March 25, 2010 Meeting Notes

Disability Studies at UW: What is it, How did it Develop, and What We Hope To Do?

Dennis Lang, Associate Director, Disability Studies

• The Disability Studies program is a multi-campus, interdisciplinary program exploring society's understanding of disability
  
  • Web site is at http://depts.washington.edu/disstud/
  • Inspired in part by the Society for Disability Studies http://www.disstudies.org/
  • Topics studied include "the cultural construct of disability, social justice, and disability policy, and the intersections of disability, race, gender, sex, age, class and other markers of diversity and difference."
    
    • Social justice
    • Policy
    • Law, society, and justice
    • Comparative ideas
    • Dance
    • Business
  • Currently, Disability Studies offers two courses of study:
    
    • Disability Studies Minor
    • Individualized Studies Major in Disability Studies
  • The program has recently received a limited amount of permanent funding.
  • Faculty participating in the program are from many departments
    
    • Rehabilitation Medicine, Law, Slavic Languages and Literature, American Sign Language, Philosophy, Social Work, Education, Civil and Environmental Engineering, History, Comparative History of Ideas (CHID)
  • Currently has about 20 students a quarter
• Disability Studies is currently exploring moving their Web site to Drupal
  
  • Hoping for easier site management, accessible design, and tools that will help build social connections
  • Discussion:
    
    • Drupal out-of-the-box is very standards compliant and thus generally starts out as reasonably accessible and intelligible to assistive technologies
      
      • However, it is easy to add modules or make modifications that interfere with accessibility
    • Drupal offers many modules supporting social interactions, such as new feed generators and news feed readers. You can weave interconnections with other sites that go beyond simple links.
    • Drupal does require management. Security updates come out regularly. The site manager is informed about the updates and it is wise to install them.
    • Drupal has a customization system based on "intercept and override" where the default site settings and configurations are intercepted and overridden by customizations, leaving the core installation unmodified. This approaches allows core installation updates without disturbing the customizations (usually).
    • A large number of themes are available. They are installed by placing them in specific subdirectories and then selecting them from the administrator menus
    • The Zen theme (http://drupal.org/project/zen) is a very standards-compliant Drupal them that is well documented and flexible
• The UW Standing Committee on Disability Issues is being rejuvenated. Dennis is looking for people who are interested in serving on the committee. Contact him at 206-522-3104 or dlang@u.washington.edu for more information.
• Sushil K. Oswal, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program at UW Tacoma is interested in studying the topic of accessibility. Anyone interested in working with him can contact him at 253-692-4308 or oswal@u.washington.edu.

February 25, 2010 Lunch Meeting

Our lunch group was small but the sharing was spirited. Here are some of the topics we discussed:

1. Thoroughly Updated VoiceOver for Macs
   
   
   • VoiceOver in Mac OSX Snow Leopard is much improved over previous versions and includes lots of new features.
   • Why buy expensive software like JAWS when in many cases VoiceOver will give you good workable accessibility to a wide range of sites?
   • http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/
2. Conferencing Software is Not Very Accessible
   
   
   • Conrad Kuehn of CEC/IT, Rehabilitation Medicine is exploring the use of conferencing software for instruction and is finding that most are not designed with the disabled in mind.
   • Basic paradigm of interactive video conferencing is hard to translate into an accessible form. Would you want voice software to be reading the text a PowerPoint slide at the same time a speaker is talking about the slide?
   • Some basic conferencing software such as Talking Communities (http://talkingcommunities.com/) works, but functionality is limited.
3. Time for a UW Accessibility Gathering?
   
   
   • Many groups on campus are doing very good work in the area of accessibility:
     
     
     • Disability Services Office http://www.washington.edu/admin/dso/
     • DO-IT http://www.washington.edu/doit/
     • Computer Science and Engineering projects
       
       
       • MobileASL - http://mobileasl.cs.washington.edu/
       • MobileAccessibility - http://mobileaccessibility.cs.washington.edu/
       • Tactile Graphics - http://tactilegraphics.cs.washington.edu/
       • WebInSight - http://webinsight.cs.washington.edu/
     • Rehabilitation Medicine Center for Technology and Disability Studies http://uwctds.washington.edu/index.asp
     • Disability Studies Program http://depts.washington.edu/disstud/
     • UW Change http://change.washington.edu/
     • Disability Advocacy Student Alliance - http://students.washington.edu/dasa/
     • Disability Law Alliance http://www.law.washington.edu/dla/
   • We don't have to import world class experts, they already are here!
   • How could we bring people together, help make connections, and ignite some synergy?
4. HTML5 Struggles to Include Accessibility
   
   
   • Wendy Chisholm is following the HTML5 discussions
   • One point of contention is whether summary attributes in table elements should exist. Many developers do not use them, the information they contain is hidden from most users.
   • Editor of HTML5 project does not seem to have an inclusive mindset
   • Apple is betting the farm on HTML5 (as opposed to Flash). Apple has a fairly good record on accessibility; maybe Apple could take some stands on including accessibility in HTML5
   • Important to get the HTML5 features right before it develops installed inertia
5. Noise to Signal Ratio Going Up on Tools
   
   
   • Tools once noted for their simplicity and usefulness are being subverted, raising the noise level
     
     
     • Google searchs get large numbers of aggregator sites (tripadvisor, yelp, etc) rather than what you are actually looking for. Many of the intermediary sites have no meaningful content, but they know to rank high.
     • Social networking tools are easily subverted by meaningless postings.