25 Sep 04 ftp: Digital Media Conference 2004 - my presentation and other cool stuff
I did a presentation on Rich Media Accessibility at the ftp Digital Media Conference last week. I spoke about making audio, video and Flash content more accessible to people with visual and auditory disabilities.
One of the things that came up later during the Q&A sessions was should the governments force people to comply with web accessibility standards. I believe that we do need official intervention just as physical accessibilty guidelines are now embedded into building construction codes. The trouble is that most design houses and companies do not care even to get informed. They are not aware that minor tweaks like putting ALTernate text description on their images and providing text transcript can make their web more accessible. And these changes only makes our web better and faster to load. In my own case, I am running a screen reader (a speech synthesis tool JAWS that reads out the web page) through my travel pages and I realise that actually hearing what I have written helps me edit my sentences to improve the structure.
In the web design class that I used to run, I used to talk about Metaverse - a fully immersive virtual world that appears in Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash. We used to discuss issues like how far this technology is and what would be the implication of such a world on the real world. One speaker, Adrian Cheok talked about some of the interesting work they are doing merging the real world with virtual one at the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore.
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Mac users have been using speech to read their documents when we need to edit them. Use a mac!.Any text can be read in Mac OS X.
Speech is in built into the operating system. No additional software required.
Mervin, Jaws for Windows provides a very simple alternative for navigation. Using keyboard shortcuts, the blind user can listen to the links or headers in the page and then another shortcut takes him to that part of the page. On the Mac, there is no way to navigate a page like this - you can’t use the built in speech tool to list the links or headers. All you can do is let the software read the whole page as if it is a text document.
Fortunately, Apple is working on their VoiceOver speech driven interface and they plan to release it with their next OS - Tiger. We are looking forward to it as it is built in the OS. Windows bases solutions like JAWS are very expensive.