I'm finally getting around to going through my notes from the
conference. Here are some bits you might find interesting:
TEITAC, the group that is refreshing the section 508 and 255 stuff and
harmonizing with WCAG said they are about 2 years out from being "done"
where done means legislation can be be drawn up.
Ray Kurzweil gave a whirlwind tour of technology history where he
repeated over and over about the doubling effect - how aspects of
technology keep doubling or halving in the same period of time or
faster. Examples were speed, cost, size etc. He showed his first book
reading machine which was something like $76,000 and the size of a
clothes washer. With the doubling effect he then showed the knfb Nokia
phone with better capabilities fitting in a pocket for $3000. Many
examples followed where his conclusion was that technology would
eventually allow us to end handcaps, which was the title of his talk.
AFB was showing their solution to video on the web. After looking at
"all the players" they recommend Flash. Seemed to be a very
Windows-centric presentation and I wished I had asked what was wrong
with QuickTime since it did everything their Flash player did without
having to write custom code. They also made use of "acces Keys" in their
web page which has all kinds of accessibility issues. I did ask about
that afterwards and the presenter pretty much said, yup, that's the way
it is. I don't accept that.
I went to a preso on accessible GPS. Expensive but very nice stuff
happening with callouts of points of interest which provides visibility
into exactly what all is going by while riding in a car or on a bus.
Allows the blind to actually be an active navigator for travel rather
than a passive passenger. I asked about triangulation between cell
towers and network hot spots in addition to GPS (ala iPhone) and they
said it's actually less accurate so it can only be used in conjunction
with real GPS. Can often be off by 18ft or more so you could end up
going into the wrong store, but it gets you in the ballpark.
Dueling OSes - already been talked about. I did note the fact that the
Ubuntu distribution includes the Gnome GUI and ORCA screen reader,
making it a bit of a turnkey system like MacOSX.
Open A11y presentation talked about a IA2 which is their replacement for
MSAA, which is what Windows uses to communicate to AT like Jaws or
WindowEyes. They said they had to write IA2 to put good a11y in Open
Office because MSAA fell short. Apparently they also did a lot of work
on keyboard accessibility here:
http://accessibility.linux-foundation.org/a11yspecs/kbd/kafs-rc3.html
The presentation on good UI accessibility by design from SAP was
interesting. Apparently they wrote a whole book about it. If a11y
designed in from the start the dev effort is less than 1% while bolting
on later is a "two digit percentage". They promote one design for all
users, which I agree with. Lots of basic stuff like labeling buttons
with actions rather than just "yes" or "no". They do not provide any
hints or discoverability of keyboard shortcuts for their web pages
saying it was all in the documentation and people should just read it. I
disagree. I also asked about many of their shortcuts stomping on browser
or OS key combinations and their answer was "yes". As in yes, they do. Hmmm.
The presentation from Adobe on Accessible video was good. They actually
made a captioned video player in a matter of a few minutes. They support
using SMIL and DFXP to bundle up different tracks of audio, video and
text together. CNet is pushing towards 100% captioning on their videos.
Flash now supports H.264, not just FLV codes. The player can
automagically generate a transcript from the video captions. Flash can
detect a11y technology (at least on Windows). It detects if any process
is watching the MSAA stream.
Yahoo showed their experimental implementation of Yahoo mail with ARIA.
Generally everything is a bit green yet. They couldn't get everything to
work with any particular combination of browser and screen reader. ARIA,
as a standard, is not done yet so this is still a bit of a proof of
concept. I hope Apple will be jumping on ARIA with Safari. It's the only
major browser left that doesn't have it. Opera, Firefox and IE already
have some measure of ARIA support either currently or in their public betas.
CB
Josh de Lioncourt wrote:
For those of you interest in some very cool tidbits and coverage on
Apple's presence at the CSUN conference in Los Angeles, the biggest
conference for adaptive technology, you can read our coverage on
Lioncourt.com at the following link:
Apple Presents at CSUN Conference
Josh de Lioncourt
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
...my other mail provider is an owl...
