Tools & Technology
NCDAE is dedicated to disseminating partner and affiliate products that have a broad appeal to disability advocates, vendors, educators and students with disabilities.
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Fact Sheets
Information sheets on various distance education technologies are developed and regularly revised. NCDAE affiliates can post comments to the technology information sheets. These are available to all NCDAE website visitors.As new technology and accessible distance education tools become available, these are listed on the NCDAE site for review.
The following fact sheets are currently available:
- Online Communication Tools
- Principles of Accessible Design
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- Adobe Acrobat & PDF
- OpenOffice.org Writer
- OpenOffice.org Impress
- Web Captioning
- Content Management Systems
- Macromedia Breeze
CaptionCaster
NCDAE funded development of CaptionCaster, a real-time captioning system for Internet-based delivery of text captions. CaptionCaster can be used in conjunction with web casts, video conferencing software, satellite delivery, or any other multimedia medium that requires captioning. The end user simply needs to have an internet connection to receive real-time, synchronized captions for the broadcast.
CaptionCaster uses standard television captions (line 21) input from stenography software. It then processes this text data and streams it over the Internet to connected end users. CaptionCaster can also broadcast text file, text input, or voice recognition input. It allows the broadcast administrator to customize delay to better synchronize the text broadcast with the audio/video broadcast. CaptionCaster also stores a text transcript of the text broadcast which can be provided as a text-only alternative to the broadcast or for creating captions for archived multimedia.
Providing synchronized captions and a transcript for multimedia broadcasts not only allows the content to be accessible by the Deaf and hard of hearing, but also increases usability and accessibility for nearly all users.
CaptionCaster development is being continued by WebAIM. Additional functionality will be developed to make the tool both easier to use, but a more powerful, fully featured web captioning system. If you are interested in using CaptionCaster for your broadcast accessibility needs, please contact the WebAIM staff.
WAVE Toolbar Development
Through funding by NCDAE, WAVE functionality was greatly expanded to include a Firefox toolbar. WAVE is an accessibility evaluation tool. It provides easy-to-use feedback regarding the accessibility and usability of Web content. Previous to this development, WAVE functionality was limited to public web pages or to file upload. For developers working on intranet pages or those who did not have Internet access, this limited their ability to use the tool. NCDAE development allowed a complete restructuring of WAVE core code to allow not only a better Web-based interface, but also the client-side Firefox Toolbar. This toolbar can evaluate a page's accessibility in one click of a mouse. Because processing is done on the end-user's computer, there is not need to make the evaluated page either publicly available or uploaded to the WAVE server.
This development of WAVE functionlity is being continued by WebAIM to include evaluation of XUL (an authoring framework for applications) and will be used to create a more powerful web-based version of WAVE. The current WAVE Firefox Toolbar is available for beta testing upon request.
Articles
- Added October 25, 2006: Web Captioning and Education
- Added June 27, 2006: Cognitive Disabilities and the Web: Where Accessibility and Usability Meet?
