Hi Jayne and All. Between your lines, Jayne:
On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Jayne Cravens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sorry to only be replying now. To Claude, and others -- great that > you have this knowledge about making sites accessible. But the > problem is that this knowledge is NOT being applied. There is plenty > of knowledge on how to make sites accessible for people using > assistive technologies or people with limited physical abilities -- > you've shown a lot of it here. But can I know from all of the people > posting to the Digital Divide Network: how many of you apply these > accessibility principles? How many of you that supposedly address > digital divide issues address accessibility issues at all for people > with disabilities? Actually I became curious about digital things (from being previously an arrant luddite) when I saw how 2 well directed e-mails managed to convince the borough of Lugano (CH) to remove architectural barriers against people in wheelchairs they had steadfastly been heaping at a museum in the former years, against the law and in spite of the formal protests of the disabled people's federation FTIA. So it was kind of logical, once I chose to use digital tools, to address the barriers against disabled people in that field too. So the remarks about captioning in my former e-mail came from co-starting a project for digital accessibility in Ticino (CH) with Luca Mascaro, who had been on the Italian IWA team who wrote the Italian computer accessibility law and application rules: Ticino being the main Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, it seemed logical to start there where we could avail ourselves of all the Italian literature (tech and divulgative) about accessibility. Re captioning: when I suggested at one meeting of the project doing a podcast of a blind person reading some official sites with a screenreader, Luca said that I should also offer a transcript and suggested I look up Webmultimediale.org, a project started by Roberto Ellero and Alessio Cartocci who had been on the same team who wrote the Italian accessibility legal texts. What immediately struck me in their SMIL-with-accessible-streaming-flash solution was the potential it also held for minority languages. They invited me to join Webmultimediale and one of the first thing we did together was the captioning of Amanda Baggs "In My Language" in French, Italian, German and Rumantsch (a latin language spoken by very few people between Switzerland and Italy) in http://www.webmultimediale.org/barbara/2007/03/in_my_language.html (copy of the subtitle files in http://noimedia.wikispaces.com/Amanda+Baggs ). And Gabriele Ghirlanda - the blind friend experimenting with the NVDA <http://www.nvda-project.org/> screenreader I mentioned before, who also joined the project - and I did do that podcast of him reading the site of the city of Bellinzona, back then with JAWS, in <http://noimedia.podspot.de/post/ascoltare-il-web-con-jaws-sotto-la-guida-di-gabriele-ghirlanda-bis/>. Rather than a transcript, though, I gave a screenshot of the page read as seen with images disabled and alternative texts enabled. > > Sorry to keep harping on this issue, but it seems to be the > "forgotten" part of the Digital Divide Network. > One thing we could start doing is eliminating the visual CAPTCHA (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha> and in particular <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Accessibility>) that prevents blind people from using the sign-up page <http://www.digitaldivide.net/members/add.php>: it never detered spammers in the last years, whether they use slave human labor to sign up and post spam or the porn site CAPTCHA solving method explained by Doctorow already in 2004 in <http://boingboing.net/2004/01/27/solving-and-creating.html>. Best Claude _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@digitaldivide.net http://digitaldivide.net/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
