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E-Access Bulletin, March 2012: Text to speech TVs; Council websites struggle
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++E-ACCESS BULLETIN
Access To Technology For All, Regardless Of Ability
- ISSUE 146, March 2012.
A Headstar Publication.
http://www.headstar.com/eab/ .
Please forward this free bulletin to others (subscription details
at the end). We conform to the accessible Text Email
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++Issue 146 Contents.
+01: UK's First Inbuilt Text-To-Speech TVs Hit The Shelves
- Panasonic sets offer ready-made accessibility .
02: Call For Global Body To Boost Accessibility
Professionalism
- Plan outlined for international expert community.
03: Councils Still Struggling With Website Accessibility
- Almost half of local authority sites rated as inaccessible.
News In Brief: 04: Campaigning Coalition - national unifying
group launched; 05: Suggestive Solutions - intelligent assistive
software; 06: Rewarding Accessibility - Technology4Good
nominations open; 07: More Gongs - e-Inclusion Awards
return.
Section Two: Inbox.
08: Petitions Continued - government glitches; 09: Graphic
Debate - blind people denied access in the workplace; 10:
Standard Reference - website commissioning guide.
Section Three: Special Report - Digital books in Italy
11: Reading without barriers: A recent survey by the Italian
Publishers' Association found that blind people in Italy are
active readers - often more so than the sighted. But even
though digital publishing has increased the number of e-books
in the country, many of these books are still not accessible to
visually impaired readers. Michele Smargiassi reports.
[Contents ends].
++Section One: News.
+01: UK's First Inbuilt Text-To-Speech TVs Hit The Shelves.
Electronics manufacturer Panasonic has built text-to-speech
functionality into 30 of its television models, designed
specifically to help blind and visually impaired users, making
them the first such TVs to become available on the UK general
market.
After switching on the function during installation, text-to-
speech will be present over a wide range of tasks in the
televisions, including speaking the channel number and name
of a programme when switching channels; the time that a
programme begins and ends; and whether other accessibility
features such as audio description are available for a
programme.
Text-to-speech assistance is provided on connecting to a Wi-Fi
network through the TV, and users can also to scroll through a
TV's electronic programme guide and listen to the list of
programmes, timing information and a synopsis of each
programme.
Speaking to E-Access Bulletin, Nigel Prankard, IPTV and
digital TV solutions centre manager at Panasonic, said a lower
implementation cost of text-to-speech in recent times had
enabled the company to offer the functionality.
"If you asked us to introduce text-to-speech [into our
televisions] two years ago, the extra cost would have been
significant, but with the onset of activity in the IT world, the
implementation costs of text-to-speech have come down,
enabling us to put it into the TVs without passing on the cost to
customers", Prankard said.
Panasonic worked with the Royal National Institute of Blind
People to build the text-to-speech function, undertaking user-
testing with a prototype before gathering feedback and making
improvements to the final design.
Prankard said he hopes to further improve the functionality
and add more features if there is positive feedback from the
initial models, possibly looking at how text-to-speech could
work for internet-connected TVs. "The W3C [World Wide
Web Consortium] are trying to make more regulatory
requirements for web accessibility, so we may have to think
how TVs could handle [web accessibility requirements] if we
give them the full ability to go to websites", he said.
And you can comment on this story now, on EAB Live:
<http://www.headstar.com/ten/> http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=693
+02: Call For Global Body To Boost Accessibility
Professionalism.
The accessibility field needs a new international community of
experts to help it become a recognised profession, Microsoft's
Chief Accessibility Officer told a recent conference.
Speaking at the sixth European Forum on e-Accessibility in
Paris ( <http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=693> http://bit.ly/wHNjGf ), Rob
Sinclair said: "The time has
come for accessibility to transcend its origin and become an
internationally recognised profession."
Specialist expertise groups have helped the security and
privacy sectors become valued fields of interest over the past
decade, said Sinclair, and a similar group could perform
equally important functions for accessibility, such as: creating
and maintaining a globally-endorsed set of educational
resources; training and certifying accessibility professionals;
building a global community of experts; and helping related
efforts around the world co-ordinate work.
Despite significant progress in accessibility over the past two
decades, we are far from achieving digital inclusion, Sinclair
said. There are various reasons for this, he said, including that
most design or engineering educational programmes do not
incorporate accessibility into their structure; and that there is a
lack of formal qualifications available to evaluate and rate
accessibility experts.
The ultimate goal should be for accessibility expertise to be
disseminated throughout businesses, organisations and
government, to provide customers with a proper support
network, he said. "These outcomes are possible, but will
require broad-reaching international collaboration and
dedicated resources".
And you can comment on this story now, on EAB Live:
<http://bit.ly/wHNjGf> http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=695
+03: Councils Still Struggling With Website Accessibility.
Almost half of local authority websites remain inaccessible to
disabled users, according to the annual 'Better Connected'
review of UK local authority sites, carried out by the Society of
IT Management (Socitm).
Little has changed in the picture of council website
accessibility since last year's Better Connected, with only a 2%
increase in the amount of councils achieving the assessment's
standard rating for accessibility - from 56% in 2011 to 58%
(252 councils) this year. Within those 252 sites, only two
(Kettering Borough Council and the London Borough of
Merton) were rated as 'Very Good' under the scoring system,
while 30% of websites (130 in total) were rated as having
'Poor' accessibility, and 12% (51 sites) were classed as
'Inaccessible'.
"Accessibility should not be seen as an extra layer of usability
to build into a site for a minority of users, however
significant", the report says. "Accessible websites are also
easier to use for everyone."
To rate accessibility in this year's Better Connected, testers
from the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB),
assessed the home page and other key pages of a council's
website; and how easy it was to complete three 'top tasks' for
users, such as finding out how to pay council tax, and applying
for a council job.
When scoring these tasks, RNIB testers identified three
potential website accessibility issues that would prevent them
completely from carrying out the task: keyboard traps (when
keyboard navigation of a webpage causes a user to become
irreversibly stuck on an element of that page); auto-starting
audio on a page (with no way of stopping the audio); and
flashing content.
These elements are also flagged-up in the latest version of the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0:
<http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=695> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/ ), which
were used as part of
the basis for assessment.
The report recommends that all councils should carry out user-
testing with groups of disabled people; build accessibility
checks into the website publishing process; and ensure that the
entire web team understands and practices accessibility.
Better Connected 2012 can be purchased from Socitm:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/> http://bit.ly/HmnwiN
And you can comment on this story now, on EAB Live:
<http://bit.ly/HmnwiN> http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=697
++News in Brief:
+04: Campaigning Coalition: A new national campaign group
aiming to unite businesses, charities and government
departments and other public bodies in a quest for accessible
ICT products and services has been launched. The OneVoice
for Accessible ICT Coalition, chaired by Nigel Lewis, chief
executive officer of technology access charity AbilityNet, has
already begun work to develop guidance to assist organisations
in producing accessible websites and accessible mobile apps,
including a 'Seven Steps' initial accessibility plan, available for
free on the OneVoice website. Membership to the coalition is
also free.
Short link: <http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=697>
http://www.onevoiceict.org/
+05: Suggestive Solutions: New software which suggests
potential accessibility solutions to users while they work on a
computer was demonstrated by staff from Loughborough and
Dundee universities at a workshop by the Sus-IT project - a
research initiative addressing ICT barriers faced by the elderly.
The software - which is still in development - aims to help
people who experience age-related changes in vision, dexterity
and memory, and works by monitoring users' computer
behaviour and habits, and picking up on problems
encountered. Solutions to these problems are then suggested to
the user, either from pre-existing assistance in the computer's
operating system, or separate assistive technology.
Short link: <http://www.onevoiceict.org/> http://sus-it.lboro.ac.uk/
+06: Rewarding Accessibility: Nominations are now open for
the 2012 Technology4Good Awards, an event celebrating the
work of charities, individuals, businesses and public bodies in
using technology to help improve people's lives. The event -
organised by accessibility charity AbilityNet and BT - includes
an Accessibility Award recognising efforts to "help an
individual or groups of people to overcome their disabilities".
2011's Accessibility Award was won by children's hospice
technology charity Lifelites. Nominations close on 18 May,
with the award ceremony in July:
<http://sus-it.lboro.ac.uk/> http://www.technology4goodawards.org.uk/
Short link: <http://www.technology4goodawards.org.uk/> http://bit.ly/fKLUxh
+07: More Gongs: Socially excluded individuals whose lives
have benefited from using digital technology are being asked to
share their stories in the e-Inclusion Awards 2012, which a new
category, "I am Part of IT". The event, established by the
European Commission in 2008, celebrates best practice in
digital inclusion across Europe, and features a further digital
inclusion award for individuals and organisations. Submissions
close on 4 May, with the gongs handed out at the Digital
Agenda Assembly Conference in Brussels in June:
<http://bit.ly/fKLUxh> http://www.e-inclusionawards.eu/
Short link: <http://www.e-inclusionawards.eu/> http://bit.ly/PPrnA
[Section One ends].
++Section Two: 'The Inbox'
- Readers' Forum.
Please email all contributions or responses to:
in...@headstar.com .
+08: Petitions Continued: Reader John Sexton writes in to
contribute to our ongoing debate on how the government's
electronic petitions website ( <http://bit.ly/PPrnA>
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/ ) is
hard for some people to use because a "captcha" audio anti-
spam test can be hard to hear clearly.
"The use of so called CAPTCHAs is both not accessible and
not effective!" says John. "They not only prevent most people
who rely on assistive technology [from accessing petitions] but
also many other people!
"The reason for such systems is to identify if it is a person or
bot accessing the online resource. The fact is with
advancements in OCR and Voice Recognition, many bots can
get past these tests, making it non-effective. There are much
better methods of determining if a person is accessing an
online resource, such as email verification, timed response
rates and server-side spam filters."
Overall, CAPTCHAs are now a dated technology, like mouse-
driven menu systems, which are inaccessible to a wide range of
people, not just disabled people, he says.
"If the government can't get it right online then they should
offer alternative methods of petitioning. Otherwise they are
failing their own Equality Act 2010 and it should be taken up
with the EU and UN!"
[Further responses please to in...@headstar.com].
+09: Graphic Debate: Last issue's news story on a report which
found that a lack of access to information graphics in tactile
form is holding back blind people in the workplace, when the
problem could be tackled by software adapting Braille printers
to produce graphics, has generated lively debate on our blog.
John Gardner said his own company's ViewPlus software and
embossers can reproduce a wide range of charts and tables in
Braille. "The Tiger Software Suite, bundled with every
ViewPlus embosser can transform and emboss an Excel spread
sheet or chart in Braille with one click", he said. "More
complex graphics, such as flow charts, can be made
audio/touch accessible. These products have been on the
market for years."
However, the report's author, John Ramm, replied: "Putting
aside the abilities or otherwise of particular embossers to
produce graphics, what my research shows is that blind people
are not getting them. It surely doesn't matter how much
hardware and software is available if transcribers are taking a
de facto position that when they come across a graphic in
something they are transcribing they produce a verbal
description, not an equivalent graphic.
"The blind people I interviewed should not need to know or
care about how transcribed material is produced. All they want,
overwhelmingly, is transcribed material which puts them on a
par with their sighted colleagues."
Further contributions can be found online - join in at:
<http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/> http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=688 .
+10: Standard Reference: Finally, a correction to some
terminology about standards used in our last issue, as pointed
out by Dave Sawdon: we mentioned PAS78 as "the first British
Standards Specification for web design" - in fact, as Dave
points out, PAS78 was a "guide to good practice in
commissioning accessible websites", and was written by a team
of volunteer experts, including himself and led by Julie
Howell.
"The point is important because of the need for readers to
understand that just about everyone has agreed to harmonise
on the W3C web content accessibility guidelines as the
specification for technical web accessibility, and that unique
national requirements are not helpful or appropriate. This was
recognised in PAS78, and in BS8878 which superseded it", he
says.
[Further responses please online, or to in...@headstar.com].
[Section Two ends].
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++Section Three: Special Report
Digital books in Italy.
+11: Reading without barriers
by Michele Smargiassi.
They can't see their books: but maybe this is why blind people
read with such an extraordinary passion. On average, a blind
person in Italy reads 9.2 books a year, while among sighted
Italians only two in ten people read so many. Six blind people
out of ten read a few pages of a book at least once a week,
while 53.2% of Italians never, ever, read. In other words, blind
people read significantly more than sighted people.
"The thirst for knowledge is strongest where there is a barrier,"
says Orlando Paladino, president of the Unione Italiana Ciechi
(Italian Union of the Blind). Or perhaps, where a barrier falls.
The data outlined above from a new survey by the Italian
Publishers' Association (Associazione Italiana Editori - AIE:
<http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=688> http://www.aie.it ) would probably
have been very different 15
years ago, when it was impossible to read books on a
computer, or to have them translated into Braille on a tactile
display.
In the recent past, books readable by blind people were very
few in number and not very often updated. These were books
printed in Braille, the characters formed out of dots that turned
even the slim Italian Constitution into a kilo of paper that could
only be crammed into an ordinary bag with difficulty. The
digital age has radically changed the lives of enthusiastic blind
readers. In the era of e-books, their library finally seems to be
the same as everyone else's, including new publications.
Has the problem been solved, then? Can blind people now read
what they want? And what do they read?
"I have no preferences," is the surprising response of some
46.7% of respondents to a new survey, but this apparent
indifference can be interpreted as: "There is so little stuff for
us to read, I must content myself with what I find." Clearly, the
revolution of books without barriers remains unfinished.
"Most e-books on the market still can't be read by speech-
synthesis software or by Braille translators; some can be read
only with enormous obstacles and difficulties, as they have no
indexes and hypertext notes, no paratexts, catalogues or
directories", explains Cristina Mussinelli, coordinator of the
LIA project (Libri Italiani Accessibili, Italian Accessible
Books), which, with the cooperation of the major publishers,
will produce and make available to blind and partially sighted
people an initial package of three thousand titles within a year,
designed to be easily readable by the special access software
and hardware used by blind people.
Literature, essays, and handbooks: in fact, blind people do
have specific preferences, and they are generally much more
demanding than the average reader. AIE launched its survey,
which yielded such astonishing results, to find the best way to
compose its first specialist catalogue for blind readers.
Since then, much water has passed under the bridge. In 2000,
three of the major Italian publishers threatened a legal action
for copyright infringement against two pioneering institutions
for the blind, the Istituto Cavazza of Bologna and the Galiano
Foundation of Catanzaro. Tired of their empty shelves, these
organisations had dared to fill them themselves, scanning and
putting on the internet a thousand titles in electronic text
format, to make them available to blind readers. This was a
service that commercial publishing had not provided to what
they considered "a small niche" of customers, though, in fact,
it is not so small: in Italy, there are 362,000 blind people and
one million visually impaired people, and on the whole they
love to read, as we have seen.
The ensuing clamor and indignation eventually obliged the
publishers to withdraw the complaint. So, eleven years ago it
was already possible to fill the gap of access to the texts. Yet
blind people had to wait a long time before anyone thought of
them as normal readers, or even more devoted than normal. In
2005 the Ministry for Cultural Heritage funded a project aimed
at building a digital library for the blind, but in 2011 that
project was assigned to UIC and AIE. "There have been
incomprehensible bureaucratic delays, against which I raised
my voice a year ago, at the Frankfurt exhibition", says Mark
Polillo, President of the publishers.
The trouble now is that due to the enormous delay, the project
(conceived when the e-book did not exist) must quickly be
updated; it can no longer replace digital publishing, if anything
it must stimulate it. "The real goal is to force publishers to
consider accessibility for the blind as a requirement of their
normal e-books", Polillo says. "Only then, at last, will the blind
will be customers of a library, like everyone else".
Article reproduced with permission from La Repubblica, where
it first appeared on 9 December 2011. Written by Michele
Smargiassi and translated for E-Access Bulletin by Margherita
Giordano. Our thanks to Margherita.
And you can comment on this story now, on EAB Live:
<http://www.aie.it/> http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=702
[Section Three ends].
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[Special notice ends].
++End Notes.
+How to Receive the Bulletin.
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Please send comments on coverage or leads to Dan Jellinek at:
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Copyright 2012 Headstar Ltd <http://www.accessifyforum.com/>
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The Bulletin may be reproduced as long as all parts including
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+Personnel:
Editor: Dan Jellinek.
Reporter: Tristan Parker.
Editorial advisor: Kevin Carey.
ISSN 1476-6337.
[Issue 146 ends.]
<http://www.headstar.com/eab>
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