Joint BSI/JISC CETIS Accessibility Workshop

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February’s Accessibility SIG (Special Interest Group) meeting was jointly run with BSI (British Standards Institution) as an informal workshop, focussing on the accessibility standards’ work being done around the world across various domains. It took advantage of the presence of a number of international standards developers and strategists, who were in the UK (United Kingdom) at the time, to foster exchange of work and ideas between the standards and education communities.

Presentations ranged from an overview of the accessibility standards work being done across the globe by Alex Li (Microsoft) to the development of accessible widgets by Elaine Pearson and her team at Teesside University.

Several of the presenters talked about their ongoing work in accessibility specifications and have asked for feedback from the community. So if you would like be involved in helping to shape these developments, people working on the following specifications would really appreciate your feedback:

* Standardisation Mandate M/376 (Phase 2) – Dave Sawdon from TRE Limited described how this work will create European accessibility requirements for the public procurement of products and services in the ICT domain (similar to the American VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template), which was introduced by Ken Salaets of the Information Technology Industry Council). The development team are particularly looking for public procurement officials to help define this standard.
* Access For All v.3.0 – works on the premise that personalisation preferences need to be machine readable, so it uses metadata to describe these personal needs and preferences. Andy Heath and the specification development team at IMS would like people to download it, try it out, implement it, check it works, and provide feedback.
* BS 8878:2010 Web accessibility. Code of practice – Jonathan Hassell, BBC, talked us through the background and purpose the recent web accessibility Code of Practice and Brian Kelly, UKOLN presented BS 8878 in the context of an holistic approach to accessibility. However, whilst it is now available for public use, user testing of the Code of Practice can only really be done in the field, so please join the community of practice and provide feedback on your experiences of implementing BS 8878.
* Mobile Applications Accessibility Standard – This standard, proposed by Yacoob Woozer of the DWP (Department of Work and Pensions), is still very much at the drawing board stage, with the focus on mobile applications rather than on creating websites that can viewed on different devices. However, suggesstions on what to include in the standard would be welcome.

Several of the presentations focussed on the work of specific standards bodies – David Fatscher from BSI gave us an overview of BSI; the various ISO standards which feature accessibility elements were introduced by Jim Carter from the University of Saskatchewan; and Shadi Abou-Zahra of W3C talked about the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) guidelines.

And finally, I am very much appreciative of the work that the BSI staff and Andy Heath put into making this event such a success. It was it was a great opportunity for the standards and education sectors to get together and I hope that some lasting collaborations have been forged.

Crowdsourcing to Fix the Web

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Well.. not the whole web, obviously, but some of the inaccessible bits. Fix The Web is a site which encourages people with disabilities to report any accessibility problems they have with a website. Volunteers then take these problems up with the website owners.

It is not intended to make web developers lazy (“I’ll wait until Fix the Web volunteers tell me what I need to do”) but rather to highlight the issues faced by people with disabilities, particularly as most web developers are not accessibility experts and most people with disabilities are not web developers.

Using a middleman (or woman) to act as an interface between people with disabilities, who experience problems with inaccessible websites, and the web developers themselves could help make the web a better place for everyone and act as an informal means of educating developers about the importance of accessibility.

iPad Accessibility

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I’ve just had a very quick look at the Apple’s latest and much awaited offering – the iPad. I say, a “quick look”, because I haven’t yet been able to wrestle it from the grasp of its new owner. However, I did manage to request a demo of the accessibility features.

How can something so visual, which relies on accurate touch, be made accessible? The form factor has a lot to do with it. The iPad is much larger than the iPod Touch and iPhone (not quite a sheet of A4) so Apple has more room to play with, which helps. The extra real estate means icons for the apps can be selected with even the largest or most arthritic of fingers unlike the iPod Touch or iPhone, which require almost pianistic dexterity.

There are accessibility settings for text-to-speech and magnification, although you’d probably need someone to set the settings on first use. This changes the gestures required to use the device, e.g. for magnification a three-finger swipe will increase the size, etc. But for me, the way the device works for visually impaired people really caught my attention. By selecting the Voice Over (text-to-speech) setting, every time the user touches the screen anywhere, a box highlights the text and the name of the app is read out. The required app can be selected by tapping. This means that visually impaired users can still navigate and select the various apps on what looks like a completely visual interface.

The iPad comes with a free e-book – Winnie the Pooh – and I was intrigued to see how this would be handled. The book has images and I was pleasantly surprised to hear them described. The descriptions were far more descriptive than alt text. The image of Pooh sitting outside his house was charmingly described, even down to the “childish writing” of the sign saying “Mr Sanders”. OK – I guess it’s down to the publishers of e-books to ensure that their books are accessible (and also to the app developers), but it does show what can be done.

These comments have only been made on the briefest of looks at the iPad and there will no doubt be some accessibility “gotchas”, but I think the size of the device has made a huge difference to the way in which accessibility can be handled.

So now, I’m going to see if I can distract the iPad’s new owner so I can have another quick look, but unless It’s by something equally as innovative, I don’t think I’ll have much of a chance!

Towards Accessible e-Book Platforms – New TechDis Publication

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E-book accessibility has just moved up a notch as a result of work funded by TechDis to make good practice recommendations for the publishing industry. This work was done in conjunction with e-book publishers and has been described in a recent News Release from JISC.

The News Release describes some of the key messages, such as:

* The experience of the ‘keyboard-only’ user can be significantly improved through a feature known as skip links;
* Buttons or unique ‘link text’ descriptions, which allow a user with little or no sight to be able to use the menus, can easily enhance accessibility;
* It is important to maintain a consistent layout between the main page and sub pages. This is also a feature that is welcomed by people with low literacy levels or those who don’t have English as their first language.

Also, that a statement from the publisher describing the accessibility options (such as how to magnify the screen to fully personalising the e-book) can be helpful.

A practical guide Towards accessible e-book platforms (PDF format) has been produced, which can be downloaded from TechDis.

BSI BS8878:2010 Web Accessibility Code of Practice Now Available for Public Comment

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The latest draft of BSI BS 8878:2010 Web Accessibility – Code of Practice is now available for public comment.

Here is an overview of the draft standard written for us by Andy Heath at Axelrod Access for All and includes information on how to provide feedback. Andy writes:

“On 30th April BSI published a Draft for Public Comment for a new standard in development – A Code of Practice for Web Accessibility.

Why is this draft standard important?

The work began as a planned update of the Publicly Available Specification PAS 78:2006 Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites (Available by search for “PAS 78:2006” at http://shop.bsigroup.com/). This was a very useful standard taken up by many organisations. But 8878 goes considerably further in its support for approaches to accessibility.

8878 gives broad support and advice to organisations in making Web Products (more than static html pages) accessible. It provides normative advice where that is clear and possible and informative advice where practice is less certain now but becoming clearer over time and it clearly distinguishes between them.

Included in the topics it addresses are:

* Recommendations to organisations on how to structure accessibility strategy and policy;
* How to effectively use web accessibility guidelines such as WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 etc. in the context of web products (Relevant sets of guidlines include Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG), Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0, Section 508 of the (US) Rehabilitation Act of 1973);
* Precisely where and how to use an inclusive design or audience-based approach, where to use an approach that treats each person as an individual and how to support each of these in technology and in the organisation;
* How to ensure accessibility through a product’s lifecycle;
* Principles for providing accessibility across heterogeneous platforms and technologies – the standard exposes the critical factors to consider in deciding what it is reasonable for an organisation to provide in a particular context and how that should be done;
* Effective approaches to testing;
* Advice on the Equality Act 2010.

Guidance is given on many other relevant areas.

The audience for the standard includes a wide range of stakeholders from implementers through many categories of manager to policy designers, individuals, disability experts and others. Organisations to whom it has relevance include individual web developers, content and system vendors and any organisation that provides content or system to a public or captive audience including corporations and government agencies.

Publication of the standard is scheduled to be around October 2010. Meanwhile, a draft for comment is available at: http://drafts.bsigroup.com/Home/Details/489.

It is open to any individual or organisational representative to comment.

A draft in Rich Text Format and a Comment Template can be downloaded at the URL given. The draft is also available for reading and commenting directly on the site (Press the View button) and should be accessible to all. Where that is not the case or for other reasons someone has difficulty making comment it would be helpful for that to be raised on the site, with BSI or with myself (Andy Heath) or any other community members who have worked on the standard (not named here). I will, where appropriate, present to BSI or the committee developing the standard any comments that are made to me.

The period for comment ends on June 30th 2010.

Comments received up to the deadline will be addressed (where appropriate) in producing the final version of the standard.

I believe this standard addresses issues that the community has highlighted as needing advice on for some years. I think it can be an important support to the community and it’s important that we get it right. I commend it to you and urge you to read it and make comment on how to make it better than it is. When doing so please bear in mind that at this point it naturally has some imperfections you would expect of a draft in edit but not of a final standard and we should be focussing for now mainly on whether it has the right content and whether the approaches recommended are the best ones.”

So after all that encouragement from Andy, please go and add your feedback to BS8878!

Relationship Management: So Long, and Thanks for All the Hamsters

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The final meeting for the JISC Relationship Management Programme was held in the beautiful surroundings of York St John University a couple of weeks ago. Simon Whittemore, JISC Programme Manager, has written an excellent summary of the event – The Pleasures and Pains of Managing Relationships and Changing the Habits of Information Hamsters – and as it’s such a good overview, I’ll try not to repeat anything here.

From a personal point of view, it was lovely to finally meet all the project teams and in some respects it’s a shame that it’s all coming to an end, as I’ve really enjoyed chatting to everyone and following project progress over the past 10 months or so. Because there were 20 projects in the Programme, it was decided to put them into groups, so they could each create a collaborative presentation for the final meeting. I know all the project teams have worked really hard and I must confess to feeling a bit like the producer of play on its opening night, who just wants all the efforts of that hard work to shine through.

Notes and presentations from the York meeting are now available, and I have tried to summarise some of the key issues for the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SLRM (Student Lifecycle Relationship Management) strands of the Programme.

The three key issues I see for CRM are:
* Buy-in from senior management is essential to ensure that the CRM approach is successful.
* Cultural change is inevitable but is challenging to manage.
* Data (around contacts and the customer relationship) must be shared, yet this is often a stumbling block. For example, some people are very happy to view other’s data, but not share their own (information hamsters?).

For SLRM, the issues are slightly different:
* The student must be put at the centre of the process.
* What the student wants is not necessarily what the institution thinks the student wants.
* Service design techniques can help to identify failpoints in the student experience and areas for improvement.

There is some work to do now on synthesising the findings across the Programme, but it’s been such a pleasure to work with everyone, that I will miss following their progress. So good luck – I wish you all every success with continuing your CRM or SLRM approaches in your institution.

Modelling – How Do You Know When to Stop?

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I attended JISC CETIS’ Introduction to Modelling workshop in Birmingham last week to try and gain an understanding of issues and what one needs to consider, when attempting it for the first time.

So why bother with modelling? What value does it bring? Models are a way of communicating and sharing experiences. They are very visual and may have some narrative, but with some slight clarification of terminology used, they should be understandable by most stakeholders. This is key. Otherwise, how else can the whole system be shown to stakeholders who may only know a small part?

Whilst the workshop looked at both hard and soft models, it was the softer side that caught my attention. Hard models, such as UML (Unified Modelling Language) or BPM (Business Process Modelling) are ideal for defining technical specifications and describing business intelligence. Soft models, as one would expect, tend to be quite woolly and may include portfolios of evidence (documents, observational notes, video diaries, etc), scenarios and personas, and use SSM (Soft Sytems Methodologies).

There were two practical exercises that we all attempted. One of which was to produce a soft systems diagram showing how to respond to a JISC call for funding. I’d never done any modelling before, but something that had seemed so simple in the introduction, was unbelivably difficult when we sat down to try it for ourselves! We didn’t need any whizz bang technology – just a handful of coloured markers, multi-coloured post-its and a large sheet of paper. Here’s a model that one of the groups came up with.

Attempt at a Soft Systems Model

Attempt at a Soft Systems Model

Using diagrams like this can help tell a story by setting the scene (scenario) and describing the personas (not usually a real person but a ficticious description of a particular role that person might do) and the ways they interact. The main focus of a soft systems model is on the people or actors in the system.

People often have difficulties knowing how far they should go when modelling and when they should stop. However, the presenters were all unanimous in answering this question: the actual purpose for doing the modelling should set the boundaries for how far/deep one goes with it. But, as a newbie, the real key for me was that one should model just enough to achieve one’s aims (otherwise one could end up modelling for years!).

If you’d like to find out a little more about the event, there are notes and presentations from the workshop now available online. You might also be interested in the JISC Innovation Base (a repository of models for the Higher Education domain, which includes both formal and informal models) and the Agile Modeling Website (Agile Modeling is a practice-based methodology for effective modeling and documentation of software-based systems).

Happy modelling!

The Importance of KM to CRM

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You might be interested in Kathy Harris’ blog, which has a couple of posts on Relationship Management. Her most recent post – CRM and KM – Are We There Yet? – talks about the importance of KM (Knowledge Management).

In trying to improve the relationship we have with all of our institutional stakeholders, from pre-enrolment to business partnerships, information plays a key role – and we need to know how to manage that information. Harris states that:

organizations still need a strategy, focus and structure in knowledge management. KM is a business practice, a process and a cultural change. It even includes policies — for reuse, for knowledge sharing, and so on. It is not the tools of search, social computing, expertise location, content management, etc. It is about people using those tools and processes to find and apply information to fill a need or resolve a specific problem in the (often unique) context required by a customer, a call center agent or a sales and marketing team member.

Many of the JISC Relationship Management projects are looking at how to improve the flow and accessibility of information in order to improve the customer relationship (more on these projects in future posts).

As Harris concludes, KM is not just about making information available, but it’s also about organising and enhancing that information to provide a deeper, richer knowledge that can benefit both the institution and the stakeholder.

Mozilla Labs Design Challenge 2009: Re-inventing Tabs

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Whilst this blog generally focusses on all things accessible, this design challenge from Mozilla Labs caught my eye. Sometimes ensuring an application is accessible can be considered as a hindrance rather than an opportunity to show off design skills and develop new ways of working. However, good design can provide benefits to many users, not just those with disabilities.

One of the aims of the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge is to inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole. New ideas and mockups for the future of the Web are invited from designers, students and design-focused people. The focus is on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

The Challenge website states: “Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing”.

All you need to is create a mockup of your proposed solution in any format – from a napkin drawing, to a wireframe, to a polished graphic – and create a short video presenting the mockup, explaining your idea and how it works. The submission deadline is 21st June 2009.

Good luck!

New Digital Inclusion Forum Launched

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A new Digital Inclusion Forum, led by Dr Jane Searle from the University of Southampton, has been launched by the TLRP (Teaching and Learning Research Programme). It aims to identify the key inclusion-related research questions and issues for TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) research.

The introduction to the site states that the “forum will seek to discuss and evaluate the contribution that the TEL programme can make to the digital inclusion research agenda. The initial focus for activity will be the development of an online space for sharing resources, discussing inclusion-related issues and scoping priorities for digital inclusion research. In the longer term, the forum will be a platform for the collaborative writing of a contribution from TEL on the theme of inclusion”.