Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today s podcast is a continuation of the coverage of the topic of Web accessibility. To assist us in better understanding this issue from a higher education point of view, I am on the phone with Jon Gunderson, Ph.D. Coordinator Information Technology Accessibility Disability Resources and Educational Services at the University of Illinois.
Dr. Gunderson provides training, developmental tools and is working on publishing a guide on Web accessibility best practices. I asked Dr. Gunderson to share with the listeners of this podcast what Web professionals need to know about Web accessibility and what they can implement today.
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Transcript:
BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the coverage on the topic of Web accessibility. To assist us in better understanding this issue from a higher education point of view, I am on the phone with Dr. Jon Gunderson, Coordinator Information Technology, Accessibility Disability Resources and Educational Services at the University of Illinois. Good afternoon Dr. Gunderson, and thank you for agreeing to this interview.
DR. JON GUNDERSON: Thank you, glad to be here.
BILL: Dr. Gunderson, you provide training, developmental tools and you?’re working on publishing best practices regarding accessibility. Can you share with the listeners of this podcast what Web professionals need to know about Web accessibility and what can we do today to provide best practices?
DR. GUNDERSON: Well our approach here with accessibility, when I first got involved with accessibility on campus ten years ago, kind of a standard approach people would take to accessibility would be to find some online tools, I think this is still a model with a lot of developers. They find some tool that will evaluate their website, for accessibility, give them this report, and then they would look at the report and try to fix the problems that were identified in the report. We found that very problematic from a number of different perspectives. One is that it doesn?’t address the inherent mark-up that people use for accessibility. Most of the automated tools out there check for only a very few accessibility requirements. Most of them have lists of what I call manual checks, like there?’s alt texts for images, maybe labels for form controls, but if you don?’t use headers on a page, or not properly, these tools consider that a manual check. So if you don?’t have any headers, hey, your page may be okay. So when we looked at that, we didn?’t think that model would lead to really more accessible websites. People might fix them up a little bit but their time and effort is probably going to be wasted because the overall website still won?’t be very accessible.
So our approach here was what we call accessibility by design, and piggyback that on top of Web standards. So kind of the mantra was, okay, your current website isn?’t very accessible, but when you?’re ready to redesign it, come to us or take one of our training classes that we offer and learn about accessible design, the things you should put in your page, and we piggybacked those techniques on top of Web standards so kind of the overall idea is everybody wins. The Web developers win because they?’re using Web standards. They can more efficiently create and maintain their websites. People with disabilities win because a lot of the accessibility features are just built in to how the website is created. And also administrators win because the cost of putting in accessibility at this time is fairly minimal. In fact I say to people, it probably saves them money.
We have an example on this campus, Dr. Brigett works for our office of publications, public affairs, and when he got involved, when we got involved with him on accessibility and making the campus home page accessible, his idea of creating a web page was drawing a picture in Photoshop or Illustrator and using the save to Web feature, which basically just broke up the image to little, bitty pieces so it could be sufficiently downloaded as a picture. Well, it?’s very difficult, if not impossible, to make that process accessible. So we tried to talk to him about Web standards and using css and the structural mark-up of html. It took a little time to learn those skills, but his next version of the home page was, you know, 100 times more accessible than the previous picture version. It was also faster to download, easier to maintain. But it was after he did that, what he said, I think that really made an impact on me, he said, “I learned these skills because of accessibility, but I use them because they?’re better Web design.”
BILL: Interesting, great story. I appreciate that. And in effect that long-term saves time, saves money.
DR. GUNDERSON: Right. That?’s the big issue now. When the Web was a wild, wild west everybody was just dumping money into it, but now that it?’s become more of a commodity and a production, people are more concerned about cost.
BILL: Fair enough, and good point. And well said Dr. Gunderson. I appreciate that. What specifically, can you give us one tip, you know, if the listeners of this podcast wanted to know, “What can I do today to start this process and make my sites more accessible?”
DR. GUNDERSON: Well, I think one of the first things that we ask Web developers to do is to look at heading structure on their webpage and use headings in a hierarchical manner. So we reserve the H1 tag to uniquely title a page, so that people as they move between webpages can navigate to the H1, especially if I?’m a speech user, and know how this page is different than another page. And that if you have navigation bars, that you use header marks, header level 2s, either right before the list of links. And there are techniques in css to hide the header if you don?’t want the visual rendering to have it. But that allows people using speech especially, to be able to find where the navigation bars are. And then if you can use header levels 2s and 3s structurally within the page people can, especially speech users, can now go find the main topics easily. And keyboard-only users can also use those headers to navigate, so to, more efficiently to links on a page. So for example if I?’m using the Opera browser, it has a built-in header navigation function, the W and S keys. I?’m a keyboard-only user, I?’m not a screen-reader user, but I can?’t use the mouse for some reason. If I have headers on my page, I can use the S and W keys to navigate close to the link I want and then use link navigation to get to the specific link under that topic. So you can go from having to type 40 to 50 or 60 keystrokes, tabbing through a page, to maybe 5 or 6 using header navigation and the tab.
BILL: Very interesting and I appreciate your perspective on that Dr. Gunderson. Great information, great resources. We appreciate your time today. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) on the telephone with Dr. Jon Gunderson, Coordinator Information Technology, Accessibility and Disability Resources and Educational Services at the University of Illinois. Thank you so much for your time today Dr. Gunderson.
DR. GUNDERSON: Thank you.
BILL: Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by webprotraining.org, offering a complete solution for all your Web professional training needs including WOW certification options. Check it out at webprotraining.org.