LSW-WebDesign

I had a chance to talk with our IT folks and I was tipped to two excellent things.

So for those of you not in the know as I was not:

1. Windows has a tool called Virtual PC, I had heard of it but did not know what it was for. It sets up a virtual PC complete with virtual drivers and virtual hardware so you can install any number of Operating systems on one machine. Not a dual boot system but a virtual system that you can easily switch between. Now you can run XP but have Vista, Win 98 and Win 95 installed on the same machine and switch between them. No need for extra machines, I can run vista and a virtual PC with Win 98 installed to run my favorite old games. How about running Vista with IE7 and run XP with IE6 and Win98 with IE5.5 for testing? You can also run Linux and in some cases Mac as well for testing sites.
2. Mac being developed for Intel processors means it is now Intel/Linux based meaning you can now install new Mac OS on a windows machine. Either dual boot or using Virtual PC. You can now install Mac on your PC and test everything possible with one single computer and if it is a Laptop, use it to show customers.

I have dreamed of such things for years and it is possible and that fact never dawned on me.

So for your entertainment, I offer you the links to:

• Virtual PC which is free
• The preview of the soon to be released Mac Leopard OS which compares to Vista. It may work with Mac Tiger, but I am not certain, it is more XP level. The first 5 or so things on the left offer video demonstrations worth watching.

The following points were written originally to pull my thoughts together for a accessibility briefing on the status of web sites belonging to the state of Alaska, I thought I would add them here for you to read as well.

• Alt stands for Alternative text. This means a text alternative to the information held or represented by an image. The popular misconception is that you need describe the image or say what the image is. This is not quite the point. The text is meant as an alternative to inform the user of any info they may be missing. If the image has no informative value it need not have alt text.
• The alt attribute however is required on every image. If there is no information to be shared, it may be left blank, alt=”".
• If an image has information like a “Pie chart” you would wish to offer the same info as an alt attribute. You would textually show the same info, you can decide if the fact that the image is a pie chart is of importance or not. If not, then simply add the % shown. alt=”Jueau: Rainfall 70%, Cloudy 20%, Sunshine 10%”
• You would not describe the image as in alt=”3D pie chart using the colors red, yellow and green. Green being sunny days, red rain and yellow cloudy…”
• DHSS has cases of decoration images using alt attributes. Common is alt=”bottom right corner”. Although correct, this has no informative value as it pertains only to the look of the site for visual users. In these cases having a screen reader notify the user during the flow of the information that it has reached an image representing the bottom right corner is of no importance and adds to the general “noise.” By leaving the alt in place but empty, the screen reader will skip the image and the user will either not know an image is present or will understand that the image is of no real value and they are missing nothing.
• In another case, in the Commissioners Office, a image of the Commissioner and the Governor has no alt attribute. This is of course an error and in breech of section 508. The result of this error, the effect on the user is that the name of the image will be used rather than information about the image. The user would hear “image snodgrass-sen-center.jpg” which of course has no value to them. By adding the alt attribute it will either ignore the image or read the alt text given.
• For the above image a correct alt attribute would be to describe the information in the image… not the image itself. In this case alt=”Commissioner Snuffy Smith and Governor Gomer Pile visit with seniors at the Snodgrass Senior Center on Wednesday, May 23, 2007.”, no description of the surroundings or even in what position the officials are standing in is given as it is of no value for the visually impaired.
• Again the same image, the image does however have a caption. It was from this caption that I drew the above alt text. In this case you would not want a caption and an alt text as this would result in the screen reader reading both and the information is doubled. You do not want the alt alone as the visual user will not have access to it. However the caption due to it’s positioning would be clear enough to a screen reader user that the two belong together. So in the case of captions, as there are no HTML elements to deal with captions, it is justified to leave the alt attribute blank as the caption text already describes the information of the image and you would leave the left and right specifications in place for the visual users.

So in closing, it is imperative that all images regardless are given a alt attribute, alt text should only be used if the image portraits important information. If the image is purely decorative the alt attribute is left empty and in the case of images with captions the alt attribute should be left empty.

One footnote: I discovered a interesting use for the “Longdesc” attribute in the Section508.gov FAQ:

For pictures illustrating a tone or mood you may wish to convey, a good method is to have both a 3-5 word “alt” and a long description of 1-3 sentences, or more if required. This will allow a screen reader user to access the longer description, but does not require the user to hear it every time that he/she returns to the page.

Another footnote: In her article “Reviving Anorexic Web Writing,” Amber Simmons makes a very good point about how alt text can make even decorative images more interesting and give an emotional alternitive meaning to the vision impaired.

Thoughtfully constructed alt text is valuable because it provides emotional content; it should make the reader feel something. Given a photograph of the University of Texas tower, for example, simple alt text that says, “UT tower” might not be terribly useful to someone who has never seen the tower, though it may be useful to someone who knows what the tower looks like. But alt text that says, “Evening view of UT tower aglow after a big Texas win” is better, because it is meaningful to anyone, sighted or not—it projects pride, kinship, tradition. It conveys very particular emotions using revealing language. - Amber Simmons

The following is something I wrote to get my thoughts together for a briefing on accessibility of Alaskan state web sites, I thought it worth noting here to help others perhaps better understand accessibility law.

1. Massive lack of accessibility resulting in the user not being able to use the web site at all to reach information or services.
2. Complaints made and requests to correct the issues have been ignored.

Lawsuits against the state would be made under Sec. 508 of the ADA. The only current lawsuit in progress is against the state of Texas from Feb. 2007 in which 3 state employees with visual impairments were not able to do their job which required working with Oracle Databases. Complaints were filed and software requested and nothing was done so they sued the state of Texas and Oracle for lack of accessible software under Sec. 508. This is not directly web related but shows how the system works. The state of Alaska would not be sued immediately for lack of a alt attribute. A user must complain first and then if we did not improve the site (which we would) a lawsuit could be filed.

The court would decide of the case was warranted. The legal rule of thumb seems to be whether “reasonable attempts” have been made to make the web site accessible. Failing one minor issue on some (not all) pages would likely not justify a court case. I am, however, no legal authority.

All other news worthy lawsuits have been brought against commercial sites, and as Sec. 508 does not cover commercial sites, these lawsuits in the US, and Australia under the British Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), have not been based on the web sites themselves, but on the fact that a service/product was not made available to those with disabilities in the same manner as those without. So those with disabilities were being discriminated against. Hence it is not the accessibility of the web site that was brought before the court but the discrimination against the disabled as they are not able to access the service/product over the net in the same manner as those without disabilities. The web site is not required by law to be accessible, but the service/product offered by the web site is required by law to be accessible to those with disabilities.

One final note on the past lawsuits, in all but the first web accessibility lawsuit brought against Soutwest Airlines, the web site owners have lost the case. However in the instances of Ramada and Priceline, although they lost the case, almost no changes were required of the web sites as the court agreed that doing so would be to expensive and therefore an undue bourdon on the companies, also the suit only covers accessibility for the visually impaired and not all disabilities. They are wrong for not ensuring their services are available to those with disabilities however are not required to do much to correct the problem.