This was definitely a smart move as I landed my next three jobs because I knew about Section 508. Then something more happened. As I began working on sites to make them accessible to all, I began meeting and interviewing people with different needs and asking them how they use the web and what they’d like to see improved. This led to epiphany number 1: These people were just like me.

I know that doesn’t sound good, but I grew up in a primarily white, upper middle class, east coast community. I went to an expensive art school in college, that despite being in NYC had very few minorities I was exposed to because it was so expensive and offered few scholarships at the time. I thought “disabled” meant “couldn’t do something”. But it didn’t. In fact it’s a horrid word to use.

One person I know can’t see. But he can navigate most of his world through hearing. Can you do that? I can’t. His ear for music justifies headphones and speakers worth hundreds of dollars. Mine can’t justify $50 headphones. He types at least twice as fast as I can because I rely too much on seeing the keyboard. Which one of us is “disabled”? I think we are differently abled.

So with this in mind, I began to reach out to people of this marginalized community to get to know them more. And then I had epiphany number 2: These people are brilliant and amazing. Actually that doesn’t encompass it well enough, the are BRILLIANT and AMAZING. Yes, all caps is needed here.

The people I met are super intelligent, creative, patient, passionate and compassionate. They have discovered methods and tools to accomplish many of their goals, which are usually the same as yours and mine. Yet, despite being able to prove the desire and skill to do what drives them for a living, they are denied employment.

That’s the dream: To build a design and development agency comprised primarily of people that have the skills but are denied the opportunity because something allows the government to call them “disabled”, because they are not. Now I know this is easier said than done. First, it would be a virtual agency as these folks are spread across the country. It would take significant investment to make sure the team would have all the tools needed to do the job and some of those adaptive tools will get expensive. It will take understanding clients because the speed of delivery will be vastly different than that of traditional agency. It will take account managers and project managers that can keep it all on track. But there isn’t a reason why these people can’t work, they just need the tools and the opportunity. If you are interested in helping me build this, contact me, I know developers, designers, and security people I’d like to give jobs to.

*Comments are off due to the amount of trolling and spam I see. Please connect with me on twitter or by email on this post.

However, when the iPhone 4S came out, I migrated back to the iOs world. So when they made the announcement yesterday, I of course checked it out again. Overall rating: C.

The upside:

First the platform is unchanged except it isn’t beta and you can upload 20,000 songs for no cost. This is pretty good if you ask me. I have about 6,000 songs up there now. They have added a more comprehensive music store and just like iTunes they are giving away free music all the time. The quality is better on the tracks though as they are 320kbps versus iTunes 256kbps.

The downside:

There is no native iOs application. However there is an iOs friendly HTML5 web app. This uses the HTML5 audio tag to stream music. When you first load the app, you are shown artists and can see albums, songs and playlists if you slide left and right. There is search, a right hand alpha listing to jump around and logout. Thats it for initial controls. No “play” fromt he top level meaning you can’t just jump into playing a random song (I like that on the web and in iTunes). Upon finding you artist, you have to click to open the artist, then the album, then the song before you get a “play” option. What if I want to play all songs by the artist? Clicking play and letting it run on the first song will automatically go to the next track when the first completes.

Since this is a web app, it doesn’t respond to the play controls available in the iOs compatible headphones. This is a feature I love in iTunes, especially when its cold out or I am at the gym. Pandora even has pause/play working via the headphones. Since it is a web app streaming over the internet, use it on wifi. over 3G, due to the high quality of the tracks it stutters and buffers like crazy. In addition, one of the issues I had with Pandora’s HTML5 solution and the beta google Music is sometimes the next song just won’t play. This happens in the iOs web app as well.

The big downside:

So I bought a bunch of the free albums at launch and even paid for the new Coldplay ($4.99). However they didn’t show up on the iOs web app to play. Messing around with it for a while I decided to erase any content related to Google Music and see what happens. When you first launch the app, it asks you to authorize allowing the database to be up to 25 mb. In order for new music you just bought to show up you need to delete this library/database and start over. In addition the UI is slow to respond, sometimes doesn’t render anything, and crashes frequently. While some of the labels are readable by VoiceOver, they are the labels that are not rendered on the current UI, therefore I deem it inaccessible. Don’t even try to listen to it read you the name of the album art image.

Summary:

If there was a native iOs app, I would use this all the time. Maybe more than iTunes as I don’t have enough room on my iPhone to hold all my music. But to make it good, they need to work on compression schemes for the music over 3G. I certainly like this over iTunes Match as it is free and DRM free, it just isn’t usable on an iPhone yet.

Lately there has been a lot of talk on the web about the awesomely cool things that we as designers and developers can do with CSS3, namely transitions, easing, animation and rotations. But just because we can do these things, should we? Isn’t it our responsibility to make a eb that everyone can use? I find myself recoiling as these things advance because not only are they difficult for some people to use, but I find them irritating as well. The more we can do, the simpler I want my sites to be.

I’m not that ambitious, but I am going to use it to kick off a project (and hopefully complete the first draft) I have been wanting to do for close to a year. I am going to write a book on building the web for everyone. The internet, and technology in general, is a great equalizer in our society. Anyone can log on and order food, gadgets, clothes. You can create a blog and become the next investigative journalist. You can meet people around the world and communicate with them without being judged on your appearance or the way ou talk. But not all of it can be used by everyone because if was built with weaknesses. The weaknesses don’t need to exist, we can build it better, faster, stronger.

If you have ever felt that something about the web was difficult to use because of any personal hurdles, I want to talk to you. I want to hear your stories of obstacles, and hopefully how you overcame them. And if you didn’t overcome them, I want to know how you think they might be overcome. If reasonable, we (I mean you, me and anyone else I need help from) will try to build a prototype before the book gets published to see if we can make the web more accessible to you.

So, jump over to my contact page and call me, Skype me, email me (which ever is easiest for you), and we will set up a time to interview you. I’d like to do Skype or in person as I want to record the video possibly for future use and transcribing. Oh, anyone know how to record a Skype video call?

Also, help me out a bit on this if you would be so kind. Link back to me, retweet this, and most importantly help the word database by taking a moment and telling me how many syllables a few words have at http://tarnoff.info/syllables. Thanks!

The vestibular system includes the parts of the inner ear and brain that process sensory information involved with controlling balance and eye movements. If disease or injury damages these processing areas, vestibular disorders can result.  Vestibular disorders can also result from or be worsened by genetic or environmental conditions, or occur for unknown reasons.

Vestibular disorders are issues with balance. According to Marissa, it is like being drunk all the time in that you are dizzy, have a loss of balance, and headaches. These family of diseases affect 1% of the population which is roughly 3 million people here in the United States. Currently there are no tools to simulate what it is like to have a vestibular disorder for web designers & developers.

Marissa says that when designing sites to avoid the following:

• Blinking and flashing elements (similar to designing for those with epilepsy)
• No loud noises
• No Flash animations or moving elements
• Avoid backgrounds that can cause optical illusions like checkerboards, swirling patterns or Las Vegas carpet style graphics

Update

Marissa was gracious enough to comment below and included some more accurate numbers from VEDA:

“Approximately four percent (almost eight million) of American adults report a chronic problem (lasting three months or longer) with balance, while an additional 1.1 percent (2.4 million) of American adults report a chronic problem with dizziness alone.”

After I finished eating, I approached the gentleman and asked for a moment of his time. His name was Mike and he graciously allowed me to interrupt his reading. I introduced myself and explained what I do for a living. I hadn’t met anyone with his condition using an eReader, so I told him I wanted to learn about his experience.

He was using a Kindle DX, which is Amazon’s deluxe model. And his first thoughts? Mike loved it. He reads a lot and given his limited arm and almost no hand control, using a regulate paper book was very difficult for him. Mike also had limited head control, difficulty speaking, was confined to a wheelchair (he has recently received a motorized chair and “drives” himself everywhere) and had a service dog. In addition to the general love of the Kindle, he went on to mention a few of his favorite features: the large home & previous buttons, and the very large next button for navigation. Despite his limited control, he is able to hit these buttons easily enough to enjoy his books. He also enjoyed that the Kindle displayed a whole page and had a decent font size selection.

However, Mike did have a one complaint about the Kindle. The Tic-Tac sized keys on the QWERTY keyboard below the screen were completely unusable to him. He didn’t have the coordination to hit the keys successfully.

At this point I segued the conversation to web application design. For him, link size isn’t an issue because he navigates websites via a trackball. The trackball gives him control over the sensitivity and speed of the cursor. However, despite this added control, he would like links and buttons to be bigger.

The last thing I asked Mike was if he could have his way, what would he like to have different in technology. His answer wasn’t what I was really asking, but it was extremely eye opening. Mike wanted to sell his Kindle and purchase an iPad. He likes that it isn’t just an eReader. He likes that it offers up Amazon, Barners & Noble, Kobo, and the tons of free books he could access. He also likes the apps. He likes the keyboard in that when he is on a key, he can see it pop-up above his finger. He likes that if he hits the wrong key, he can slide his finger until he is at the right one and only when he releases does the iPad acknowledge it being typed.

In addition, and more importantly for Mike, was the way you interact with the device. The swiping gesture used in many applications (specifically Kindle and iBooks) was much easier than hitting the Kindle’s large buttons. However, the shorter battery life and the display shutting off were things Mike identified as possible problems for him.

The experience of interviewing Mike was incredible for me. As a developer it showed me ways to think that I hadn’t considered before. It will make me a better programmer, and more importantly a better person. However, for me the best part of this 10 minutes & my entire day was the reaction from Mike. The fact that I approached him, respected him, and was genuinely interested in him was evident on his face. By truly caring about his experience in the world and taking a few minutes to talk to Mike, I brightened his day. Most people don’t give him any time. Most people avoid him like they might catch something from him. These are people too, we owe them our time, our respect, and our love. Show a little compassion and they will make your life richer.

My last note on this experience was mike’s t-shirt. He had on it the classic evolution illustration with the final figure being a person in a wheelchair. Inside the wheel was the symbol for equality. Underneath was the quote “Adapt or perish”.  As society I think it is imperative we take both the concepts of equality and “adapt or perish” to heart. We need to keep moving forward making life better for all or we will all suffer the consequences.

The end of day one had lightning talks. They were so successful there was talk about doing more on day two. I don’t know if we will get to them, but I decided I needed to update my accessibility talk try to give what is normally covered in 45 minutes down to 5. I have added it to the navigation so you can see it here as well. Take a moment and check out my Accessibility 101 Lightning Talk. I will be adding it to Github later.

And before you start, Thank You for your help!

While at this time the federal government has not made it mandatory or criminal if you do not, the larger your company is the more likely it could face a civil trial. Target Corporation has been through a suit filed by the American Council of the Blind in which the ACB won $6 million dollars and forced Target to accommodate the blind and visually impaired on their website. The ACB isn’t suing everyone, but they are pushing to make Section 508 a civil rights law rather than a government regulation.

Section 508 subsection 1194.22 of the ADA is the portion of the law that addresses accessibility for things from computers to software to the internet. According to the law the only people required to implement Section 508 are those providing services or product to or on behalf of the government (federal, state and local). If your company provides a product or service to a private company that is contracting with the government and that product or service will be the contracted interface representing the government, then you are obligated to adhere by Section 508 as well.

If you are not in one of these situations, but have a consumer facing web site that MIGHT be used by someone with a disability you should be following the law.

So without further ado…

Do…

• Provide at least one font size larger than your default. Users can increase size with their browser, but if you provide a link you can do it without breaking design which increases usability.
• Provide a high contrast mode. If that majority of your text and links aren’t black or dark blue text on white, give the user this option. You can do white text on black, but limit this to menus or highlight areas as it is harder to read long text.
• Provide alternate, title, or long description text for all non-text elements with a message. This includes images conveying a message (not spacer or decoration), multimedia, and form fields. If the alternate text (alt) is longer than 50 characters, use the long description (longdesc).
• Use tables for displaying tabular data only. This means if you think the presentation is best in a spreadsheet, use a table.
• Provide a summary for all tables using the “summary” attribute.
• Better than alternate text, use labels on all form elements. Do this by adding the “for” attribute to the label with the value equaling the id of the field it ties to. If the label doesn’t work, put the title on the field.
• Provide a link at the top to skip repeat navigation for the keyboard navigators.
• Provide a link at the bottom to take the user to the top.
• Instead of using a drop down for multiple select items, use check boxes (have you tried multi-selecting a drop down using a keyboard to navigate?)
• Any emphasis made using color, should also be understood without color. Bold it, underline it, box it, but just add something other than color alone.
• Provide accessible text versions of multimedia presentations that sync with the presentation.
• Make your pages so that they make sense when no style sheet is applied. This means navigation at the top, followed by content. Use headers to separate your content like a outline.
• Provide redundant links if you use a server side image map. Better yet, use a client side image map or none at all.
• Provide a header row and header column to all tables. Make sure that all the data cells and header cells relate appropriately if there are two or more logical levels of headers.
• Title all frames so that they can be identified and navigated easily.
• Make sure that if your page flickers, that it is between 2Hz and 55Hz.
• Make sure that any items relying on scripting to display can also be accessed when scripting is turned off.
• Provide a method to reset or extend time limits if a timed response is required.
• Provide a link to any plug-ins or applets needed to view the content you provide. These should also be hosted on compliant pages and be compliant themselves.
• Provide a text only version of the site if no other accessible alternate is available.
• Test your project in prototype form before implementing it.
• Use sans-serif fonts for long sections of text. These read better than serif fonts like Times New Roman when on a screen.

Don’t…

• Know if something is accessible? Try using it with a screen reader like JAWS and you will know. Close your eyes and forget the mouse to see how you do.
• Put blue or red text on black or black on blue or red.
• Make a Flash only site. Provide a text based version.

Resources

• Color blind check http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/
• Guidelines http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
• Access Checklist http://www.access-star.org/ITI-VPAT-v1.3.html#webdetails
• Color blind add-on for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5001
• JAWS screen reader http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp