Accessibility of Google Apps

Are Google Apps accessible enough to be relied on as the primary tools for your class or office?

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) feels they are not and has asked the Department of Justice to investigate the reliance of New York University (NYU) and Northwestern University on Google apps as a violation of the civil rights of blind faculty and students. See...

  http://www.nfb.org/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=771

The Chronicle of Higher Education had a short article on the topic that drew a lot of comments:

  http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/colleges-discriminate-against-the-blind-with-google-apps-advocates-say/30394

Just how accessible are the various Google Apps? The Web2Access site, which evaluates interactive and collaborative e-learning tools, has been looking at the Google Apps. You can see their evaluations by going to the Web2Access site at...

    http://web2access.org.uk/

...and entering "google" in the search box. Readability and accessibility of text editors seem to be common weak points.

NFB has created a set of accessibility demonstration videos to show the kinds of problems they feel raise concern. You can see the videos at...

  http://www.nfb.org/nfb/googleaccessibilityvideos.asp

Google itself says it is committed to improving accessibility of its products. See...

  http://www.google.com/accessibility/products/

and

  http://www.google.com/accessibility/

One response to all this buzz is to let Google know how important accessibility is for the higher education environment. Back when Apple started pushing iTunes U, the California State University system (which has 23 campuses) refused to get on board because of serious accessibility problems with the iTunes interface. CSU even sent delegations to the Apple headquarters to advocate for improvements. Apple responded by making significant improvements. So, letting the vendor know how you feel can bring about real change.

Ted Drake of Yahoo Accessibility Lab

On Thursday, Yahoo's Ted Drake gave a presentation of CSE students about accessible design to kick off the coming week's HackU event (http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/uw.html). Below are slightly cryptic notes of all the things Ted talked about

Accessibility Innovations and Challenges

Ted Drake, Yahoo Accessibility Lab
Facebook: YahooAccessibility
Yahoo Accessibility Lab Blog: http://yaccessibilityblog.com/
Drake's Blog: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/author/tdrake/
Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/7mary4/yahoo-hack-university-accessiblie-innovations-and-challenges

• Yahoo
  • Has history of front end engineers working with back end engineers
  • Front end team has task of making it accessible
    • Web developers do most of the accessibility work

• Accessibility HackU competitions (http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/uw.html).
  • Students build tools that make things more accessible
  • Team with the best hack gets a prize

• What is accessibility?
  • Addressing the needs of people with disabilities and their friends and families
  • About leveling the playing field
  • A major goal is to remove barriers - if your UI requires a mouse, you are already excluding people
  • Thinking about universal design, from the start, all the way through
    • You want designs that work for people whether they are abled or disabled
• Who makes it accessible?
  • Lawsuit against Target for the inaccessibility of their
    commercial site design emphasizes the importance of accessible
    design
  • Accessibility is built by advocates and champions
    • Advocate refuses to go around things that are inadequate
    • Champions make accessible design happen
• Make it accessible
  • Contrast - There are several good contrast evaluation tools
    out there, just search for "contrast checker"
  • Do not rely solely on color to convey meaning ("click on the red button")
  • Alt text for graphics needs to be explanatory, do not just repeat the headline
    • alt="" appropriate if image is decorative
    • ARIA has a role="presentation"
  • Title attribute - does not replace the Alt attribute
  • Images may be disabled
    • If using background images in CSS and you have text on that background,
      check for contrast of text on background without image. White lettering
      that no longer has a dark background is hard to read.
  • Off-screen text
    • A method sometimes used to make text available to people
      using screen readers but not visible to others by placing it
      way off screen
    • A problem in countries with text flow from right to left
  • Using wrong element type in HTML can confuse things. Use the most
    semantically correct element type
    • Example: using button for sign-in, then using anchor for cancel
      because you want cancel to look like a link
      • Confusing because cancel is an action, not a link to somewhere
      • Instead, make the cancel a button and style it as a link
    • ARIA role role="button" can be used to clarify things for the screen reader
  • Use th in tables for row and column headings
  • Command + allows you to zoom the page
    • Web designers are getting lazy about accessibility implications
    • A person who zooms in ends up with scroll bars
    • On Firefox, go to zoom text only (View -> Zoom - Zoom Text Only
    • Use YUI CSS packages
      • Example: YUI Grids CSS (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/) takes care of all the basics for you
      • All based on standards
    • Proportional sizing is nice, but your situation may require fixed widths
  • Forms need labeling - every form field should have a text associated
    with it and the label attribute should be used to associate the field and
    the text.
  • ARIA
    • Can be used today
    • Works in almost all browsers
    • How to do it
      • Landmarks role="search"
      • Function role="button"
      • Labels aria-label="Search Term"
      • State aria-invalid="true"
  • HTML5
    • Firefox 4 will have the ability to use HTML5 roles, but most other browsers are not there yet

• Innovative Solutions - Things student developers can work on
  • Traumatic brain injuries
    • Be careful about grayed out parts of your UI
    • Planning and execution assistant and trainer (PEAT)
      (http://www.brainaid.com/) manages timeline events, notifying
      patient of what needs to be done when
  • Short term memory loss hacks
    • Re-education tools
  • Cognitive disabilities
    • Syntax simplifiers
  • Presentation transformation
    • Readability.com
      • Simplifies presentation of Web pages
  • Icon identification of options
    • Enables visual based search, such as for phone numbers
      for people who have difficulty reading
  • Memory loss
    • What will help a person remember?
    • Mental games, seems to help short term memory loss
    • Journals
  • Non-visual people
    • Texture recognition
    • Converting visual to plain text
      • Photograph a street sign and it tells you want the sign says
    • Directions
      • Phone Wand tells you are going in the right directions
    • Games
      • Game for the blind that uses stereo sound
  • Deaf hacks
    • Sound detector, warns of sirens, etc.
    • Deaf twitter - take video, send it to twitter
  • Physical challenges
    • Web site scanner, moves through Web page section by section,
      bringing up sections that contain actions
      • Designed for someone who navigates with a single finger
    • Picture based communication devices
      • Buttons for specific messages (no, yes, help, etc.)
      • Need a service on the cloud that remembers your settings
  • Support social network
    • Giving feedback to support people
  • If it ain't broke, fix it anyway
    • Cool little apps can really enhance people's lives even
      if initially people are not sure they need them