible?
Some of the ones that I showed you.
We're biased, but the Factsheets are really
helpful. OzWiki is really helpful. Those CCC
developer videos are really helpful.
There's a great company called WebAIM, which
has a series, lots of articles around anything
you could want to know. We also have articles.
They have a lot more. They also have a mailing list,
so joining that mailing list would be really
helpful. It would be really good if you have
questions, specific, and you send it out and you
get a lot of people that will be happy to
look at something for you or give you advice,
especially if you're looking at whether a
product is accessible or something like that.
You can often find people who have already
audited it or are using it in a situation and
can advise on that. So, the WebAIM mailing list,
which we'll add to the links,
is definitely a good place to look.
So, I'm going to answer Maya or Maja.
"Since mental health issues were mentioned
before, do they also affect use of technology
somehow?"
It's something that people still
don't really know about. There hasn't been a lot of
research into that. In my explanation of who I'd
worked for, I forgot to mention that I actually
worked for the Department of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander peoples and
Disability Services Queensland, which was
one department because they just put
Aboriginals and people with disabilities
together because they were both minorities.
And one of the things that we found with
our focus groups is that we had a website for
DSQ, and it had like these red slashes
through it, and we had a number of people
in our focus group go "Oh, that just creeps me out,
because it looks like blood." So that kind of
stuff no one's really ever thought about or
investigated. As I said, there's a little bit of
investigation now, but what we do find is that
people with mental health disabilities often
want things, I suppose, clean and not busy.
So basically having a lot of white space.
And that's one of the reasons why they
use mobile versions of websites so much.
So I'm going to answer that question, Owen, but
you're going to have to wait just a moment.
Kelly, "is there a best practice way that
Easy Reads should be published on websites?
I'm assuming that PDF wouldn't be
the preferred option." Absolutely. PDF is never
the preferred option. And I have a webinar on that
and an article and all that kind of stuff, if
you're interested in that. You want to make it
really easy. Now it is worth, I would say, putting
it as HTML on your site, making it easy to find,
but I would also recommend that you provide
a PDF version for those people that--
unless you can print from the website and
it looks good, I would suggest putting out a PDF
for people to print so that they can distribute
it to people as required. But, and I talk about this
in my PDF session, when you provide PDFs, don't just
assume that the people that want print versions
can afford to actually print those print
versions. So, maybe what you should do is offer
people copies. So actually have an option that
"Hey, do you want copies of this? We'll send
them to you." Because often people who have
disabilities are in the lower socioeconomic
ranges and ink is incredibly expensive.
So if you've got, say, a disability advocacy
group that wants to print 100 copies, that could
cost them $100, and that's probably $100 more
than they can afford. So, providing the option
to send them printed copies would be great.
Yes, I would say, Kelly, that the Easy Read version
should be on the same page as the non-Easy Read
version, but make sure it's very clear which is
which, and make sure that the links to both are
provided at the very top so someone doesn't have
to go through the non-Easy Read version
to get to the Easy Read version.
Sharon, I will absolutely share my PDF articles.
Yes, got in a bit of trouble for that.
It's another story.
Okay, Owen Rockwell, what guidelines am
I personally hoping to find in WCAG 2.2?
Well I already know that they have added a new
requirement on touch target size to AA. It's
nowhere near as large as what basically
most people require, but they have added that,
and I'm very glad that they have added that.
One of my personals is location. So if you think
about Pokemon, for example, there could be a
Pokemon that's up a set of stairs, which
is impossible for someone who is in a
wheelchair to actually capture, if that
makes sense. So basically, spoofing location or
not locking down content to a location,
unless there's a legal requirement or something
like that, that's something that I'd really like to
see and it's something that no one's talking about.
It is in our mobile guidelines. Obviously, I
understand that if you've got Netflix in
Australia, you can only access certain content,
and it's different to the Netflix in America.
I understand that. That's a legal reason, but
in a lot of reasons people lock down
content to a particular location, which
makes that very inaccessible. There's one
example, Lyft I think it is, which is an
Uber type company which allows you to
say "Pick me up from this location," which is
not the current location that I'm in, which is
really helpful for, say, people who have a carer
that is setting up a Lyft for someone else in a
different location. That kind of stuff. Now it
wouldn't be illegal for them or non-accessible
for them to say "You can only order a Lyft to your
current location," but the fact that they allow
you to order a Lyft to a different location
is really important.
Excellent. Well I think I've got all questions.
And please reach out if you've got
any further questions. We'll send you
information to access OzWiki, and please do
think of joining our mobile workshop. If you're
thinking of maybe sending an entire team or
something like that, let us know. We can give
you some discounts. But I hope that today was
helpful and I think next time I run this, I have
to allow a little bit more time.
So thank you very much, and I hope to see
you in a month or so. See you later.