Accessibility

Honoring John Slatin

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:45:29 -0500

Last week John Slatin passed away. This week there is a new project to honor his memory and help his family.

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project matches accessibility experts with companies that would like a brief review of their site for accessibility. In return, the site owner is asked to contribute a minimum of $500 to The John Slatin Fund. The John Slatin Fund was established to help John’s beloved Anna offset the medical expenses incurred during John’s long illness. The goal of this project is to raise $25,000 for John’s family.

Learn about the project and sign up at http://www.knowbility.org/business/john-slatin.

A Friend Passes

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:45:49 -0500

Last night John Slatin passed away, after a long bout with Leukemia. John was a tireless advocate for accessibility, and a terrific person. His approach to accessibility was fair and well-reasoned, and he was always interested in learning about different perspectives on a topic. I'll miss sitting down at CSUN with John for dinner or drinks to debate accessibility topics. John will be missed but the impact of his work on WCAG 2.0 and accessibility in general will endure.

Reference Card for Accessible PDF Creation from Word

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:44:57 -0500

There is a lot of PDF that is generated though Adobe's PDFMaker plug-in for Microsoft Word. You can quite easily create PDF documents that meet the majority of accessibility needs with very little effort, if you know how. For the CSUN conference, we created a one-page document that helps guide users who may not know much about accessibility so that they can more easily address accessibility in their documents.

This document doesn't cover every possible issue, but identifies the small number of items that need some attention to avoid the most common issues that authors can prevent. In general, if an author:

provides equivalents for images in Word

uses Word's styles to define structural headings

identifies table headings for simple tables

uses Word's column feture instead of text boxes, and

enables the generation of tagged PDF

The results are excellent for most documents created in Word. Yes, you can deviate from this path and need to perform repair work to make a PDF document accessible, but to start I want to ensure that authors know what the path to minimize challenges looks like.

This is a first stab at this document, please let us know what you like, if it is useful to you, or any other comments you may have.

Download Reference Card

CSUN 2008 Talks

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:16:42 -0500

Last week, members of the Adobe accessibility team attended the California State University's "Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference" - aka CSUN. This is a big event in accessibility each year and if you are interested in accessibility you should consider attending in 2009.

Adobe participated in four talks at CSUN:

IAccessible2 Development: An Accessibility API that Works for Assistive Technologies and Applications. This was a panel discussion involving IT and assistive technology companies.

Accessible PDF Authoring Techniques. This was a talk by Greg Pisocky and Pete DeVasto from Adobe and Brad Hodges from the American Foundation for the Blind. The presentation slides are available.

Rich Internet Applications with Flash and Dreamweaver. This was a talk by Matt May and Andrew Kirkpatrick discussing Flash and AJAX accessibility, related to Adobe's SPRY framework, Flash and Flex. The presentation slides are available.

Accessible Internet Video. This was a talk by Andrew Kirkpatrick on how you can deliver the most accessible experience in video online using Flash. The presentation slides
are available. I'm going to post the main demonstration example shortly.

Please take a look and let us know if you have any comments.

Captions on CNET TV

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:00:53 -0500

CNET TV is providing captioning for the videos on their site as of last week. The video is in Flash and uses the DFXP caption support we put into Flash CS3. Check it out yourself at http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-31702.html.

WCAG 2.0 Last Call

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:18:44 -0500

The W3C has moved the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 to Last Call. This is the last call for public comment, so if you choose you can submit any comments on the draft by February 1, 2008. The draft is available at http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20071211/.

I think that it is worth considering two things as you read this document.
1. This document is more complex than WCAG 1.0 because the web is more complex. WCAG 2.0 needs to address accessibility challenges for the web that is being developed today, with dynamic content and Flash and PDF and Flex and AIR and Java and Silverlight (and on and on). Please read with the whole of the web in mind.
2. This draft has received significant attention related to harmonization with the U.S. Section 508 standards in development, the ISO accessibility guidelines, and the Japanese Industrial Standards. Take a look at the latest draft of the Section 508 standards at http://teitac.org/wiki/EWG:Draft_Nov_27 and compare. Wouldn't it be nice to have one set of standards to attend to? I think so.

I don't feel that this draft is perfect, but think that it is an excellent document that we can use to improve accessibility moving forward. if you pick any two people interested in accessibility they will not fully agree on all the points in WCAG 2.0 but I think that you'll find that the issues in dispute tend to be edge cases.

I've been on the WCAG group for the past several months and there has been a lot of hard work put in during this time processing hundreds of comments. Please comment on this draft and let's get this one finished!

Introducing AIA

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 12:43:14 -0500

A group of IT and assistive technology companies have formed a group designed to address engineering challenges around accessibility issues. The group's name is the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance, or AIA. Adobe is part of this group because it is important to have improved methods to provide straightforward interoperability between IT products and assistive technology tools.

Of particular interest is the project that seeks to harmonize existing accessibility APIs such as IAccessible2 and UIAutomation. With the wide variety of assistive technologies available today, both these tools and Adobe's players need reliable and standard methods to participate in information exchanges with assistive tools. There are too many tools for Adobe's players to support directly through customization and similarly the assistive technology tools have too many IT products that they need to support so they too cannot provide custom solutions across the board. The way forward is through better and harmonized (or converged) APIs.

The AIA press release is at: http://www.accessinteropalliance.org/newsevents/pr121007.html.

The AIA group web site is http://www.accessinteropalliance.org/.

New Flash Player with MSAA on Firefox and H.264 Video

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:02:49 -0500

In case people haven't heard, we have a new version of the Flash Player available as of last night. The features that I'm most excited about are the support for H.264 video - so now you can have high-definition video and you can provide captions using the caption support released in Flash CS3 - and the addition of MSAA support for Firefox so users of screen readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes that use Firefox for browsing the web can interact with Flash content. The new player version is 9,0,115,0 and you can get it at http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.

Demo of JAWS with Flex 2 TabNavigator Control

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:02:08 -0500

I wanted to post a quick demonstration (using Adobe Captivate) to show how JAWS interacts with a Flex 2 TabNavigator component. This was a one-off demo - the kind I wish I could do without saying "uh" so often!

TabNavigator Example

TabNavigator example MXML source

Flex Scripts for JAWS (JAWS 8.0 coming soon)

Flash Captioning Seminar

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:04:05 -0500

I (Andrew Kirkpatrick) am delivering a seminar on Flash captioning Tuesday, July 10. See details below and sign up on our website.

Title: Captioning in Flash
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 11:00 A.M. PDT
Adding captions to video in Flash is essential to ensure that users who are deaf or hard of hearing can access Flash video content. Adobe Flash CS3 includes a new component to make captioning easy and effective, and a variety of captioning tools are available to help developers define a process that fits into their existing workflow. This session will share best practices for Flash 9 swfs, Flex applications, and older Flash 8 swfs and will show you how to get captions in your video step by step.

The Librarian of Congress and more

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:27:48 -0500

With the new features in Flash CS3 for captioning, the skins we've made available for accessible video presentations, our support for the DFXP caption data format, and new work on CC for Flash by NCAM I'm seeing a lot of new captioning examples. Someday there will be too many to point out when new ones come available, but in the meantime, here's another. This one is also by the Library of Congress and relates to the 2007 National Book Festival and uses the FLVPlayback skins.

The example is at http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/. It includes captions and is screen reader and keyboard accessible, and also offers a transcript.

Adobe's New Accessibility Engineer

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:19:39 -0500

I'm pleased to announce that Matt May is joining my team at Adobe working on accessibility. Matt will be working interally and externally, with Adobe product teams and customers to address accessibility in Adobe products, ensure interoperability with assistive technologies, and ensure that customers are aware of the many accessibility features that already exist in our products.

Matt is sure to be familiar to many of you from his work at the W3C. He joined the W3C/WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group in late 2000, co-edited the first JavaScript techniques document for WCAG 2.0 in 2001, and went to work full-time for the W3C in 2002. During that time, Matt was staff contact for the WAI Authoring Tool and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Groups (ATAG/UAAG), and the Protocols and Formats Working Group, which reviewed W3C and related specs for accessibility. Matt's most widely-seen W3C work is probably the W3C Note, "Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA".

In 2005, Matt co-founded a standards-based design firm named Blue Flavor, and since January, Matt led client-side development on a new merchant platform for Amazon's enterprise group.

We're excited to have Matt on the Adobe accessibility team! Welcome Matt!

Captioning Article and Examples

Mon, 07 May 2007 23:06:54 -0500

We've got a great article on the Adobe Developer Center: Captioning Flash video with Captionate and the captioning-supported FLVPlayback component skins
by Michael Jordan, who added support for captioning to the set of ActionScript 2.0 FLVPlayback video component skins. This is an eight-page article, and by page three you'll have captions. Pages four through eight provide more in-depth information for developers who want to make additional modifications to the user interface.

The beauty of the skins is that they complement the built-in ActionScript 3.0 FLVPlaybackCaptioning component that comes with Flash CS3 and allow authors who want to publish video files to support Flash Player 8 to add captions with ease, and provide an accessible interface to control the video for keyboard and screen reader users at the same time.

The Library of Congress is using the skins for their online exhibition on the MacDowell Colony, but they aren't using Captionate - they have a DFXP XML file from MAGpie. These skins also support external caption data in DFXP. We have our list of caption vendors who create DFXP caption files, including Caption Colorado, Automatic Sync Technologies, the Media Access Group at WGBH for developers who don't want to caption video themself.

As always, I'm interested in any feedback on the skins or the article, but first go check out the MacDowell Colony videos!

Captioning in Flash CS3

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:28:00 -0500

I want to highlight my favorite new feature in Flash CS3 - Flash captioning. There is a new component, named FLVPlaybackCaptioning, which works in cooperation with the FLVPlayback component to make delivering captioning in Flash really easy.

Ordinarily a Flash developer drags a FLVPlayback component onto the stage in the Flash authoring tool, sets a variety of parameters including identifying the video source, and publishes the video. The additional steps for adding captioning are to drag the FLVPlaybackCaptioning component onto the stage, reference the caption data file, choose a FLVPlayback skin that includes a captioning toggle button, and publish. The captions will appear over the video.

Beyond this basic process, there are many additional options that allow complete control over the location and appearance of the captions. The captions can appear in a separate area adjacent to the video (or where ever is deemed best) and with a variety of font characteristics including different font faces which can be embedded into the Flash movie and shown even on user's systems that don't have that particular font installed.

The captioning data file needs to be in the W3C's DFXP (Timed Text) format. There are already tools that help you create a DFXP caption file. MAGpie already supports this format, and other tools such as Captionate and HiCaption Studio have plans to support DFXP in the coming weeks and months. If you prefer to have the captioning work done for you, there are services that can deliver the DFXP file, including the Media Access Group at WGBH, Automatic Sync technologies, and Caption Colorado, and more providers are expected soon.

More information to come - let us know how you use this exciting new feature!

New Captioning in Flash Component

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 12:43:29 -0500

WGBH's National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) is providing a new component that allows Flash developers to add captions to video in Flash. "cc for Flash" is a free download and is available at the NCAM web site (http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/ccforflash/). This component helps developers use captions in QuickTime's QTtext format or in the new W3C Timed Text format called DFXP.

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Also announced is an update to MAGpie, NCAM's free closed captioning tool. This update adds a new export item to MAGpie's export menu to allow for the output of DFXP caption files.

To use MAGpie to caption an FLV, you'll need to use a file in a media type that is supported by QuickTime, so if your video starts out as an MPG or MOV just use that for the captioning, and then use the XML file generated by MAGpie. It won't matter as long as the timeline for the FLV is the same as the timeline for the original video. If you create the FLV from a portion of a larger file you'll want to get a QT-compatible file that has the same timeline for the captioning.

I'm really excited about this new development - send links to captioned video if you use cc for Flash. Thanks to NCAM for the great work!