Today’s fastest-growing trend in education is online teaching. As instructors want to reach out to wider and wider audiences, they are finding that online education makes their classrooms virtually limitless. Academics everywhere are turning to the Internet as their new classroom. Students around the world are now able to take classes at the university of their choice without having to travel. However, for students with disabilities there are perils in online education which may almost outweigh the benefits. Students with disabilities may be excluded from this online experience when universal design principles are not followed.
First I’d like to examine what an online class offers and then talk about how students with disabilities may be blocked from accessing this modern educational opportunity. The structure of online classes is much more flexible than the traditional lecture or seminar classes held in brick-and-mortar institutions. Instructors of online classes often do not require students to attend fixed-in-time lectures. An online class may have prerecorded lectures that students can watch whenever and as often as they want. Students can play back the lecture at their leisure and convenience.
To compensate for the interactive process of asking questions while in class, students can email instructors or post questions on in-class bulletin boards and forms. Questions may be answered by the instructor, teaching assistants, or even other students in the class. Many instructors encourage students to help each other the quality of student responses informs the instructor about how well students understand course content.
Online courses allow students to absorb the content of the class at their own pace. The student can interact with the teaching module in a variety of different ways until they understand the material and are ready to move on. If there’s difficulty understanding a particular concept, the student can approach the subject matter from multiple angles before moving on to the next topic. Many online classes dynamically generate content such as problem sets for students, until the student demonstrates a successful understanding of the principle. Only then are the students given the opportunity to move to the next level. This dynamic generation of content means that instructors do not need to spend as much one-on-one time with students as in the past, and yet students are actually learning more, especially students with different learning styles. Instructors are now freer to give focused specialized instruction tailored to the specific problems of the students they spend time with.
Due to the interactive nature of modern Internet technologies, students today participating in online classes can virtually experience many of the same things they would in a physical classroom. Modern technology can simulate everything from mixing chemicals for an experiment to building structures to learn about stability. Students can play virtual instruments to learn about music or manipulate virtual devices to perform tasks. When instructors “virtualize” classes, the cost of instruction significantly decreases. Instead of having to purchase an expensive chemical for each and every student taking the class, theoretically an unlimited number of students can manipulate the online experiment an infinite number of times. The possibilities of the course design are limited only by creativity and expertise.
Unfortunately, unless attention is paid to ensuring that all students can participate, these expanding innovations will not be available to everyone. As wonderful as these technological advances are, each has access challenges. When communicating information to their students, instructors must identify effective methods of reaching different types of users, including those with sensory and learning disabilities.
If an instructor shows a video of a chemical experiment and neglects to describe the action, including all the visual elements, a blind student is precluded from acquiring most of the key information the demonstration is meant to convey. A video should have a good narrative describing the key points the instructor wants the viewer to understand, so that students with visual impairments have access to the same educational opportunities as the sighted viewer.
For students with hearing impairments, the video should also be captioned and provide a standalone transcript. In keeping with the “curb cut” phenomenon, increasing the accessibility of course content results in everyone having an enriched experience, e.g., word-searchable captioning enables everyone to quickly find a desired point in the video. Captioning is helpful for not just those with hearing impairments, but also can be a valuable resource for those with other disabilities, like color-blindness or learning disabilities. And I can’t tell you the many times I’ve heard from non-disabled viewers, after a video has been captioned, how much more usable and effective the newly captioned video is.
There are so many different technologies being used today to create online forums and chats. Every time you turn around, a different chat client is being created. Many of these chats are very difficult for a screen reader to use at the same speed as other users. The screen reader may not find incoming chat messages from other class participants, or may not identify the participants who are speaking. If the screen reader is focused on the content being generated, the student with a disability is missing simultaneous portions of the chat essential to following the conversation. When choosing a chat client, an instructor should be sure that it works well with a screen reader and that students with multiple disabilities can engage in the classroom conversations.
If the client chosen for the class is accessible only through manual keyboarding, students who input by speaking (and have no use of their hands) may not be able to participate in the conversation. It is vital that instructors be sure the client selected offers multiple methods for inputting, so that online class participation is accessible to all students. The interactive process, so named long before the internet took center stage, needs to be even more interactive now that it is so easy to by-pass direct interaction between instructor and student. We don’t want students with disabilities to fall off the Cloud!
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Gotcha or captcha
In 1997, the Internet was starting to show signs of what it would become. More people were logging on every day and with that, others were starting to find ways to make money off of this information highway. Today, over 80% of the e-mails sent are spam, but fortunately, more ways to fight spam are being developed. In 1997, Alta Vista was the first company to create the CAPTCHA to fight this flood of unwanted Internet traffic. This first block was to help prevent hijacking of search results that made it impossible to search accurately.
Perhaps I should first describe what a CAPTCHA is. Here is the definition as found on Dictionary.com: “An online test that humans but not computers are able to pass, used as a security measure and usually involving a visual-perception task.” However, many sites have alternatives for people who can’t use the visual method to continue past the image that features alphabetical or numerical cues. Websites also use an audio CAPTCHA as an alternative to the image. One of the most popular spam control feature is reCAPTCHA. This is a free service that provides the image and the audio files for a site. reCAPTCHA then uses the results of the inputs to help identify the images of text while digitizing them. Earlier, they also provided clips of movie sound bites to help caption older titles. However, today the sound bites are synthesized speech, with distorted speech overlaying the synthesized words.
The CAPTCHA strategy has resulted in problems for many people with disabilities. Obviously the images cannot be read by a screen reader. If they could, it would defeat the purpose of the CAPTCHA’s property of being readable by people but not by computers. This is why audio CAPTCHA was implemented. People often can’t solve CAPTCHA for a growing variety of reasons. For example, I have not been able to solve a reCAPTCHA audio-CAPTCHA for two months now because they have made the audio harder to hear and added a lot more words to solve. I can’t understand half the words in the sound clip and my spelling is so bad that I can’t spell the other half. It’s interesting how an audio CAPTCHA is automatically harder to solve than a visual one. For example, reCAPTCHA gives an image of two units, like words, but the audio version has many more words, sometimes up to ten or more.
A sighted person can compare and contrast what they’re typing to the letters shown on the screen, but an audio user must try to distinguish between unintelligible words, such as “there” or “their” or “they’re”. There is no memory needed for the sighted user in solving the CAPTCHA, but the listener must remember as much as they can of the audio file to be sure they get it all.
I tend to type and listen to the words every time I hit the space bar, but as a blind user, if I’m trying to solve a CAPTCHA, I run the words together so that the screen reader doesn’t speak at the same time as the synthesized voice I’m trying to hear from the CAPTCHA. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to try over and over again because I missed one word and don’t remember what it was. And if I submit it and it’s incorrect, then I start all over again. The only thing that is more frustrating is a site that doesn’t provide me with an alternative.
Many people with cognitive disabilities can’t use the visual CAPTCHA either. If they have a reading disability and the image of the text is distorted, they may never be able to read the CAPTCHA at all. Many of the students I worked with, who have learning disabilities could not use the best synthesized voices on the market. They were not able to understand words spoken in a computerized voice. Some of these students would not be able to use either image CAPTCHA or audio CAPTCHA.
Over the past few years, people have been trying various ways to change how CAPTCHA behaves. Some people have switched to challenge-questions instead. The problem is that the questions must be so generic as to be solvable by people from other cultures. For example, if a challenge-question asks, “What comes first: dinner or supper?”, some people may not know the word supper at all. Others may think the two words mean the same thing. Very few people recognize that dinner is another word for lunch in some parts of the world.
I understand the necessity of CAPTCHA in most cases, but we really need to find other ways to get past the money and down to work. I would never want the Internet to get more disrupted by the traffic that CAPTCHA is blocking today, but I do want to use the tools and applications that CAPTCHA prevents me from accessing.
I remember working on the problem with Annualcreditreport.com a few years ago. When we found a way to make the reports accessible, we then needed to find a way to get to them. The only way we could come up with was to use an extra form of communication. The person who was unable to read the image to solve the CAPTCHA would have to click an additional link that would then bring up a phone number to call and a code to give the computer on the other end. The computer would then give you the appropriate answer to allow you to respond to the challenge. This is problematic, since it relies on a having access to a phone. But the system worked for most people.
The real answer is that we need to stop the effectiveness of spam. We get so much of it that we need ways to block spammers’ access to the web, because somehow and somewhere people are falling prey to it. Spammers will keep trying to send ads if we all keep clicking on the links. If you find a link that looks somewhat legitimate, it’s hard to say, “Well, maybe it’s not worth checking.” I know I often do it myself. The sender’s name is one I think I know and I am interested in the subject, so I check. I get a message saying I will get a free iPad, so I fall for it. I know better, but the spammers also know we all want something and they offer it and we take it.
The only other thing that can help us tackle this issue is international consensus on not letting people get away with it. With electronic borders that don’t really exist, phones and the Internet, spammers just need to simulate an address off-shore to bypass laws created to stop them. Also, we need to teach people how to identify the fakes and how to be smarter about what they open or click online. We need to make sure we know the sender of an email and how to tell what the consequences of replying to spam are. Education is the only way we can cut back on this hostile takeover of our information highway. When it comes to the Internet, we really are a global village, so let’s start keeping our village clean and inviting to all.
Monday, May 14, 2012
So where does the blame lie
Screen readers have been on the market for over 25 years now. I remember using my first screen reader in the 80s. Access to software has always been problematic. My first computer was an Apple 2E with an echo PC synthesizer. This computer ran with proprietary software that allowed the blind person to use a special customized word processor that worked with the synthesizer. Today we would call it a self-voicing application. At the time word processing had begun to have some of the same easy-to-use features that we are all familiar with and expect today. However my system "braille edit" did not have a spellchecker. In fact for formatting I needed to know special symbols and codes to embedded my text.
Today much of the mainstream market is accessible or at least to a degree. Blind people using assistive technologies can expect that their assistive technology will work within the same applications that their peers are using. A blind person can use a word processor, spreadsheet or database applications most of the time with little or low difficulty. However you will note that I said little or no difficulty. The less common an application is the less likely a blind user will not be able to access it.
More and more often I hear people ask “so why is there inaccessible software when we've known for so long how screen readers work” and we know of ways to make things work”. The more I think about this particular question the more I realize that in many ways we are to blame. My own office relies and depends on a database for our internal use that we would never expect our students to use. The screen reader I'm using to write this the most popular screen reader to date has its own administrative tools for the networking version that the screen reader can't read. Yes a screen reader cannot read its own utilities. A blind administrator such as myself needs to work within the networking tools using workarounds and jury rigging. In fact with Microsoft Windows eight to be released in the next year or less it will still be the only operating system I am aware of that does not have an accessible installer. I've had to put off a major upgrade for a couple weeks now while I waited for assistance to do a Windows install.
With all the things I've mentioned above I bet you're wondering why do I use this screen reader or why do I use Windows. The answer is to compete in this market what choice do I have. However those choices put me in a situation where I myself have caused more inaccessible products to be released. If I only had the ability to say to my screen reader manufacturer “I won't buy any more of your products until your administrative tools are accessible“ and then also have all the thousands and thousands of other users say the same thing you could bet that this problem would be solved. But if I were to say it and nobody else would back me what good would it do. The database that our office uses internally is a very popular product. Several departments on campus have different flavors or iterations of the same product. The product is somewhat affordable and somewhat easier for non-technical people to use. Can I tell every single department on campus stop using this database and if I did tell them that would they listen? I can't say statements like that putting my needs over the needs of many non-technical staff that need to track students as much as I need to. And if I did speak up and make some people stop using the product how would this affect the non-technical people. I need to be much more important to affect the market as a person with a disability more than impact as the many thousands of non-technical administrative assistants perhaps we would have fewer inaccessible products then we already do. But the sheer numbers just don't work. I look again at my campus and from what I know that there are only six blind staff members on campus in a staff of 20 to 30,000. How can six people affect that many, Instead we are given readers and other tools that end up costing more for us to cope in the inaccessible environment.
I was speaking with one of my colleagues at another university that has a much stronger assistive technology policy. They are very open and strict about products they purchase being extraordinarily accessible. from the outside I watch this University and think of them as a leader in accessibility. However my colleague tells me that even their university makes decisions to often to by the inaccessible.
Recently our campus had a difficult decision about what to do when outsourcing some of our primary campus tools. We needed to find a more effective e-mail and calendaring system to modernize our capacity. Like many other campuses we were looking at the choices between Google and Microsoft. I praise our campus administration for making it through such a difficult process as well as they did. I appreciated the difficulty they had in making sure that everyone had a say in the process. I respect our administration even more because they specifically came to me as a known advocate for assistive technology to ask how I felt they should go. Ultimately I did not give them a yes or no in either direction. What I did was provide them the information that I know about how the two companies treat accessibility. I was very proud when I read through the very public decision matrix to see that accessibility was actually a line within the project. Even if they did not include my words in that matrix what the matrix showed was a picture of how the two companies deal differently with accessibility. Ultimately the campus went with Google not because it was the better product and if you look at the scoring Google actually did score lower but we went with Google because there is a visible trend of improvement overall. When it comes to accessibility Google declared openness and continued development to accessibility. However, Microsoft did not take any stance towards where accessibility would be in the future.
How can we as advocates for accessibility and technology help fix these problems in the future? In the open market the only way we can do this is through our buying power. My campus is a massive buying power and ultimately they said that what they want is improvement and change. The status quo although it may be accessible does have its little inaccessible gremlins that have never been addressed or changed. Apple has had an accessible installer since 2006 or earlier. Many UNIX versions or flavors have had accessible installers shortly thereafter. I seem to recall seeing a demonstration of how to install Solaris accessibly in 2007 or so. Two versions of Windows later and soon to be three were just not there yet.
How do we make sure that other institutions start to make the same kind of statement? People with disabilities need to speak up continually and eloquently. I'm a firm believer in winning people over to your side and not fighting to bring them over. I have worked for many years to demonstrate and educate this campus in what it means to be accessible. I had a small impact but more importantly the people I worked with have also had an impact. By teaching others about accessibility and access issues they themselves became advocates for the cause. I have never been aggressive or hostile to any program or person about accessibility instead I've always worked with them as a team member and always try to find a positive with every negative. Ultimately the people I work with become better advocates for accessibility than I could ever be independently. This work is how I feel I made a difference in some of our campuses decisions. I have recently been asked to join two national coalitions working on issues of adoption of technology. One of these coalitions is a group of universities working on a pilot for electronic text. This group is people from both IT and assistive technology organizations within the different universities. All of the people in this group want to find a way to make the products used in this pilot more accessible. I'm excited to be a part of such an organization but I know that we cannot be effective if the administrators at our campuses don't take note of what we say. I feel especially lucky to know that when I do come out with an evaluation of how accessible a product is or not. That my campus will listen and take what I say into account. They may not follow my suggestions but I do know that at least part of what I say is important. Those of us in the field need to speak up often and loudly. We need to be sure that we have enough content and noise going to the administrators that some of it will sink in.
But now I want to speak to those administrators. Ultimately you the CIOs and the educational technology administrators and you the faculty are responsible for the future. If you decide to purchase a product or use a tool or utility that may not be ultimately accessible for everyone you're sending a message to the manufacturers and vendors of products. Your message is loud and clear and has the force of the dollars or Euro or Yan or any other currency even open source behind it. When you buy a product that you don't know it's accessible you're telling the world its okay to be inaccessible. You need to educate yourself about what makes a product accessible and be sure that what you're buying or using is accessible. If you don't know find one of us in the industry of assistive technology to help you check the item for accessibility. Don't believe the vendor when they tell you it's accessible. You wouldn't buy a car that the salesman told you was fuel-efficient if it didn't have an actual fuel efficiency rating. Why would you buy a product that the vendor tells you is accessible. Also be aware when you use open source products. The open source market tends to be more accessible by design but also has those inaccessible pitfalls and barriers. The reason for this is that making things work accessibly takes a few more steps that sometimes get missed. Open source products also suffer from the problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. An open source project may have all the commitment in the world to accessibility but the team that worked on one module may be all it takes to break that particular product. The plus to open-source technology though is if you find something that's broken you're more than welcome to fix it. So contributing back to the community and making a more accessible product is actually the best decision an administrator could make.
To answer the question in the title who is responsible for all the inaccessible technology in this world? I have to look extraordinarily close to home. After all I bought Windows I bought my screen reader I made the choice to use the tools I use and work around those problems in the products I need to deal with. I'm not saying the people that have disabilities should stop working within accessible products I'm just saying that we have some responsibility in this process to. Ultimately the finger can be pointed precisely at consumers of products. If those consumers are individuals universities or government agencies we all share the blame. However I feel that the more money used to purchase a product that is inaccessible the more culpability when that product is inaccessible. I may not have a choice in what database my office uses but I do have a choice in the screen reader I use. I'm not completely blameless but I share the blame with much more important people than I'll ever be.
Today much of the mainstream market is accessible or at least to a degree. Blind people using assistive technologies can expect that their assistive technology will work within the same applications that their peers are using. A blind person can use a word processor, spreadsheet or database applications most of the time with little or low difficulty. However you will note that I said little or no difficulty. The less common an application is the less likely a blind user will not be able to access it.
More and more often I hear people ask “so why is there inaccessible software when we've known for so long how screen readers work” and we know of ways to make things work”. The more I think about this particular question the more I realize that in many ways we are to blame. My own office relies and depends on a database for our internal use that we would never expect our students to use. The screen reader I'm using to write this the most popular screen reader to date has its own administrative tools for the networking version that the screen reader can't read. Yes a screen reader cannot read its own utilities. A blind administrator such as myself needs to work within the networking tools using workarounds and jury rigging. In fact with Microsoft Windows eight to be released in the next year or less it will still be the only operating system I am aware of that does not have an accessible installer. I've had to put off a major upgrade for a couple weeks now while I waited for assistance to do a Windows install.
With all the things I've mentioned above I bet you're wondering why do I use this screen reader or why do I use Windows. The answer is to compete in this market what choice do I have. However those choices put me in a situation where I myself have caused more inaccessible products to be released. If I only had the ability to say to my screen reader manufacturer “I won't buy any more of your products until your administrative tools are accessible“ and then also have all the thousands and thousands of other users say the same thing you could bet that this problem would be solved. But if I were to say it and nobody else would back me what good would it do. The database that our office uses internally is a very popular product. Several departments on campus have different flavors or iterations of the same product. The product is somewhat affordable and somewhat easier for non-technical people to use. Can I tell every single department on campus stop using this database and if I did tell them that would they listen? I can't say statements like that putting my needs over the needs of many non-technical staff that need to track students as much as I need to. And if I did speak up and make some people stop using the product how would this affect the non-technical people. I need to be much more important to affect the market as a person with a disability more than impact as the many thousands of non-technical administrative assistants perhaps we would have fewer inaccessible products then we already do. But the sheer numbers just don't work. I look again at my campus and from what I know that there are only six blind staff members on campus in a staff of 20 to 30,000. How can six people affect that many, Instead we are given readers and other tools that end up costing more for us to cope in the inaccessible environment.
I was speaking with one of my colleagues at another university that has a much stronger assistive technology policy. They are very open and strict about products they purchase being extraordinarily accessible. from the outside I watch this University and think of them as a leader in accessibility. However my colleague tells me that even their university makes decisions to often to by the inaccessible.
Recently our campus had a difficult decision about what to do when outsourcing some of our primary campus tools. We needed to find a more effective e-mail and calendaring system to modernize our capacity. Like many other campuses we were looking at the choices between Google and Microsoft. I praise our campus administration for making it through such a difficult process as well as they did. I appreciated the difficulty they had in making sure that everyone had a say in the process. I respect our administration even more because they specifically came to me as a known advocate for assistive technology to ask how I felt they should go. Ultimately I did not give them a yes or no in either direction. What I did was provide them the information that I know about how the two companies treat accessibility. I was very proud when I read through the very public decision matrix to see that accessibility was actually a line within the project. Even if they did not include my words in that matrix what the matrix showed was a picture of how the two companies deal differently with accessibility. Ultimately the campus went with Google not because it was the better product and if you look at the scoring Google actually did score lower but we went with Google because there is a visible trend of improvement overall. When it comes to accessibility Google declared openness and continued development to accessibility. However, Microsoft did not take any stance towards where accessibility would be in the future.
How can we as advocates for accessibility and technology help fix these problems in the future? In the open market the only way we can do this is through our buying power. My campus is a massive buying power and ultimately they said that what they want is improvement and change. The status quo although it may be accessible does have its little inaccessible gremlins that have never been addressed or changed. Apple has had an accessible installer since 2006 or earlier. Many UNIX versions or flavors have had accessible installers shortly thereafter. I seem to recall seeing a demonstration of how to install Solaris accessibly in 2007 or so. Two versions of Windows later and soon to be three were just not there yet.
How do we make sure that other institutions start to make the same kind of statement? People with disabilities need to speak up continually and eloquently. I'm a firm believer in winning people over to your side and not fighting to bring them over. I have worked for many years to demonstrate and educate this campus in what it means to be accessible. I had a small impact but more importantly the people I worked with have also had an impact. By teaching others about accessibility and access issues they themselves became advocates for the cause. I have never been aggressive or hostile to any program or person about accessibility instead I've always worked with them as a team member and always try to find a positive with every negative. Ultimately the people I work with become better advocates for accessibility than I could ever be independently. This work is how I feel I made a difference in some of our campuses decisions. I have recently been asked to join two national coalitions working on issues of adoption of technology. One of these coalitions is a group of universities working on a pilot for electronic text. This group is people from both IT and assistive technology organizations within the different universities. All of the people in this group want to find a way to make the products used in this pilot more accessible. I'm excited to be a part of such an organization but I know that we cannot be effective if the administrators at our campuses don't take note of what we say. I feel especially lucky to know that when I do come out with an evaluation of how accessible a product is or not. That my campus will listen and take what I say into account. They may not follow my suggestions but I do know that at least part of what I say is important. Those of us in the field need to speak up often and loudly. We need to be sure that we have enough content and noise going to the administrators that some of it will sink in.
But now I want to speak to those administrators. Ultimately you the CIOs and the educational technology administrators and you the faculty are responsible for the future. If you decide to purchase a product or use a tool or utility that may not be ultimately accessible for everyone you're sending a message to the manufacturers and vendors of products. Your message is loud and clear and has the force of the dollars or Euro or Yan or any other currency even open source behind it. When you buy a product that you don't know it's accessible you're telling the world its okay to be inaccessible. You need to educate yourself about what makes a product accessible and be sure that what you're buying or using is accessible. If you don't know find one of us in the industry of assistive technology to help you check the item for accessibility. Don't believe the vendor when they tell you it's accessible. You wouldn't buy a car that the salesman told you was fuel-efficient if it didn't have an actual fuel efficiency rating. Why would you buy a product that the vendor tells you is accessible. Also be aware when you use open source products. The open source market tends to be more accessible by design but also has those inaccessible pitfalls and barriers. The reason for this is that making things work accessibly takes a few more steps that sometimes get missed. Open source products also suffer from the problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. An open source project may have all the commitment in the world to accessibility but the team that worked on one module may be all it takes to break that particular product. The plus to open-source technology though is if you find something that's broken you're more than welcome to fix it. So contributing back to the community and making a more accessible product is actually the best decision an administrator could make.
To answer the question in the title who is responsible for all the inaccessible technology in this world? I have to look extraordinarily close to home. After all I bought Windows I bought my screen reader I made the choice to use the tools I use and work around those problems in the products I need to deal with. I'm not saying the people that have disabilities should stop working within accessible products I'm just saying that we have some responsibility in this process to. Ultimately the finger can be pointed precisely at consumers of products. If those consumers are individuals universities or government agencies we all share the blame. However I feel that the more money used to purchase a product that is inaccessible the more culpability when that product is inaccessible. I may not have a choice in what database my office uses but I do have a choice in the screen reader I use. I'm not completely blameless but I share the blame with much more important people than I'll ever be.
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