Category: Blacktelephone Sites

These are the sites that we found have passed accessibility checks using the ten checkpoints, WAVE tool and Cynthia Says.

CSUN 2010: Accessibility of Twitter

I’m scheduled to do a presentation with Dennis Lebree, the developer of accessibletwitter.com at the:

25th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference
March 22-27, 2010
Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel
San Diego, CA

See CSUN Center on Disabilities for registration info. Hope to see you all there!

I’m also doing a presentation about managing www.csun.edu and what we are doing to make things more usable and accessible on a site with 175,000+ active pages and over a million objects.

Presentation 1

• Session ID: WEB-2014
• Title: Accessibility of Twitter for Mobile, Desktop and Web
• Speakers: Dennis Lembree, Joseph O’Connor
• Starting: Thursday, Mar 25, 2010 08:00 AM
• Ending: Thursday, Mar 25, 2010 09:00 AM
• Location: Emma AB

Presentation 2

• Session ID: WEB-1006
• Title: CSUN Web Environment Improvement Project: Accessibility One Link at a Time
• Speakers: Joseph O’Connor, Kimon Rethis
• Starting: Thursday, Mar 25, 2010 10:40 AM
• Ending: Thursday, Mar 25, 2010 11:40 AM
• Location: Emma AB

Joseph O’Connor
CSUN Manager University Web Communications

whitehouse.gov

Since David did such a great job of reviewing the candidates’ Websites and in response Obama’s team actually fixed some things on their site, I thought I would review the brand new www.whitehouse.gov site that went live on the 20th.

You can read my comments on everything from use of images to multimedia here: www.patriciarees.com/whitehouse/

Screenshot of www.whitehouse.gov

In general, I was surprised that they missed some pretty simple things like a few important images without equivalent text, a broken search form when javascript is off, but they got the harder things like captioning their videos.

I’m going to send them my review, since the site asks for accessibility comments and help. Hopefully they can be as responsive as the campaign Website team was.

Online Video in American Sign Language Showcases Verizon Wireless’ Nationwide Messaging Plan

Screen grab from the Verizon Wireless ASL videoWeb Video One Of Many Services Provided For Customers With Disabilities

By: PR Newswire

BASKING RIDGE, N.J., July 21 /PRNewswire/ — Verizon Wireless, the wireless industry leader in customer-friendly policies, announced that the company now offers information about its Nationwide Messaging plans in online videos in American Sign Language (ASL) to better serve customers who are deaf or hard of hearing. Continue reading →

New TTS service aims to boost accessibility

A new text-to-speech (TTS) conversion service could help to significantly improve website accessibility and help businesses make the most of their text-based assets.

This is according to UK firm Textic, whose Talklets Web 2.0 offering is unlike similar solutions in that it is the first TTS application to make use of a commercial software as a service platform. Continue reading →

Accessibility of Campaign Web site: Barack Obama – The Closed Captioning Page

Screen grab of the Captioned page

Since the blog article was published, we got some feedback and reactions from the web community as well as the Barack Obama camp. They fixed the video caption page. Well… issues of accessibility remain:

  • Why “ghettoize” or create a “digital divide” on the video page, and why can’t the videos be captioned (or have an option to turn on captioning) already? This is synonymous to a “text-only” page.
  • Why Lightbox? It is NOT accessible!
  • Also, when the script is turned off, so is the capability to access the videos.
  • And, when the style is disabled, the links to the video player disappear.