Multimedia Accessibility

Graphic Testimony It's possible to provide long descriptions for dynamically generated graphs By Stan Berman

Accessibility is becoming increasingly critical to the Internet experience. Is your site accessible to people with disabilities? Is it compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer?

The guidelines overview pages listed below introduce WAI accessibility guidelines and their related documents, such as: * techniques to help implement the guidelines * translations of the documents into different languages * checklists

Making multimedia e-learning optimally accessible is not about ticking a checklist! All our advice encourages a thoughtful and analytic approach to addressing accessibility issues. Accessible e-learning is achieved by engagement, not by formula

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Reading Text Online Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D., Chief of Advanced Studies and Projects for HFI, discusses reading text online. Are we really ready to make research based decisions?

Questo è un servizio sperimentale offerto dall'Adaptive Technology Resource Center (ATRC) presso l'Università di Toronto.

Guideline 1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.

Di B., Paolini P., Speroni M. (2004 (to appear)). Web Accessibility for Blind Users Towards Advanced Guidelines. UI4ALL Conference (User Interfaces for All), Vien [sic]

Solutions de rechange aux tests de Turing sur le Web Note de groupe de travail du W3C du 23 novembre 2005

What's really at stake with Kindle is Amazon's desire to re-invent itself as a company where the buying and selling of retail goods is not an end in itself but also a means by which to obtain valuable client data. In a more abstract sense, Amazon.com is actively producing laboring subjects in and around an everyday practice-the reading of books and periodicals-which to my knowledge has never shared as direct a relationship to economically productive activity as it does with Kindle.

The Authors Guild is pressuring Amazon to modify the Kindle 2 so that the synthetic speech function can only be used with the express authorization of the owner of the copyright of a work. A coalition of organizations that represent or work with persons with reading disabilities is organizing a protest to persuade the Guild to change its position. KEI supports the protest, and makes this statement on the Kindle 2 issue:

A coalition of organizations representing people who cannot read print will protest the removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 at the Authors Guild headquarters in NY City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, 12 to 2:00 p.m. Join us there! Manon

Amazon's new world-beating gadget isn't the savior of the e-book, genre. It's a proprietary, market-protecting anomaly in a world of increasingly open standards and accessible media. Shame on you, Amazon. (...) The thing that e-books need, I'm convinced, is PDF. Secure, reflowable, customizable PDF. The reader devices need to be easy on the eyes, lightweight, and allow users to shunt any PDF to it, whether it's a specially formatted e-book or not. If I am paying $300+ for essentially a document storage device on steroids, I need to be able to put my own junk on it, too. (...)You might be lining your own pockets and making a few sales, Mr. Bezos, but you're also promoting confusion in the marketplace and causing division in the e-book space at a time when everyone else is pushing for convergence and open standards. Thanks for nothing.

Same as in Forbes' but on the NFB site with contact info

This isn't a new issue. George Kerscher and I wrote a major essay on the topic seven(!) years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This irony continues: it's a terrible shame that Amazon (and other ebook device vendors) keeps putting out ebook products that are inaccessible to the blind! More on that in another essay. The essence of the Soundproof Book essay was the dueling moral high grounds: author's rights vs. the right to access. Since these are both generally good from society's standpoint, how do you handle the conflict between them?

The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright. Amazon has taken a step in the right direction by including text-to-speech technology for reading e-books aloud on its new Kindle 2". More details are available on the Forbes website.

Listening to the examples demonstrates that nobody non-blind and non-masochistic would use the Kindle 2 text-to-speech feature. And as blind people can't use the Kindle 2, what is the point of that feature - and of the Authors' Guild ruckus about it?

February 25, 2009. Text-to-speech (TTS) programs have been in use for a number of years, and they're improving. As Roy Blount says in an op-ed in today's New York Times, Kindle 2's TTS isn't Jim Dale reading "Harry Potter," but it's listenable. There's no need to take our word for it; have a listen to the sample below.