NFB: NYU, Northwestern and Other Schools Adopting Google Apps Discriminate Against the Blind

Claude AlmansiBy Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues
ETCJ Associate Administrator

The National Federation of the Blind is requesting the US Department of Justice to “investigate civil rights violations . . . against blind faculty and students” by New York University and Northwestern University and four school districts in Oregon.

Motive:  their adoption of  Google Apps for Education,  a limited series of Google applications  (mail, calendar, docs, spreadsheets and sites) that educational bodies can put under their domain name, and where they can  control what their staff and students do, but which present serious accessibility issues for the blind. Continue reading

e-Book Readers: Attempting to Bugger the Blind Is Bad for Business

Accessibility 4 All by Claude Almansi

DoJ’s and DoE’s letter to college and university presidents on e-book readers

On June 29, 2010,  Thomas E. Perez (Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice) and Russlynn Ali (Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education) sent a joint letter on electronic book readers:

Dear College or University President:

We write to express concern on the part of the Department of Justice and the Department of Education that colleges and universities are using electronic book readers that are not accessible to students who are blind or have low vision and to seek your help in ensuring that this emerging technology is used in classroom settings in a manner that is permissible under federal law.  A serious problem with some of these devices is that they lack an accessible text-to-speech function.  Requiring use of an emerging technology in a classroom environment when the technology is inaccessible to an entire population of individuals with disabilities–individuals with visual disabilities–is discrimination prohibited by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Section 504) unless those individuals are provided accommodations or modifications that permit them to receive all the educational benefits provided by the technology in an equally effective and equally integrated manner.(…)

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Making Web Multimedia Accessible Needn’t Be Boring

claude80By Claude Almansi
Guest Author
7 November 2008

Some people see the legal obligation to follow Web content accessibility guidelines – whether of the W3C or, in the US, of section 508 – as leading to boring text-only pages. Actually, these guidelines do not exclude the use of multimedia on the web. They say that multimedia should be made accessible by “Providing equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content” and in particular: “For any time-based multimedia presentation (e.g., a movie or animation), synchronize equivalent alternatives (e.g., captions or auditory descriptions of the visual track) with the presentation.”[1]

This is not as bad a chore as it seems, and it can be shared between several people, even if they are not particularly tech-savvy or endowed with sophisticated tools.

Captioning with DotSUB.com

Phishing Scams in Plain English, by Lee LeFever[2], was uploaded to DotSub.com, and several volunteers did the captions in the different languages. The result can be embedded in a blog, a wiki or a web page. The captions also appear as copyable text under dotsub“Video Transcription,” which is handy if people discussing the video want to quote from it. Besides, a text transcription of a video also tends to raise its ranking in search engines, which still mainly scan text.

The only problem is that the subtitles cover a substantial part of the video.

Captioning with SMIL

This problem can be avoided by captioning with SMIL, which stands for Synchronized Multimedia Interaction Language. A SMIL file, written in XML, works as a “cogwheel” between the original video and other files (including captioning files) it links to and synchronizes.[3]

The advantage, compared to DotSUB, is that captions stay put in a separate field under the video and don’t interfere.

This is why, after having tried DotSUB, I chose the SMIL solution for: “Missing in Pakistan – Sottotitolazione Multilingue.[4]

So far, the simple text timecoded files for SMIL captioning still have to be made off-line, though Alessio Cartocci – who conceived the player in the example above – has already made a beta version of an online SMIL captioning tool.

Captioning with SMIL Made Easy on Webmultimediale.it

The Missing in Pakistan example is on Webmultimediale.org, the site where the WebMultimediale project team experiments with the creative potential of applying accessibility guidelines to online multimedia – for instance, in collaboration with theatrical companies.

web_multiHowever, the project also has a public video sharing and captioning platform, Webmultimediale.it, where everyone can upload a video and its captioning file to produce a captioned video for free. The site is fairly bilingual, Italian-English. By default, you can only upload one captioning file, but you can contact Roberto Ellero, the founder of the project, through http://www.webmultimediale.org/contatti.php if you wish to add more captions.

Webmultimediale.it also has a video tutorial in Italian on how to produce a time-coded captioning file using MAGpie, which is only accessible when you are signed in, but as it is in Italian, English-speaking users might prefer to use the MAGpie Documentation[5,6] directly.

Other Creative Potentialities of SMIL

As can be seen in the MAGpie Documentation and in the W3C Synchronized Multimedia page[3], SMIL also enables the synchronization of an audio description file and even of a second video file, usually meant for sign language translation. While these features are primarily meant to facilitate access to deaf and blind people, they can also be used creatively to enhance all users’ experience of a video.