The WCAG Hip-Hop Rappin' Theme Song

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0)

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) have now become an official recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). More information is available on the W3C website at http://www.w3.org/ .

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.

WCAG 2.0 success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific. Guidance about satisfying the success criteria in specific technologies, as well as general information about interpreting the success criteria, is provided in separate documents. See Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview for an introduction and links to WCAG technical and educational material.

WCAG 2.0 succeeds Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [WCAG10], which was published as a W3C Recommendation May 1999. Although it is possible to conform either to WCAG 1.0 or to WCAG 2.0 (or both), the W3C recommends that new and updated content use WCAG 2.0. The W3C also recommends that Web accessibility policies reference WCAG 2.0.

Sometimes it's about more than just the technology

After this episode of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" aired earlier this year there was a lot of talk on the listservs I frequent about the neat gizmos and wikked cool electronics and integrated access technology that allowed the Deaf parents to communicate and care for their visually impaired and autistic son.

OAK PARK, Mich. - Four years ago, a nationwide television audience watched as Judy Vardon stepped from a limousine and fought back tears as she marveled at her family's extensively renovated home. But few are watching now as Judy and her husband Larry, who both are deaf, face foreclosure on a house that was remodeled on ABC-TV's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" in part to accommodate their blind, autistic son.

There was a happy ending to the two-hour show broadcast on Nov. 6, 2004, which set an "Extreme Makeover" ratings record. Now, the Vardons are swamped by a mortgage payment that has almost doubled since the makeover, and their medical insurance doesn't cover autism treatments for 16-year-old Lance.

Adding to their insecurity, Larry Vardon, 50, works at Chrysler's Sterling Heights stamping plant. The company is on the brink of bankruptcy as it and the other Detroit automakers appeal to Congress for emergency loans. "I'm afraid I'm going to lose my house now," Judy Vardon, using sign language through an interpreter, told The Macomb Daily of Mount Clemens for a story published Sunday. "This house really belongs to Lance. This is his environment. He can't speak out for himself, and I hope we can save this house."

ABC said 20.5 million viewers saw a crew led by host Ty Pennington rehabilitate the Vardons' 980-square-foot house in suburban Detroit from the inside out, including installing cameras and flat-screen monitors allowing the Vardons to monitor their son, Lance.

Today, the numbers that most affect the Vardons are a monthly house payment of $2,300 and a mortgage rate that has topped 11 percent after having been resold three times since the makeover. And they're struggling to keep their house from becoming what Oak Park officials say would be the 391st to go into foreclosure this year. Throughout Oakland County, officials expect 9,400 foreclosures this year, a 440 percent increase from 2004.

In case you want to re-live early 2008 when the economy was till vibrant and programs like this had a good-feel to them, here is a link to a blog with YouTube videos of the entire episode in eight parts.
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Fluid Tunes for the Mac (Wikked Cool!!)

Fluid Tunes is gesture recognition software that, when combined with an iSight camera, can be used to control the iTunes library. Here is a good post from the Alltogether blog with a video podcast of the program in action. Granted you can already do this on an iPhone by touching the screen, but this new application allows users to stand back from the screen and use a camera to interact with the computer.

This post and a couple of others I found all reference the film adaptation of the short story Minority Report and its use of Multi-touch technology as described in Wikipedia:

The film foreshadowed multi-touch technology that would become a reality several years later. Anderton interacts with the Precrime computer using a large holographic wall display, which he manipulates with his hands while wearing special gloves. He uses gestures such as "spreading" to enlarge an image and "dragging" to move images around. Earlier films such as Tron (1982) had featured multi-touch technology, but the fast, fluid, and dynamic manipulation of real-time video in Minority Report captured the public imagination in a way that earlier depictions had not.

Today this technology is become commonplace with the iPhone and now the Blackberry Storm. And how many of the news teams on election night this year could not keep hands off their interactive electoral maps [as envisioned by SNL - 5:27 mark] .

But it was not so long ago that this technology was fresh and new and causing the TED crowd to oooh and aaahhh. Here is a video from TED 2006 where Jeff Han - a research scientist for New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences - demonstrates an "interface-free," touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.
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AT Freeware

Recently on one of the listservs a member asked about access technology freeware. Many list members posted their favorite sites and information about what they have used. The best of the list was complied and placed on the ATHEN Wiki under the heading Free and Open Source AT. Check it out and feel free to add or modify the Wiki yourself.

A Logic Named Joe

At dinner this evening my younger son asked me a question to which I did not have a ready answer - and as usual my response was to inform him that if he is still interested after dinner we will look up an answer on the Internet. He agreed, paused for a moment, and asked me how the Internet knows all this stuff. Well, I started to explain that the Internet does not 'know' all of this stuff per se', but rather the Internet is made up of a vast array of resources within which may be the answers to the questions he is asking. This led to him asking where the Internet came from - and for that matter - who invented the Internet. My wife joked that it was Al Gore and my older son chimed in with Bill Gates. She was joking -- he was confused. The conversation quickly turned to disputing any claim Mr. Bill has on the creation of the Internet and explaining the joke about Mr. Gore.

After dinner -- the original question being forgotten -- we did a quick search for the history of the Internet. I knew beforehand about MIT and ARPANET, but was a bit suprised to learn that like so many other technologies we take for granted today, the Internet owes a portion of its origin to science fiction. I grew up reading Asimov, Harrison, and Heinlein while watching Star Trek [TOS] and others, and am delighted every time some new gadget or gizmo hits the market that can be traced right back to its fantastical fictional origin. Though I consider myself to be pretty well read in science fiction literature, I had never heard of the short story "A Logic Named Joe" until I came across it in the Wikipedia entry for Internet.

Published in 1946 by Murray Leinster [the pseudoname of writer Will F. Jenkins], when computer technology was still in its trying to procreate stage, "A Logic Named Joe" is a unique story even by today's standards in that it combines possibility of too much information with a quietly efficient Artificial Intelligence bringing together disparate bits of information. Replace the word 'logic' every time it appears in the story with the word 'computer' and the term 'central tank' with 'Google' and you've got a tale worthy of today's "information age". Heck, within the first few paragraphs there is enough expository premonition to make you expect that by the end of the story the author will pinpoint the location of Bigfoots cave.

I'm a maintenance man for the Logics Company. My job is servicing logics, and I admit modestly that I am pretty good. I was servicing televisions before that guy Carson invented his trick circuit that will select any of 'steenteen million other circuits—in theory there ain't no limit—and before the Logics Company hooked it into the tank-and-integrator set-up they were usin' 'em as business-machine service. They added a vision screen for speed—an' they found out they'd made logics. They were surprised an' pleased. They're still findin' out what logics will do, but everybody's got 'em.

See what I mean. Written in a gutteral tone and at a time when computers were so rare they were given individual names, the story unfolds that "Joe" has somehow developed an independent personality and decides that he can do better than thems that are maintainin' him. Joe decides that information should be shared openly and freely - security protocols and logical reasoning be damned.

In just a few pages, the story introduces and predicts a plethora of innovations and uses we take for granted today, including:

• Internet access from a desktop computer
• Fully searchable networks
• Video databases (fully searchable)
• On-line accounting software
• Television available via desktop computers
• Real-time news, weather, stock quotes, etc.
• Internet telephone and televid service
• Personal Internet addresses
• Individual phone numbers (in a time of party lines)
• The ability to censor content for users
• On-line and On-screen technical support
• Web based software programs
• Cyber Cafes (for a fee)
• Log-In screens
• Pop-up ads
• Viruses

I cannot believe that in my life to this day I had never even heard of this story let alone read it. It's like finding a band that was not known by me in their heyday but now I cannot get enough of because I love a cover of one of their tunes and am thrilled to hear the original. Now I need to find everything written by Will F. Jenkins [a.k.a Murray Lenister].

By the way - the story is available for reading through Baen Books and a 1950 radio recording in MP3 is available through Archive.org.

Silicone Touch: an iPhone case for the visually impaired

A colleague saw this on Engadget.com recently and thought it was interesting. Basically, it is a sleeve that fits over the iPhone and has tactile buttons for controlling custom iPhone applications. While totally conceptual right now and extremely limited in its actual functionality (i.e., apps would need to be customized), it would be interesting if the basic interface could change by enabling an "access mode" such that the tactile sleeve could be functional.

A similar concept was presented in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager for a computer terminal that adapted to a visually impaired crew member -- "Year of Hell" - season 4 - episodes 8 and 9.

Anyway, the approach seems conceptually similar to the VisuAide Maestro, which is essentially a tactile-button sleeve that slips over a touchscreen PDA, plus accompanying software.

Webcast: Implementing the Digital Accessibility Agenda ofthe Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 12/3/08

Late notice, but this sounds interesting enough to tune in. It's a four-hour webinar, so a big chunk of time, but worthwhile to use working in AT. Here are the details:

UNITAR/G3ict Seminar on Implementing the Digital Accessibility Agenda of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Challenges and Opportunities for Signatory States

Summary
Date: 3 December 2008 (International Day of Persons with Disabilities)
Location: United Nations Headquarters, New York
The seminar will be aired live via webcast on http://www.un.org/webcast.

Background:
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is one of the fastest ever negotiated human rights treaties. Since its adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2006, it was signed by 136 countries, and ratified by 41 as of October 2008. The Convention at large - and more specifically its Article 9 - creates the first universal framework addressing the accessibility of Information and Communication Technologies - ICTs - and assistive technologies, making it one of the most innovative and far reaching dispositions of the Convention.
As a result, all mandates of the Convention regarding accessibility cover ICT applications. These dispositions benefit an estimated 650 million persons living with disabilities worldwide, most of them in developing countries. The Convention puts accessible and assistive ICT solutions even more into the focus in the coming years for industry, users, and policy makers, as it represents both a major human rights milestone and a considerable market driving force for assistive and accessible ICTs.

Objectives

On the occasion of the International Day of Person with Disabilities, the seminar aims to contribute to the rapid and effective implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in general and its digital accessibility agenda by:
• providing an overview over the provisions and the status of the Convention;
• introducing participants into the Digital Accessibility Agenda of the Convention;
• reviewing the practical implications for signatory states with regard to provisions pertaining to digital accessibility;
• sharing knowledge among key stakeholders on how ICT accessibility mandates can be best met, and the role that ICT vendors, users and policy makers can play in support its implementation; and
• presenting tools and resources available to policy makers and civil society to monitor and implement the Digital Accessibility Agenda of the Convention.

Additional Information

Organization:
The seminar will be conducted in English. Sign-language interpretation (US) will be available. Further, the seminar will be aired via webcast.

Participants:
The seminar is open to all delegates of Permanent Missions of Member States to the United Nations, civil society, UN agencies and departments, and all guests that wish to observe the International Day for Persons with Disabilities at UN Headquarters.

Date and Venue:
The seminar will be held at United Nations Headquarters, New York, in Conference Room 4, on 3 December 2008 from 9.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m.