The old UX catch call is never truer here – we are not the users. The disparity between us and the people we are really working for, with accessibility, is sometimes just too great for us to even get a idea of what it is like, no matter how many videos of people using assistive technology we see.

And this zinger:

In reality there is no socially inspired public relations value in accessibility. A business can be seen to get more value out of sponsoring a guide dog than making their web site accessible.

The rest of the article is well worth the read. (via @scenariogirl)

It was great to see this one on their companion blog, Epic Win:

The theme of this year’s conference is “Crossing the Chasm” and while I was disappointed that there weren’t more sessions addressing disability accessibility directly, there is a tremendous amount of value in almost every session I have watched to anyone interested in any kind of accessibility. Through the conference website I was able to find a couple of good resources on the accessibility of open educational resources for people with disabilities:

• Open Source Accessibility Meeting (Check out the draft documents and presentations)
• The Open Courseware Consortium Accessibility Working Group

One of the resources I learned about today is folksemantic, a service and set of tools to help identify open educational resources. A quick search for accessibility resources yielded the following shareable learning resources:

• Accessibility of eLearning
• Accessibility in interaction design
• Access E-Learning
• Accessibility in Distance Education

If you do join in the conversation, be sure to add yourself to the virtual attendee list!

Dallin Paul Looking Good

Congratulations to my youngest brother Dallin Paul who graduates from high school today. After high school, many students with disabilities are offered the opportunity to to participate in some type of post-high education program. Dallin Paul is graduating with an exceptionally large cohort of peers in special education and because of poor planning on the part of the school district his options for a post high education have been severely limited.

Long story short, the school district picked the wrong family to try and place a student in a converted gym for a classroom with little opportunity for community involvement or interaction with any nondisabled peers. If anyone from the school district is reading this, did you not realize that the Phillips family has multiple Special Education degrees, a Master’s degree in Rehabilitation Counseling, Part of a Doctoral degree in Rehabilitation Counseling and a Juris Doctorate? On top of that we have a combined lot of years as teachers and administrators in special education and direct care of person with disabilities. Game on.

From The Growing Push for “Mad Pride”.

I am familiar with various movements that celebrate the positive aspects of difference such as Disability Pride, Deaf Pride and Crip Pride, but only recently came across the idea of Mad Pride, a movement that celebrates the positive aspects of mental health diagnoses. The movement has been around for awhile, but a recent Newsweek article was the first I learned of it, at least that I remember since I received my own mental health diagnoses.

There is much good that comes from accepting a mental health diagnoses and “coming out” to friends and family. Benefits include an increased understanding, a sense of community with others with like experiences and a greater openness to receiving help and managing lifestyle. Of course there can also be negative consequences, but I believe that the perception of those is generally greater than the reality.

On the other end of the spectrum from “mad pride” there are many who suffer from the debilitating effects of “mad shame”- an unwillingness to acknowledge a mental health diagnoses in ones self. In between those two extremes are the masses of people who have a mental health diagnoses that treat it as an illness managed through some combination of pharmaceuticals, self-medication or other treatment options.

When first diagnosed with a mental illness, I found myself somewhere in the middle– never ashamed, but neither was I anxious to shout it from the rooftop. Since that first diagnoses there have been long periods of darkness and frustration, I’m in a good place now with a completely different diagnoses (ADHD). I now freely share my diagnoses and am feeling successful in work and family life and my ADHD is a an important part of that success.

Additional Resources

• ‘Mad Pride’ Fights a Stigma (New York Times article)
• MindFreedom (non-profit organization focused on human rights and alternatives for people labeled with psychiatric disabilities)
• Mad Pride Wikipedia Entry

• Accessibility Blog Roundup II
• Twitter Accessibility Roundup
• Twitter messages tagged with #accessibility
• Twitter Accessibility Search

People Who Sit In The Disability Seats When I’m Standing On My Crutches

Tar Heel Reader is a collaboration between the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and the Computer Science Department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is a collection of over 3000 online books in an extremely online readable format. From the site:

Each book can be speech enabled and accessed using multiple interfaces (i.e. switches, alternative keyboards, touch screens, and dedicated AAC devices). The books may be downloaded as slide shows in PowerPoint, Impress, or Flash format.

A high school student with an intellectual disability may have difficulty finding age-appropriate reading material if he reads at 1st grade reading level. Enter Tar Heal Reader, not only is the text extremely readable, but it is also accessible in a number of different ways.

Go check out some of the books or even write your own.

Each of the books listed on the Tar Heels site was created one at a time, a model that doesn’t scale very well. At the other end of the spectrum is Readable (or Readability). Readable allows a user to take one aspect of readability (formatting of text) and apply it to any website.

Imagine now a tool that could take any paragraph (Like Readable) and converts that paragraph into some type of text or multimedia that is understandable to any user, at whatever level of understanding that user specifies. Cool.

What other projects or efforts are laying the groundwork for this type of accessibility to exist one day?

Additional resources on making your content more accessible to users with disabilities

• Improve the readability of your web page (7 tips from Webcredible)
• Methods for measuring text readability (resources and links from Standards Schmandards)
• Juicy Studio Readability Test (readability test and overview of those tests from Gez Lemon)

In his post titled, Some Sweet Disability Thinking, Red references a post from Mark Smith:

If you told me of all of the complications of your disability – physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, economically – and I simply replied, “So what?” would you be offended?

In fact, I give this very response to my friends – and, more importantly, myself – every day when it comes to the challenges of living with disability: You and I have disability hardships, so what?

Read the rest from Mark Smith’s post titled Three Pages in the Trash.

“So what?”

Fireman Somchai Yoosabai shows up and hears that the student loves comic book heroes. It just so happens that Somchai hasa Spider-Man costume that he keeps in his locker. He puts costume on and quickly and safely convinces the student to come back inside.

More at:

• Spider-Man Saves Autistic Boy in Thailand
• Fireman dresses as Spider-Man to rescue boy

“‘Access’ isn’t just yes or no, but really shades of accessibility, and has different dimesions.” (Access to Open Educational Resources Wiki)

The definition of access from Merriam-Webster:

a: permission, liberty, or ability to enter, approach, or pass to and from a place or to approach or communicate with a person or thing b: freedom or ability to obtain or make use of something c: a way or means of access d: the act or an instance of accessing

Depending on who you are or where you are at in life, the word access has different meanings. UNESCO has a fantastic wiki page on Access to Open Educational Resources where they define a number of different types of access. Although written for a specific type of content (open educational resources), the types of access they have identified can be applied generally :

• Awareness, Policy, Attitude, Cultural:
  • Access in terms of awareness.
  • Access in terms of local policy/attitude.
  • Access in terms of languages.
• Legal
  • Access in terms of licensing.
• Technical (Delivery Method)
  • Access in terms of file formats.
  • Access in terms of disability.
• Technical (Receiving)
  • Access in terms of infrastructure.
  • Access in terms of internet connectivity/bandwidth.
  • Access in terms of discovery.
  • Access in terms of ability and skills.

Reading through the comments on the page, it is evident that in many parts of the world, access for users with disabilities is a secondary concern (at best). Without power, bandwidth or an even an Internet connnection no content cannot be accessed, so who care if is it accessible to users with disabilities?

When considering all of the different barriers that keep people from accessing content on the Internet, all of the sudden adding alternative text to an image doesn’t feel like such a big deal. Let’s keep working on an accessible web, but in the meantime let’s not forget that lots of people don’t have access to that content whether it is “accessible” or not.

Via Stephen Downes

Also of Interest

• Accessibility, Availability and Affordability
• Access to the Web for People with Intellectual Disabilities

That said, I care very much about disability issues. Curb Cut has been an accessibility blog written primarily for readers already interested in accessibility issues. However, depending on your past experience you may or may not give a crap about disability issues.

My interest in web accessibility originated from my relationships with two of my brothers who were born with Down syndrome. Like a good brother should, I wanted to make the web a friendlier place for them. Well, it turns out that Patrick has no use for the Internet. Dallin Paul is a heavy Internet user, but thus far has been able to find every America’s Funniest Home Video People Getting Hurt Collection and Power Ranger video on YouTube without any problem. If my goal is really to make the world a better place for them then it is time to refocus my efforts. There is little I could to for the Internet that would make it more useful to Patrick or Dallin Paul, but consider the following:

• Patrick has worked for over 10 years at a University food court. He works hard, is dependable and well-liked by colleagues and customers. Nevertheless, there is very little chance that he will be offered a full-time position or any kind of benefits.
• Dallin Paul still has a fear of attending church with my family because of some very unfortunate experiences he had with Sunday school teachers growing up. When he does attend, he is welcomed by some, tolerated by others and ignored by everyone else.

I have spent a number of years as a teacher in special ed classrooms, traveling with Special Olympics teams and volunteering with various disability organizations. You wouldn’t know any of that from reading Curb Cut in the past. My disability experience is the only real value I have to offer and I purposefully kept it out of my writing on web accessibility. Shame on me.

Here’s to a more authentic Curb Cut.

From Aaron:

When I wrote the below checklist, I attempted to answer the question, “What concise pieces of advice can I give to designers that will have the greatest impact on accessibility in the majority of cases?”

Other Checklists

• Principles of Accessible Design from the National Center on Disability and Access to Education
• Web accessibility: The basics from Trenton Moss at Webcredible
• Evaluating website accessibility part 2, Basic Checkpoints by Roger Johansson at 456 Berea Street

• Should alt text be used to paint a thousand words?
• Mini-FAQ about the alternate text of images
• Alt Text, Less Can be More
• “Alt Text” search on WebAIM Discussion List
• Search fo “alt text” on The Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group (WAI IG) mailing list

These discussions are helpful and essential for establishing best practices. However, these discussions are harmful to the extent that a developer becomes tied up arguing about “gray areas” instead of building accessible content.

• Catching up with Accessibility: The Basics QuicklyShawn Henry.
• Accessible Rich Media by Sharron Rush, Susan Gerhart, Becky Gibson and Lisa Pappas
• Everything I Know About Accessibility I Learned From Star Wars by Derek Featherstone
• Cooking up Accessible Video for the Web by Pat Ramsey
• Core Conversation: How Accessible Should Your Site Be? by Jeff Beckham
• Targeting Your Web Site: Accessibility Litigation Update by Anitra Pavka and Michael Wasylik

In addition there are sessions on internationalization, web standards and the ongoing browser wars. Audio from each of the sessions will be recorded and at some point made available on the website.

Any sessions that I missed? I hope to see some of you there, you can get in touch with me here.