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 WWW2008 event last week in Beijing. To provide us with a summary of the event, I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Mark DuBois, from Illinois Central College and WOW?’s Director of Education.
Mark participated in many of the sessions and keynotes and as a result he has a unique perspective on the value of the conference. Knowledge gained from the conference will allow us to report back to WOW members and Web professionals via this podcast and WOW?’s educational outreach to high schools and colleges worldwide.
Check out the three minute interview at: WOWTechnologyMinute
Today s podcast is sponsored by the Webmaster Survival Guide. Check out all of the great resources and links at: WebmasterSurvivalGuide
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 of the topic of Web accessibility. To assist us in better understanding the issue from a “what can we do today” perspective, I am on the phone with Professor Mark DuBois, from Illinois Central College. Mark, good afternoon and thanks for agreeing to this interview.
MARK DUBOIS: Well Bill, thanks for having me. I look forward to it.
BILL: You bet, thanks. Mark, you know, thousands of Web professionals are tasked to manage a number of complex technical designs and Web business topics for their clients everyday. And sure, you know, they’re not always accessibility specialists. And as a result, I’d like for you to share with the listeners of this podcast a couple of specific examples of what Web professionals need to incorporate when considering Web accessibility for their clients today.
MARK: Okay, in a nutshell I think the best thing that any practicing Web professional can do is make sure that their sites adhere to Web standards and where possible they separate presentation and content and that they also understand how individuals that have various difficulties, how they navigate websites. They can make some fundamental changes. I’ll just give you a real simple example here. This comes courtesy of Professor Jon Gunderson over at the University of Illinois. And in an example he was using in class a couple of weeks ago he mentioned about a survey. And this was a webpage, contained a number of like a lickert scale, essentially, but I think there were nine entries. And each one of the radio buttons had a number assigned to it so it was, technically, it met all the accessible standards and it would have passed any of the automated validation, accessibility validation routines. But if an individual was actually trying to use this particular form, what they would encounter is, well here’s the initial question and then they would listen to the audio browser go through and give them the numbers one, two, three, up to nine, followed by the numbers one, two, three, up to nine and be listening to that over and over. So although it was technically accessible, it clearly wasn’t useable.
BILL: Very interesting, thank you for sharing Mark. I can see where that would be very useful to understand and be able to eliminate. Let me ask you a question again Mark, you’re serving also as the director of Education for the WOW organization and we’re certainly grateful for that. And to that end, we’re collaborating on the development of an additional short course for the webprofessionaltraining.org website and I’m curious to know, could you share with the listeners of this podcast, on the topic of Web accessibility, what we might expect out of the short course for Web accessibility?
MARK: Certainly. I think as I had mentioned previously, one of the top things is to understand how people actually use the Web. If they’re relying on assistive technologies how they actually work with websites. I think that’s a key understanding. And then we get into some of the specifics, slight modifications you can make. For instance, if you’re using JavaScript you can incorporate onfocus and onblur event handlers, you can incorporate keyhandlers, onkeypress and so forth and tasks for various keys. It doesn’t require a lot of extra coding, but you can do some rather interesting things that will help people out. Understanding how people navigate via headers, how they use the tab key for instance. How they navigate through links. All of those would be aspects that would be included in the course.
BILL: Yeah, fair enough. And Mark, for that audience that necessarily is not pursuing Web accessibility as a full-time position, but part of their, you know, ditty-bag, if you will, of skills that they need to be proficient as a Web professional, would you say, what length of time do you have in mind for this short course and what kind of a cost do you anticipate?
MARK: Well I’m thinking that the course would run somewhere between two and four weeks, depending on how much time people have to spend on it. And like most of the WOW courses we’d probably be talking less than a hundred dollars for it.
BILL: Yeah.
MARK: So I’m trying to keep it as affordable as possible.
BILL: Sure, sounds good. And enough time for me to really get my head around and understand what I need to do as a designer, developer, webmaster, in the accessibility world.
MARK: Exactly. Something that, in the same that today you’re building a site you take into consideration issues like security and so forth, just basically understanding what’s involved, why it’s helpful to have fluid design on your webpages and that sort of thing, as you build your templates.
BILL: Yeah, fair enough. I thank you for that Mark and then again all for the support you’ve provided the WOW organization for years. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute, on the phone with Professor Mark DuBois from Illinois Central College. Thanks for your time today Mark.
MARK: Well you’re welcome Bill, I enjoyed it. Thanks for asking.
BILL: Today’s WOW Technology Minute is sponsored by the Voices That Matter series of conferences. The Voices That Matter Web Design Conference is a unique event brought to you by New Rider, the leading publisher or Web design books and resources and home to the most popular Web design authors, trainers and speakers. This year?’s Voices That Matter Web Design Conference will take place June 10-13, 2008 in Nashville, Tennessee.