OCW Accessibility

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OCW Accessibility Sapient/OCW Call June 15, 2005
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Agenda

• Agenda
• Introduction
• OCW Accessibility Best Practices
• OCW Accessibility Review
• Review of 3 Month Plan
• Sapient Coordination
• Questions and Comments?

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Introduction

• Introduction
• What is accessibility?
• Reason for OCW accessibility efforts

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Introduction What is accessibility?

• Introduction What is accessibility?
• Web site allowances for users with disabilities
• Includes technology limitations
• Forward-thinking for future User Agents
• W3C standards WCAG 1.0, XHTML 1.0, CSS2.1

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Introduction Reason for OCW Accessibility
Efforts

• Introduction Reason for OCW Accessibility
  Efforts
• Community needs including legal issues
• Industry and MIT standards
• Global reach of OCW

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OCW Accessibility Best Practices

• OCW Accessibility Best Practices
• Label all images
• All images on OCW have ALT attributes usually
  containing a shortened version of the caption.
  Spacers and design-oriented images have blank ALT
  attributes so they are not misinterpreted as
  content. In image galleries, we are semantically
  linking images with captions via an anchor or A
  element and therefore have chosen not to add ALT
  attribute values for most of these images. Cases
  where the caption is too large or long, we have
  placed the full text in the ALT attribute and
  used a shortened version for the image caption.
• Create structure
• OCWs course authoring standards require a
  built-in hierarchical structure based on HTML
  headers and an outline format utilizing ordered
  and unordered lists. This includes Convert from
  HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Transitional
  and fixing validation issues Changing static,
  pixel-based size designators to dynamic,
  percentage based values Using HTML headers more
  appropriately Properly marking up quotes and
  lists where possible.

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OCW Accessibility Best Practices

• OCW Accessibility Best Practices Contd.
• Improve navigation
• Part of the 3 month plan includes adding
  non-visual navigation aids and allowing users to
  skip over navigational features directly to the
  main content of a page. These features should
  make it easier for those browsing our site with
  assistive technologies to better navigate our
  site.
• Keyboard-friendly shortcuts
• OCW has piloted use of the ACCESKEY and
  TABINDEX attributes for our Image Galleries as
  navigational shortcuts. Our 3 month plan includes
  standardizing and adding these shortcuts to the
  remainder of the site.

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OCW Accessibility Best Practices

• OCW Accessibility Best Practices Contd
• Screenreaders assistive technologies
• OCW has consulted with the ATIC Lab and MIT
  Usability Group to determine how the web site and
  various HTML-based features are translated by
  screenreaders and have made adjustments based on
  this feedback. As the organization goes through
  more iterations and adds new features, we will
  continue to rely on ATICs experience in this
  area of testing.
• Choose colors contrast wisely
• OCW does not use color as anything more than
  decoration as defined by the stylesheet. Weve
  tested the site both with color-blind users and
  by printing the pages out to ensure the colors do
  not cause problems.

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OCW Accessibility Best Practices

• OCW Accessibility Best Practices Contd
• Allow font resizing
• OCWs 3 month plan includes investigating use
  of ems instead of pixels for font size. However
  because all typographic elements are controlled
  by the stylesheet, users already have some degree
  of control over resizing fonts
• Label form fields
• By default, all form fields contain contextual
  labels utilizing the LABEL element.
• Dont rely on JavaScript
• During our 3 month plan, OCW will be
  modifying the JavaScript search function to
  standard HTML via POST/GET allowing all users to
  search the site. We will also be taking any other
  JavaScript snippets throughout the HTML files on
  the site and moving them to external .js files to
  keep the HTML clean and JavaScript-free.

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OCW Accessibility Best Practices

• OCW Accessibility Best Practices Contd
• Avoid tables when you can
• With MIT stopping support of the
  non-standards based Netscape 4.x, OCW has ceased
  using tables for layout wherever possible and is
  moving towards a solution utilizing XHTML and
  CSS2 positioning supported by most browsers.
  Legacy tables used for layout will be replaced as
  those portions of the site are slated for
  updates.
• OCW is also improving the structure of
  existing data tables including
• Using table captions instead of
  paragraphs Calling out header abbreviations
  Create standard, logical language for the table
  summary attributes Remove summary attribute
  from all layout tables.

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OCW Accessibility Best Practices

• OCW Accessibility Best Practices Contd
• Careful with PDF files
• We are investigating the creation of
  templates for PDF source documents TeX files
  and MS Office files. By distributing these
  templates along with a tutorial on how to use
  them, we hope some people on campus may adopt
  this method of creating or marking up their
  material that will eventually be converted to
  PDF. Using the templates would ensure they are
  made more accessible when tagged by the Acrobat
  application.
• Flash interactive content
• Any interactive content on OCW is called out
  and used only as supplemental material.
• Careful with Popup windows
• OCW only uses popup windows for sites external
  to the MIT OCW site with the exception of image
  galleries and HTML modules. We are developing a
  new policy to denote cases where links are popups.

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OCW Accessibility Best Practices

• OCW Accessibility Best Practices Contd
• Opening new windows
• As Web browsers become more smart with regard
  to their UI and navigational features, opening up
  new windows becomes a problem. When a new browser
  window is opened, whatever the user is viewing
  goes completely out of sequence related to the
  rest of their viewing history. The recommended
  means of denoting a change in sites is to mention
  it as part of the links title attribute details.
  OCW should consider revising its standard of
  opening all external links in a new window.
• Caption video
• OCW is currently transcribing existing video
  for a video captioning pilot and has been
  investigating a service to automatically caption
  audio and video files.
• Java simulations
• All Java simulations come with a text
  description and are clearly labeled as Java
  including technical requirements needed to view
  them.

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OCW Accessibility Review

• OCW Accessibility Review
• Per cycle review plan to discover any
  accessibility problems
• Fall 2004 cycle summary
• Missing accessibility features
• Better structure HTML documents
• Less complex CSS
• Video captioning

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Review of 3 Month Plan

• Review of 3 Month Plan
• Origin of Plan
• First phase - done (5/6/05 5/13/05)
• Second phase - in process. (6/10/05 6/22/05)
• Third phase - testing and rollout. (6/27/05
  7/13/05)
• Republish all courses (8/1/05)

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Phase 1

• Review of 3 Month Plan (Phase 1 - DONE)
• Develop standards for S05 Cycle.
• QA and Rollout.
• Train Authoring Team in New Standards

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Phase 2

• Review of 3 Month Plan (Phase 2)
• 5/13/05 6/27/05
• Develop standard accesskey assignments
• Develop standard tabindex order
• Develop non-visual navigation aid hierarchy
• Develop list of template edits and HTML/CSS
  module changes

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Phase 3

• Review of 3 Month Plan (Phase 3)
• 6/27/05 7/27/05
• Implement new HTML/CSS CMS template changes
• Edit HTML content in all global pages
• Add various HTML accessibility features
• Convert HTML to valid XHTML
• Rollout changes to QA
• Test with Browsercam
• Edit HTML for all remaining unchanged courses
  from Batch 0

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Sapient Coordination

• Sapient Coordination
• OCW Search revision
• Template updates
• CSS and JS updates

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Questions and Comments?

• Questions and Comments?
• About Accessibility?
• About Standards?
• About Plan?