Cyndi: Welcome to another webcast sponsored by the national center on disability and access to education. I'm Cyndi Rowland the technology director for NCDAE and I will be moderating today's discussion on accessibility and the open source content management movement. With me today is Alexander Limi's, one of the founders of Plone, and Jonathan whiting. I want to thank you for being with us. We have a bit of an unorthodox webcast today. For anyone's followed other NCDAE webcasts you may be familiar with our typical style with a single moderator and a couple of panelists. But today Jonathan and I will both be talking with Alexander asking him questions and engaging in conversation on this topic. We wanted to focus today on Plone as a case study, in a way. A case study of a content management system that has been doing some really exciting things with respect to accessibility. And that's why we have Alexander with us today.
Jonathan: I also just want to quickly mention we've already received questions and comments about this webcast, there seems to be quite a bit of interest. People feel we may be advocating Plone as the only solution, the only content management system. We think Plone has made some great accessibility choices, and they've implemented things very well so we're show casing them and using them as a case study but we're in no way saying it's the only decent management system available that you should use for your organization. I want to clarify that if you do have some questions about other content management systems, or suggestions for other content management systems, that we do have a fact sheet on our web site that you can, we welcome comments, those comments are used to update that fact sheet. We hope it improves over time. The link is on the webcast page.
Cyndi: And as we get started I'd like to just remind anyone listening that you can submit questions to our panel through the link that's titled submit a question. Go figure, huh? Found on the NCDAE webcast page. The way that we run these webcasts is for about the first two thirds of our time, 40 minutes, Jonathan and I will be talking with Alexander, and then the last third of the time we're going to devote to any questions that come in from our panelist. . I've got to say we've already had questions that have come in over the past few days so we've elected to kind of weave those into some of our initial questions. So let's get started. Alexander, for some of the folks that are listening right now, they just may not be aware of you, or your work. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Alexander: Sure. So the first thing that you mentioned is probably that I'm not a native speaker so I'll probably stumble here and there when I explain things.
Cyndi: That's just fine.
Alexander: Bear with me. I'm originally from Norway, I started with a guy called Allen Bannion who lives in Texas about five years ago, and I'm currently in San Francisco, and starting to work at school in October.
Cyndi: Very good. And of course one of the things you left out of your own INTRO is that you were one of the founders of Plone, which is a very respectable content management system. Anything else you'd like to add about your work with Plone?
Alexander: Well, essentially I'm not an expert on accessibility issues, so a lot of this will, these questions I will answer from a user interface perspective more than in an accessibility perspective. Although I do talk a lot with the people that do the accessibility work. And I'm aware of most of the approaches and stuff like that. So we will be able to probably get some proper answers from that.
Cyndi: Very good, okay. Well let's just get started, then. I want to begin today's discussion with a couple of questions that I think will help us define our terms for listeners. You know, first off there's often confusion between the two CMS's, the first being course management systems, and the second being content management systems. Can you provide for us a distinction between them, and maybe even discuss areas where they overlap?
Alexander: The hardest questions first. So there is quite an interesting divide between these systems for all of them, consider all the other subsets of their problem domain. So content management people consider a course where in learning management systems subsets of content management. The other way around we're considering content management a subsystem of course wear. So I'm not that far into course management to be able to identify what those kind of things are. What I can say is that there is a lot of functionality that is common between the two, and that you can share between the different systems, whether you're building a content management scenario or a learning management scenario. In general, you have security, content handling, work flow support, user handling, stuff like that, all those things are shared between the systems. So what has happened with Plone with regards to course wear is that people have taken a tone which is not particularly aimed at course wear as such and they've taken it as a content management system and customized it to be closer to what course wear is. Two good examples are the connects project at Rice University, which is CNX.org. We will probably be able to add some links later on. And also MIT open course wear are using the same system as the rice university people. So there is a really good presentation which can probably go in much more detail about how they are using Plone at a web site called Ted, there's a conference every year, it's Ted.com, and we can probably add those links later. In any case, they go through a lot of the stuff they're doing with course wear and Plone, and I think it's really exciting, even though I don't work in education as such, they're essentially rewriting the rules for publishing papers and working on curriculums, and a lot of this stuff. So I was really impressed with that presentation. So if you go to Ted.com there is a link to presentations there, and there is a guy from rice university that talks about how they use Plone.
Cyndi: Well, and you know, just to kind of come back to that in pieces, it seems from an education perspective that courses are comprised of just, you know, bundles of content. So you know, Plone is a content management system, just to confirm that for our listeners, versus a course management system. But it is being used in education today. You know, we have a question that came in the other day from someone, and I think is a really good opening question, as well. And Ralph Shelburn sent in, asking about the open source movement, and he asks, what is it, essentially? So for folks that are not familiar with the open source movement, can you describe that a little bit?
Alexander: Sure, I can try. I actually had problems describing this to English-speaking people before I found the correct parallels. But I found out about the concept that you used to have here in the U.S., which is called bond racing, where when somebody comes to an area and they want to start their own farm, all the people put down their, you know, work for a couple of days and they help this guy, or this family, raise their first barn. So they can get productive and kind of be valuable members of society, and get their food production going and stuff like that. And open source is very much like that, where in general we help people get started, and we spend some time helping them get started, so that they can become protective members of the community and give back the resources that they choose to share with us. But in stepping back, the main ideas of open source is that everything's open. Most of these values resonate with the academic community because it's kind of the way everything works in academia where everything's shared and everything is open for everybody to read and study. So it's a shared ownership, it's a shared maintenance, it's a shared development, and a shared responsibility. And another interesting facet of this is that it's very Darwinistic. Most of the time the superior solutions win out, because there is no, the systems that are not fit for the job they are doing receive less attention, and as a result don't progress as quickly as the others.
Cyndi: Right. Well, and you know, as I think about higher education, I think that there are lots of things that might be appealing about open source content management systems. But I'm interested in your sense of that. You know, there are hundreds of institutions right now that are leaving their proprietary systems behind. But do you think that the open source movement is providing an advantage just because of costs, or would you say that features, updates, I don't know, ability to respond, things like that, are reasons that we're seeing more folks in higher education move in this direction?
Alexander: So there is no single reason that people are moving towards open source. It's usually a combination of a lot of things. Vendor lock-in is one of them. You don't really want to be tied to one vendor, and with the recent acquisitions that are going on in that space with black board buying web CT and stuff like that, you end up in situations that are not ideal for the competition in that area. But the biggest one I think is that content management and course wear and stuff like that is, it's pretty much when you go into an organization it's the last thing that comes into the organization. And it needs to be flexible enough to integrate with the existing systems. And a lot of proprietary systems have a problem doing that, because the source code is proprietary, and is owned by the company.
Cyndi: And it's fixed.
Alexander: Yes. So let's say you have an old, you know, system that provides some sort of critical functionality, and you're not ready to throw that out just yet. With open source you can hire a couple of people and write something, even if you have something very, very specific that is only used in your university, you can still write something that integrates with that. Of course I'm a developer, so I have a very biased technical view of what's possible. But in general it's based on a programming language called python which is very, very common in the world. And getting people, hiring people to do those kind of task ises is normally not a problem.
Jonathan: I have one question following up on that. This is kind of I guess just for other people that may have a similar question. Now, I know that sometimes those decisions, or those improvements, you hire a program'er to add some functionality, sometimes people keep those in house and sometimes they choose to give those back to the community, to whatever open source community they're working in. Do you have any comments on that process?
Alexander: Yes. So essentially the license we use is the same license as LINUX uses, which means nobody can take Plone and produce a close system out of it. If they want to redistribute what they're doing, like sell it as a product, the result also has to be open source. Which creates an interesting dynamic in the sense that people don't have to release their modifications unless they want to sell the product. So you are free to actually do modifications in house, and never release those. But most people actually choose to release the things. Because one of the things that, or one of the things that we always talk about is how software is actually not an asset, it's a liability. Software is not something that is actually worth anything unless it's maintained. And a lot of people do not understand that in the sense that they argue that, you know, we spent hours and hours writing this software, we should get paid for it. Which makes sense, but the software itself isn't worth anything if it doesn't have any users, or isn't actually actively maintained by somebody. And the robustness of that owe co system is directly proportional with how many people are involved.
Cyndi: And going back to your, the barn raising analogy that you brought up earlier, you know, it does make sense, if you have benefited from other people leaving their work for a time to help raise your barn, it makes sense for you to leave yours for a little bit of time and help give back in to them some features, some functionality that may be very helpful to them in their attempts to be productive, as you say, in their community.
Alexander: Yes. And in general what we see is that a lot of the people that adopt Plone are either in ACADEMIA or the NGO world where those values really resonate, because you help the greater good. If you want to be very dramatic about it, you donate this stuff to humanity. So it can be maintained by somebody else down the line, even if you guys stop using it, or whatever happens, the stuff is at least out there, it's published. It's like it's knowledge that is out there that somebody can pick up and run with.
Cyndi: Right. I'm going to start shifting our conversation, now, towards more of the accessibility bits. Hopefully we've provided most folks with enough context for open source and for Plone and content management. But let's get right to it, now. Of course there have been content management systems that have dealt with web accessibility before, and in lots of different ways. But why was accessibility a goal for Plone? And that's very clear in your own documentation. And I'm very, very interested, particularly in how Plone chose to tackle accessibility.
Alexander: Okay, so essentially it started when we started the project itself, we had a very strict adherens to standards because we were tired of systems that were using invalid HTML and not using CSS pro presentation and stuff like that. So it kind of started gradually as a by-product of that, which for us it wasn't really that hard to adjust our product to comply with accessibility guidelines. Because that's the way we wrote it in the first place. So, but there were a couple of people that were involved that really pushed that angle, because they saw how close we were to actually being compliant with the guidelines. And there was, there was one particular incident that I'll always remember which is kind of a water shed event for accessibility, where we had been working on Plone for I think two years at that point, and we hadn't really, you know, I'd never seen anybody use our system that actually used screen readers and stuff like that. So we had a kind of a workshop in Austria, where they had two people from the local blind association around there come up and show us how Plone worked when you couldn't see anything. And that was mind blowing to see how things - I mean it's kind of funny we were actually programming accessibility blindly, in the sense that we hadn't tested it a lot at that point, because we didn't really have any screen reader technology to test with and stuff like that. And these people are able to use Plone out of the box, with their software. And at that point I personally decided that this was worth pursuing, because these people, I was just shown how much of a confusing world it was, especially at that point, like three or four years ago, where absolutely nobody cared about standards and how accessible web sites were.
Cyndi: So you just made the decision to conform to standards, and then the wonderful by-product was that your system was, in the main, accessible. Do I have that right?
Alexander: Yeah, that is correct. So one of the other problems I often use is good accessibility leads to good usability. It's kind of like, I'm not sure if you're aware, you probably have them in the U.S. too, the tab where you pull tap where you pull up and go left and right to get water, which was a design for people who have handicaps. And it turns out to be a really good way of designing a tap. And it's become, I believe in Europe it's the prevalent design mode for taps. And those kind of things, I'm a big believer is that if you can keep it simple enough that it's accessible and useable, it has effects all over.
Cyndi: And it affects everyone in positive ways.
Alexander: Exactly.
Jonathan: I definitely agree that people focusing on standards in design has been a great thing in terms of accessibility. A lot of people started to care. And for some people, it sounds like you're one of these people, that's sort of the in-road. They started out focusing on standards but I think there also sometimes some specific decisions that need to be made above and beyond standards. And it looks like some of those have been, some of the decisions that have been made with Plone. I'm just curious if you can think of any specific decisions that were made to enhance the accessibility of Plone?
Alexander: So - So we essentially decided that we would always have like the base level of support should always be that we support browsers without Java scripts, and we support browsers of any level. Because we also have a lot of customers that use Plone in developing countries that might not have the latest and greatest when it comes to browsers. And making sure that it always works under the lowest common denominator. I can use Plone from my mobile phone and just being able to do that is very powerful and shows how far down it actually scales when it comes to the functionality. So if you have something that can read HTML and post forms you can pretty much do anything you do with Plone. So that was one, I guess one of the things that helped us all along. And we're kind of facing a new challenge now to veer a little bit from your original question, but everybody's starting to you AJAX technologies these days. For those of you who don't know what AJAX, it's very dynamic behavior in web pages, like Google maps and G-mail and stuff like that. And a lot of those people do not think about accessibility. So we're kind of, there is a danger that a lot of the world will start entering the space where their sites used to be accessible and then they start getting carried away with dynamic functionality and suddenly their sites are unusable for people with accessibility concerns. So one of the things we're doing now is we're upgrading it to use this dynamic user interface technology. But we try to keep the old accessibility we've always had, and not kind of leave that by the way side when we change things.
Cyndi: Well, you know, in a semi-related convenient, listening to last little bit about AJAX, do you feel that any of your feature sets that you've had to limit any of your, the decisions about your feature sets because of your commitment to standards and accessibility?
Alexander: Not really. Because we have Plone itself is a very abstracted, so having two modes of operation on top of one functionality is not a problem as such. So what we always do, we construct it so it works and links into text mode browsers which means the lowest common denominator works. And then we put the dynamic behavior on top of that. So it kind of, a lot of types, like I said, it actually leads to better decisions. It's the thing you're trying to solve is so complex you cannot do it in an accessible way you're doing it the wrong way.
Cyndi: Very interesting. I've heard a lot of folks as they're talking about open source projects and accessibility, kind of wonder about how well accessibility can truly be integrated. Because the reality is you've got hundreds of people that are contributing code, and at a certain level is it really possible to administer and implement accessibility in such an open system? I don't know if you have thoughts on that. I don't know how it is that you guys quite make sure that everyone that's contributing is doing so at the level that you needed them to, and that that's somehow being evaluated or checked. I'd just like to you visit on that a bit.
Alexander: Yes. So we have around 200 contributors at this point, which is, when you think about it, it should be totally unmanageable. But it isn't because at any one time there's probably you know, 20, 30, 40 active members. And so what we do for making sure accessibility is followed, the base level of functionality, meaning that things are not unreadable for most of the screen readers, is taken care of by our testing frame work. We have things that do browser tests, we have things that make sure that everything's accessible with the bare minimum. Of course there are rules between the works in any kind of device, and extra things you put on top to make sure that people really get a better experience that are using screen readers and stuff like that. So in general, we do a lot of parodies. Every time the code goes in everybody reads the list and sees what gets checked in. And we see how the code base evolves and the people from the user interface team have accessibility in mind when they look at the change that is made. So if somebody makes a change that is incompatible with that, it's normally they hit that guy and say we can't do it this way because people with screen readers will not be able to see this.
Cyndi: And those changes are really made to the base code, correct?
Alexander: Yeah, that is correct.
Cyndi: I know that other open source systems where accessibility is being, I don't know if you'd call it successfully implemented, but implemented through a series of developers, but folks have to invoke hundreds of include files and at any time the whole thing might just break.
Alexander: It's kind of grafting on a functionality approach that doesn't really scale that well. So there are some things that you'd need to have in your core frame work that people always underestimate. Accessibility is one of them. Another one is multilingual capabilities, which Plone's really strong on. Where you can't just say okay, now we have a system let's make it work in Chinese. Let's make it work with Hebrew with the right to left instead of left to right. And stuff like that. That stuff needs to be in the core, it needs to be maintained, and it needs to be part of the code base that everybody uses. Because if it doesn't, it breaks.
Cyndi: You know, we had another question that was sent in the other day, Julia Gosling, if I'm saying this name right, she asked, I thought this was a very provocative question. Sort of a statement question. Let me read it. A truly accessible CMS is one that is accessible both in the user interface and in the code that it is able to produce. Is that an impossible dream for an open source CMS?
Alexander: So we do have people with sight impairments that do contribute code to us. Most of our code is in a language that is an XML dialect. Which is called page templates. Essentially HTML with an XML namespace on it. But I won't get into anything too technical here. But you can do a certain level of customization without touching code, like in a programming language sort of way. You can do a lot of customizations without touching any templates. But it depends on the level of changes you want to make. We do have people that contribute that have an accessibility challenges. How well that works with programming languages and stuff like that, I'm not in a position to comment on. But I totally agree, it should be possible to contribute in that way. But to flip the coin, the most important thing that we can do for accessibility is more of a cultural issue. It's people need to give us feedback when they find something that they don't like. Because it's the other way around, we're the blind ones when it comes to looking at how this thing would work in the screen reader. If it's too verbose, if it's altered in the wrong way, if it's unclear how it works, we never get to see that. So giving us feedback and saying, you know, this sucks, you need to fix this. And being less, I guess - I'm from Norway I'm very blunt and very straightforward when I voice my opinions, as you probably noticed. But people need to be less, what should I say, polite, and more, a little bit more demanding and say, you know, if you're going to say you're accessible, this is not the way to do it. And it kind of reminds me of the state we had a couple of years ago with the Chinese, where they were too polite to point out mistakes, so we never knew that there were mistakes there. And when the community got big enough people started pointing out, you know, this actually doesn't work in Chinese. And then we said oh, so let's fix that. But until we get feedback there is nothing we can do. And that's why the major, major thing that you can do with a system like Plone is to give us feedback and say you know, this doesn't work. In Jaws this thing breaks.
Cyndi: Well, Alexander, you bring up something that's on my top ten question list for you, actually. In terms of people giving feedback, I just know that there are a lot of folks, maybe some of ourselves included over here at the national center and web aim, a little intimidated by open source. So how can folks get involved, especially if they want to get involved giving feedback or contributing some accessibility code, how can they take that step without feeling intimidated and contribute in some positive ways?
Alexander: Yeah, so it's interesting you should ask, we're actually in the middle of the process of creating a separate accessibility team, and a separate accessibility mailing list for Plone with some of the people from NHS and United Kingdom, the national health service. They have a couple of users that are using screen readers, and provide valuable feedback for us. So right now we have the general user interface mailing list, which is probably the first touch point if you want to voice a concern or talk about things that could be improved, or help us out. So we probably put links to this but it's Plone.org/support, and on that page there's a list called user interface or U. I. It's UI@lift.org.
Cyndi: After this webcast if you want to send us any links with the description we'll make sure all of that gets up on our webcast page.
Alexander: Excellent. So one of the things that we want to do, especially now that we're changing the interface to include these AJAX dynamic user interface things, is that we need a strong testing team that makes sure that when we do these updates we don't break things that already work, and also that we improve things that don't currently work that well with regards to how they're ordered or complexity or stuff like that. So again, like we - It's very hard for us to test screen readers because we don't use them on a day-to-day basis. I can download a screen reader and make it read the text for me, but that's the limit to how long I can do that. And figure out what's going on. And then see if the - You know, one of the great things about Plone is that it's very good on details. All the small things are correctly figured out, and all those small details are lost when a person like me tries to use a screen reader, because I'm not familiar with a screen reader.
Jonathan: That's great.
Alexander: So testing and doing it again and again and improving it until it works optimally is the way to go about it.
Jonathan: I wanted to go back to the question that Julia posted. I think you've definitely addressed one interpretation of the question. Another interpretation that I had when I read it, I think when she's using the word code, possibly is she not only talking about contributing code to Plone but also when people create pages, that code, the interface so that there's the interface that someone would use, a teacher or somebody who's a content contributor, as text, and add headings and include images and things like that. What can be done to ensure that that is accessible, and not just - And also make sure that that interface is accessible, that the content is accessible to the end user. Any ideas on that?
Alexander: In general Plone puts a lot of those things that are required according to the standards as required items when people put in content. So things like getting the headers in correct order, things like putting at-tags and images, all those things are required in the editor. When you insert an image you're asked to proper put in an ALT tag. I haven't done that integration so all I can say is I know that they've spent time to make sure that the accessibility elements are actually present in the U. I. For the people that use it, that do not use screen readers and stuff like that. And Plone is actually, it's interesting, because we just got a customer in our company that said, you know, we picked Plone because when we went out and we saw all the other systems, and we saw the systems that they have deployed, not one of them actually validated. Because the system itself validates but once the people that set it up leaves the area, they're left with a content that don't have enough background to know what's right and what's wrong. Content editors. And Plone has a loot of validation and code cleanup that makes sure that web site is actually following those standards, even when the people that, you know, deployed it from them are not there any more.
Cyndi: That's a question that I've got. What is it that Plone has done to make it so that site administrators, content creators, aren't breaking accessibility?
Alexander: So there is both manual stuff, like I mentioned, the, when they create content they are asked to provide a lot of, or some method of like ALT-tags and stuff like that, that get surrendered for them automatically. And there is also an automated frame work that, whenever you, if you cut and paste something from a word document and you put that inside Plone, and then you save that document, then that document is run through a filter that makes sure that all the illegal markup is stripped out, that the header levels are correct, that everything validates. So it's kind of both a user interface design thing, and also an automated process behind that goes and cleans up a lot of the content that is put in.
Cyndi: So that it can validate?
Alexander: Exactly.
Jonathan: I'm glad you mentioned that because one of the concerns I think a lot of listeners might have is that, well this is great except I use word, or some other, or power point.
Alexander: So that's one of the areas where Plone goes above what most open source systems do, because from the start we've been focused on businesses, not just scratching our own niche. So from day one we've had to deal with people that their main form of content production is word. And word, as such, is terribly unsuited for producing content for the web. So we've had to, you know, take what comes out of word and filter that in a way that it becomes good web content. And that's something we've been doing for years. So it's really something that you need to do when you go inside a company, because they will not suddenly throw out word and start using our built-in visual editor for their content.
Jonathan: Great. Well I had a question that's actually part of a discussion that we had on the web aim site. National center is a partner with web aim and last week there was discussion where someone asked a question about Plone and accessibility. Some people applied with positive feedback and some issues people mentioned. A couple of times people commented they thought Plone was complicated, and because it was cluttered, even at a technical level it might be accessible, on a functional level it was not, because a screen reader would not read it because it would up the complexity.
Alexander: Part of that, that's a totally correct observation. And part of the reason for that is that Plone out of the box shifts with a lot of functionality. It's kind of like word, where in word you have I think last time I heard the number that it has like 2,000 different functions to do things to your document. But people use maybe 5 percent of that. But they don't all use the same 5 percent. So what Plone does, it essential ships with everything enabled the way it is now. And the people that deploy it in an organization normally what they do is they go in and they disable the stuff that they are not using. Like if you don't need work flow, you disable that. If you don't need collaboration and sharing of documents, you disable that. There's a lot of things that you can pull out, and there's a lot of things you should pull out, because everybody's needs are different. So out of the box, Plone is, has a lot of functionality, and is a bit intimidating.
Jonathan: Is there anything you can see in the future where some of those, there might possibly be an out of the box it's a little stripped-down kind of simpler approach? Or due think that's kind of -
Cyndi: A Plone basic.
Jonathan: A Plone light, or is there always going to be a lot to start out with?
Alexander: You can kind of draw a parallel the way LINUX distributions work. The aim is to have such a system that you can put together your own distribution of Plone, if you will, which includes the features that are relevant for you. If you maintain a public web site, not an internet, there's a lot of stuff you don't need. And you could select from a prepackaged distribution that is solely focuses on web publishing and not on internet and get a subset of that functionality. But instead of forking the code base, there's a lot of - There are other systems that have done this, like dedicated certain parts of their content management system and forked off a code base and they kind of sink back and forth. What we're doing at the moment is that we're working on a modular technology that will allow you to create kind of a policy document and say, you know, I'm interested in these six features and these 18 features, and then you push a button and it creates a site with these features enabled. And also after the fact you can remove or add those kind of features. So it's a little bit off the - Like it'll take a little while before that thing is reality, but in the long run I would like to see things like, you know, Plone for web publishing, Plone for internets, Plone for collaboration, Plone for whatever audience that needs certain subset of our functionality. Plone for education and stuff like that.
Cyndi: Well, you know, Alexander, as we're really thinking about Plone and accessibility, we realize that everyone is always making these movements towards the most accessible system, certainly the one that's validating, and to a certain extent it's always a target, and many of us never completely reach it, depending on what our own goals are, or to what standard we are trying to conform. But I wonder what your wish list for accessibility really is. I'm sure that there are things in accessibility that, you know, Plone has not yet done. And maybe it's a direction that you would like to see. So if you had, for example, unlimited resources, you know, what would your wish list look like? Or given the resources that you currently have, what are the directions that Plone will be taking accessibility in the next while?
Alexander: So the first thing, I would just, if I had more resources and more people willing to cooperate with, or work with the product, is essentially get a lot more testers. Like there's a lot of things we have no idea that you can do with screen readers. And how things are approached that way. There's a lot of wisdom out there just among the people that use these tools basically, and it's like user interface. You just have to use it again and again, and refine and refine and refine. And after a couple of years you have a really good interface. But it takes time and it takes doing it again and again, and doing it wrong and re-implementing it and getting it right the second time. So on my list would be a list, a long list of name that is could help me, and in terms of time so that we can work this out and make it work. Because technically it's not that big of a challenge. Like for the coders that work with Plone, as long as they know what they're aiming for, it's really easy to comply with most of these accessibility guidelines. They face much more complex problems than this when they built Plone. So these kind of things are, it's kind of like user interface. It's not hard as such when you know where you're going but it's very hard to get it right and it's very hard to make things simple.
Cyndi: Right. Well, I've just got this flurry of things in my brain, here, I'd love to ask you. But I know that we need to get to some of the questions that have been coming in. Let's see. There's one that may be more of a question to us at the national center, but I'll go ahead and read that. It comes in from John middle ton. The question is, what CMS program is NCDAE.org currently using, if any?
Jonathan: And really we are using a custom-built system. We don't use any packaged system. So -
Cyndi: So the answer is none.
Jonathan: Exactly.
Cyndi: But here is a question, I think, that's a good one for you, Alexander. And it comes in from Jason, oh boy, I hope I'm saying this right, BARCOLO. The question is, do you see an open source publishing model whereby learning objects from publishers can be monetized and if so what obstacles do you see to prevent such a model?
Alexander: So you dropped out for a bit. Can you repeat what the question is?
Cyndi: Yes, do you see an open source publishing model whereby learning objects from publishers can be monetized, and if so, what obstacles do you see to prevent such a model?
Alexander: Okay. So I assume he's talking learning objects, I assume, refers to content, here, and learning modules and stuff like that. There is nothing in the way, for example, Plone works. You're allowed to have things inside there that are thing that is can be monetized. It doesn't have to be open source as such. The core system will be open source. So if you make any changes to Plone itself to make your learning object or whatever you put in work, and you sell that thing, that's part of the source code has to be open source, so that we can see this is what you had to do to make this thing work with Plone. And we should improve Plone so you don't have to do that the next time. So I guess the question is probably a bit over my head when it comes to jargon and how you guys talk about content, and how your business models work. I don't really work in education as such. But if you can help me out in clarifying, or you have any thoughts or any examples or anything like that.
Jonathan: No, I think that's a good way to address it. I think just this question of more or less making money from learning, yeah, learning objects.
Alexander: Okay, so making money from content, I guess.
Jonathan: Yeah, I think -
Alexander: So there's definitely the possibility of doing that. I do find the way that that content is produced in projects like connections, the CNX.org web site that rice university has and also the NYT open course are much more compelling, because it kind of goes back to the same kind of argument, should that information be under wraps, and the property of somebody, or should it be licensed under a license where you can change it and modify it and update it without necessarily consulting the original owner? If you know about creative commons, their web site is actually Plone, too.
Cyndi: And we do know that here at Utah State University.
Alexander: Exactly. So yeah, I guess you guys are pretty close to it. So creative commons has like rules for what you can do and not do with content. And just my personal belief is that those kind of things should be as open as possible, and be as shared as possible, because it's the interconnection between the content that makes up the value. Like when you teach something to somebody, the interconnections you can make between different fields is what creates new value, there. Not plain reading whatever they tell you. It's connecting the bits you already have. So technically it's certainly possible to monetize this. It's not something we're touching as such. But there's nothing wrong with having a licensing model inside an open source system that would have a kind of an economy of paid content.
Jonathan: All right, well thank you. We have another question that came in, this is from John GUNDERSON, and he asks, he says you talk a lot about screen readers. Do you consider other disabilities? This is his question, do you consider other disabilities? Do you have any comment on that?
Alexander: So the only exposure I've had to those kind of tools are screen readers. What we do is that we approach things according to the section 508 guidelines and the web content accessibility guidelines from world wide web consortium. Again it comes back to testing. It's very hard for us to work, or to figure out if things have worked the way they're intended to from the specification. Like the screen reader Jaws has caused us a lot of pain because it doesn't actually conform to the standards, and it has broken things in Plone time and time again because we don't know that it's actually doing things slightly differently from the way it's described in the software. So no matter how much you follow the standard, there will always be cases where you need to test and make sure that it actually works in real life. So I guess the answer is yes, we'd love to, but we do need feedback to do those things.
Jonathan: So now, following up just a little bit about what you mentioned about Jaws, you mentioned that a couple of times, that there are problems with Jaws that everyone, people that work with screen readers I'm sure would all agree with you. If you're confronted with a decision where something seems like in order for it to be compatible with Jaws you need to tweak things from what you'd planned, are those changes you make or do you more stick to the, say no, no, Jaws really needs to change and we shouldn't reward them for their bad decisions?
Alexander: It's kind of both. Like we normally end up working around things that never change in Jaws. But if they break something in a tiny upgrade and they are aware of the issue. An example is they had a problem of rendering some certain pieces of CSS correctly because they did something in their application that broke the way Plone serves up CSS. And we had a work-around like you could go in and you could check a check mark and Plone would sub-off the CSS slightly differently to make sure that Jaws could read it. But eventually they ended up fixing that. So then we, everything's fine again. But we do put in work-arounds for accessibility when we have to.
Jonathan: And I do want to go back quickly to John's comment. I think it's a good one. I think a lot - You've mentioned in the past that your background being you, I guess - Well usability, U. I., and a lot of times people from, in accessibility backgrounds come back to this, that a lot of people who, when they talk about accessibility, really are focusing specifically on accessibility to the screen readers. Just kind of reiterating what I think you said, would it be fair to say that right now you think that you are fairly centered on screen readers when you talk about accessibility, but are open to feedback from other people about considerations for other people that may have disabilities besides that, say, motor, keyboard accessibility issues?
Alexander: We do have some of that. Like we do have like access keys and stuff like that. The problem with that is that we do things blindly. Sorry about, I don't know if that's politically incorrect to say it that way, but we do it blindly in the sense that when we started out Plone we added a lot of shortcut keys or access keys to do things. And what it turned out is that a lot of those access keys actually conflicted with internal keys in Jaws. So by supporting those things, we had to remove, or we destroyed some of the functioning in Jaws. And then you start multiplying this with the amount of languages out there. Because Jaws in German has totally different key shortcuts, or access keys than Jaws in English. And then you get this amazingly exploding complexity of things that you need to work around. So we actually had to reduce the amount of access keys in the later versions of Plone to make sure we didn't override anybody's settings. So it's a very hard problem, and it's 100 percent dependent on people giving us feedback.
Cyndi: Well, and what you have said earlier is that you conformed to section 508 of the U.S. rehab act, and WOCAG 1.2 and I happen to know that's priority two. But you're soliciting more feedback from folks that are using a wide array of assistive technologies.
Alexander: Definitely. What we're doing is we comply with the letter of the standard, and again that is normally not enough but there's no way for us to know unless people actually tell us that we screwed up.
Cyndi: And let me follow up with this question. On the standards that you chose, okay, Plone really chose to hit priority two, or AA accessibility, or at least that level out of the web content accessibility guidelines version 1. I wonder why in this standard. On wonder handy could say gosh it could certainly have been easier for you to hit priority one. On the other side of the coin I could say even in you selecting priority 2 you're still leaving some people out.
Alexander: Yes.
Cyndi: What drove this decision? Why did you guys settle on the AA priority? And 508.
Alexander: It's mostly a matter of manpower and, again, testers. So people were able to give enough feedback that we could comfortably raise that thing to AA level. But there are a lot of requirements in the AAA level that we don't have enough feedback on, or - So technically it's really easy to push Plone to AAA. Like I've looked through what we're missing, and most of it is stuff that is pretty trivial technically to implement in Plone. It's just that we don't have, I don't want to go out and shout from the roof tops that we have AA when nobody's giving me any feedback on it. So it's kind of going for the middle thing. Like we just did whatever we could, and then we ended up, oh, this is actually, this ends up being the AA standard. And then we said, you know, we can push it up to AAA, but we need help to do that.
Cyndi: Okay.
Jonathan: Great. A final question that we have here is from John grant, and he says that he - Well, let's see. He suggests that Plone may not be accessible for a number of non-profit organizations because it uses a significant amount of server resources and therefore cannot be used in a hosting situation. And he also makes a call for other CMS's to be discussed. Again that's something that can be done outside of this discussion. But what do you think, do you have any comments on that?
Alexander: No, he does touch on one of the things that is particular about Plone is that it runs, it's not a collection of PHP scripts, for those of you who know enough - It's an entire application server, and it's much heavier than your average, you know, $5 a month PHP hosting. So - But that thing will change in the sense that dedicated virtual hosting and stuff like that is becoming cheaper, and it's becoming the standard. So we're in a phase right now where hosting for Plone is a little bit more expensive and a little bit more resource demanding. But Plone does so much more than all the other systems. We have very granular security model. Like if you look at our security track record, there's one security hole in Plone, and pretty much all the PHP systems are like 40 or 50 different security holes. So there is a reason why so heavy. And it might not, like I talked to you guys before we started this webcast, we're generally mature enough in the Plone community to tell you when you're using the wrong tool. So if you're using Plone and you really should be using, you know, Google or any kind of other system out there, we will tell you. We won't say, you know, we're Plone people, we don't talk to the other people because we do. We're not in competition. This is a cooperation. We have slightly different markets and we have slightly different focuses. But in the end it's all about getting people over to a platform where they're comfortable and can maintain their own stuff, and can run it comfortably. If that can be open source over proprietary, that's a very good thing.
Cyndi: Well, and you know, one other thing that I'd want to sort of add on to your response to that question. Who was the person - And to John grant. And now I've just lost it. We're having a problem here because I'm having a hard time seeing where that went. We will do our best to see if we could get broader discussions of other course management systems, as maybe a potential future webcast. But the other thing that I would say, and this goes back to something John brought up right at the very beginning of our webcast. We'd encourage folks to go to the NCDAE site, and there is a fact sheet on CMS systems, and as people post their own comments to that, we'll update that fact sheet, and we can really start building a lovely little, you know, community of knowledge there about what it is that people have been finding. You know, the good, bad, and the ugly. And we want to encourage that. It's not until we can pull these things together, the things that you guys all have your fingers in, it's not until we can start doing that that we can get feedback into the developer community. So I would encourage folks to do that. Well, I can't believe it but we're out of our time already today. It just feels like this hour went in about, I don't know, 18 minutes or something like that. And I want to thank you, Alexander, for joining us today, and let everybody know that the archive of the webcast will be available, well actually it'll be available later today, and the transcript of today's webcast will be available in just a couple of days. I'd also like to just make mention of our next webcast and invite people to join us. It'll be on October the 25th, and Jared Smith is going to be leading a discussion on web captioning, and the uses in education. So join us at that time, and please, give us some feedback, contribute to our fact sheet on CMSs, and we will do what we can to get some more on this important topic. So from the national center on disability and access to education, I'd like to sign off and say good bye.