Cyndi: Welcome to the second in a series of webcasts sponsored by the National Center on Disability and Access to Education, and we’ll be referring to that as NCDAE throughout the broadcast. Today’s topic is Research and Development of Accessible Technologies. I’m Cyndi Rowland. I’m the Director of the Institute for Technology Access within NCDAE and I’m also director of WebAIM, which is a partner within NCDAE.
With me today is a great panel and I know that you’ll all enjoy listening to what they have to say. We have with us Tom Wlodkowski, Director of Accessibility at America Online. We have Sara Basson who is with IBM's global campus and she works on an array of accessibility projects with them and we have Jared Smith who is part of the NCDAE staff and an instructional designer with WebAIM.
For those of you that are joining us today, and have questions for our panelists, please make sure that you e-mail those to us, and you can e-mail those from the web cast, submit a question page. So it should be there if you have a browser open right in front of you. And towards the end of the broadcast, the web cast, we'll get to as many of those questions as we possibly can. But we've also set up a forum that will accompany this web cast, and the purpose of that will be to ensure that everyone has maximal opportunity possible to interact and to discuss ideas that are pertinent to them. So at any point in time, if you would like to comment on something that one of the panelists has to say, or share an opinion, maybe even share other technologies, or open a question or a topic, feel free to go into that forum. Now, let me tell you how to get there because this forum is brand new, within NCDAE. The URL specific is at www.ncdae.org/forum/. And you'd want to post it under the topic "web cast." You can also reach that page by following, going to the main page, NCDAE.org, and following the links to that. Please note that this is a new forum, and we're just now beginning public discussions on topics that come directly from the national summit. So since it's just beginning don't be surprised if the topics you're interested in aren't yet populated. They will be shortly and we hope to have some lively discussions on those topics.
Well, let's start right now with each of our panelists introducing themselves a little bit more, and describing their experiences in accessibility of educational technology, whether we're talking about the web, whether we're talking about other, you know, video technologies, there's an array of technology that is used in education today. Well, let's start first with Tom. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your background?
Tom: Sure, thanks Cyndi, happy to be a part of this. Hello, everybody. My name is Tom Wlodkowski and I’m the Director of Accessibility at America Online. And while I’m not necessarily directly involved with education accessibility per se, though AOL does have a portal called AOL at School and we certainly advise them, I certainly am these days more focused on making the AOL Internet service, our software and content areas accessible to people with disabilities. I certainly have been involved in prior lives, I guess you could call it, with accessible technology and education.
Prior to joining AOL, I worked for the CPB/WGBG National Center for Accessible Media as a project director. I worked on a National Science Foundation-funded grant to develop guidelines for making math and science educational media accessible, and not only were we talking about the user interface and how to navigate a cd-rom at the time, or some other type of software, but also looking at math and science content and how we might make that accessible and we were involved in developing a couple of different prototypes in that space. An accessible math game for kids, and an accessible science simulation software for more secondary education. I also worked on making set top boxes and DVD technology accessible, talking menus into DVD’s.
So I tackle things from a variety of perspectives, I guess you could say, and then certainly now, working at AOL, looking at a lot of the different web technologies, looking at software accessibility, implementing services like our streaming closed caption content. So I imagine rather than hear me talk about things, we'll get into a q and a format and we'll be able to cover some topics. I just wanted to give you a range of areas and focus that I’ve dealt with over the past eleven, twelve years dedicated to accessibility for people with disabilities.
Cyndi: Tom thanks so much. As I listen to some of the things you've been involved in, it strikes me that for some of the individuals listening they might be very interested in finding out more information about, for example, the talking DVD menu structure or other things like that. So again, I’d encourage people to, you know, post in to the discussion forum and we can make sure that those questions get answered. Sara, you want to give us a little bit about your background?
Sara: Sure, thank you. So my name again is Sara Basson and I’m in IBM global services. I joined IBM a few years ago after a previous stint actually at NYNEX Science and Technology. By training and background I’m a speech scientist but migrated to accessibility several years ago, which was a very natural migration, both because it's an area of passion for me, and also there is so much relevance to speech products. And so it was basically taking work that I had done previously in speech recognition and text to speech synthesis and leveraging it for this other opportunity. I was initially in IBM's accessibility center which is housed at IBM research. There's a world wide accessibility center which has an accessibility mandate for the entire corporation, with several functions. First, it is a center that ensures that our own hardware and software is accessible both for our employees and for our customers, and also making sure that IBM remains a technical leader in this area, represented on standard bodies and so on. And from there, I migrated to IBM's global service but continue with an accessibility mandate. So my goal in global services is to use the accessibility expertise that IBM has acquired by focusing using on this area for so many years, and deploying this in services opportunities. So I’m in the human capital management practice with a goal of demonstrating how accessibility can create a business advantage and actually make IBM a more desirable service provider because we bring accessibility leadership into the game. And of course the end result if successful is, you know, this is good for the community that depends on accessibility, it's also, you know, good for IBM from a business perspective and ultimately good in terms of causing IBM to want to continue investment in remaining a leader in accessibility.
I’m actually also within, also a learning practice so that's relevant to the learning issues associated with this web cast and at later points in the call I’ll be talking more about some pet projects that I have with multiple universities with focus on captioning and creating accessible in-classroom environments. So I guess there will be more opportunity to talk about that in depth later on.
Cyndi: Absolutely. And Sara, thinking about your background and thinking about some of the dilemmas right now in ensuring that all media is accessible and that your expertise comes in very handy for the projects that you're working on. Jared, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your interests.
Jared: Thanks. My background is actually in education and instructional technology, and I’ve always really understood the power of technology and how it can help the classroom teacher and students in education. We're all here because of many of the dilemmas the students with disabilities face. I guess because of, and some of the benefits they receive from technology. My role right now, I kind of wear two hats, one is with WebAIM, the Web Accessibility In Mind project, and as part of that project I help with information dissemination, developing tutorials, tools to help in Web accessibility efforts, and so many, many of you I’m sure are aware of WebAIM and the work that we do. I also have a role with the National Center on Disability and Access to Education. My role there is, I guess, in a way, to represent the developers. That's really, I guess, my focus is on the development of accessible technologies. And one of the roles that I currently have there is in development of some real time captioning tools for delivery of captions over the Internet or other mediums in real time. We have a couple of questions already that have been posted regarding captioning, and that's one of the things. And I know several other groups and people, Sara at IBM, there are others that are addressing this issue, and so that's one of my real interests right now.
Cyndi: And you know, when I think about the topic of this web cast, and the interest that's been expressed nationally for people to start having public discussions about the tools that are being developed, those that are on the horizon, it really for me begs the question, and actually I’m going to loop back to you, tom, not that we're necessarily doing this in a round house fashion, but what are some new accessibility developments coming out of your own shop that are coming from AOL? You know, are there some on the horizon that you are at liberty to discuss? And then we'll have each of the panelists just share their own thoughts about what is available that other folks may not know about, and what are things that are just, you know, on the bubble and maybe on their way. So Tom, why don't you start with us on that?
Tom: Well, AOL's accessibility policy states our commitment to making products that are useable by all, including people with disabilities. And so I think I i probably would tackle this question from a different perspective than perhaps the way you've intended it.
Cyndi: That's okay.
Tom: But feel free to direct me in one way or another. In terms of what's coming out on the horizon, I can tell you that the web is becoming more dynamic, and that's probably no surprise to anyone who follows the web, and the industry. And I think there are some challenges that really need to be addressed there. So it's not necessarily a specific product or issue just related to AOL, but you know, certainly AOL wants to be in and maintain our technology leadership position, our innovative approach to the Internet. And so, you know, perhaps we see some of these technologies a little bit faster than they might make their way into more static environments. You know, how do you deal with DHTML and screen reader compatibility? Those are big issues. How do you deal with Flash? You know, Macromedia has developed accessible Flash but in a company like AOL we like to push the envelope there. So in doing that, you know, we can't always make Flash as accessible as we want to, or like to, given other market demands that are at work. So I would say rich media is a big issue that really needs to be looked at, the dynamic nature of the web. HTML is beginning to look and feel more like a software application, which is something that we're grappling with.
But I think some of the more interesting initiatives that we've launched from the accessibility standpoint of late, using instant messaging to enable people who are Deaf or hard of hearing to place conventional telephone calls to hearing people through communications assistants or relay providers, IP relay has been around and people have gone to the web, and got into a web-based chat and were able to, you know, use a relay provider via the Internet and place a call to a hearing family member or friend. Instant messaging is pretty pervasive not only on your computer desktop but in your wireless device. I forget the percentage but a good number of mobile devices here in the U.S. now ship with AOL Instant Messenger client or a wireless browser that allows you to get into our AIM on the Web. And so now we can partner with relay providers, and we have three active partnerships now, Hamilton Relay, MCI relay and Hands-on Video Relay, and we can offer relay service via instant messaging. So again, trying to identify a main stream technology that already exists, like instant messaging, and where can we enhance the value of that? And certainly launching AIM relay has significantly improved the value of instant messaging within the Deaf community, and we're getting some very good feedback on that.
And more recently we launched video instant messaging where if you have a web cam you can get into a mini video conference, and now Hands-on Video Relay has partnered with us so a Deaf user can use a video relay call, communicate with an interpreter with sign language, and have the relay call go on as it normally would, except now over instant messaging versus the deaf user having to go to the web site of that relay provider. So that's one area.
We also recently debuted streaming closed captioning, and that's really presented some interesting challenges for us in the commercial environment. When you think of AOL, think of us as an aggregator of content. We gather content from many different providers, whether it's web-based content that we get or video content. Basically AOL identifies partnerships, and you know, we collect what we believe to be the most compelling content in a given area, and offer it up to our audience. And with captioning that has presented some issues in the sense that we might stream news packages for example from CNN or ABC, but when we get the package they haven't yet been captioned for network, by the network. And so that's a problem. And how do we deal with that? Because everything's pretty much automated in the Internet space, not like television where you either do real-time captioning, or you, you know get material far enough in advance and you can create what they call off-line captioning environments where you can put the captions, attach it to the video in advance of its being broadcast. So in this case, you know, trying to find ways of working within the unique constraints of the Internet where a lot of it's automated, you know, the partner uploading content to us and we don't necessarily see it and we create the template and as long as it's streaming we're happy and the partner is happy. But how do we insert captioning do that process? That's something we've been working a lot with.
We have two content areas now for streaming, one is an hourly news program where we take the script that CNN provides us, and we give it to a third party who syncs up the script with the video and they deliver us a time stamped text file which is synchronized to the video used SMIL which is a W3C markup language. And so that's one offering, and then we're also doing a kids cartoon series with closed captioning called Princess Natasha on KOL, our online kids channel targeted to kids 6-12, and we're using Flash to deliver captions there. And that's more like the traditional model of captioning where we work with a captioning vendor, WGBH in this case where they caption the cartoon series and they deliver us the Flash caption file. So I would say those are two areas but certainly looking at deployment of web technologies on the phone, we have a product called AOL by phone where you can get mail by phone, reply to mail by phone. We're really looking for accessibility to surface in many different areas and my job is to kind of follow the bouncing ball of technology and hopefully address accessibility in a meaningful way in whatever direction our products are deployed.
Cyndi: Well, and Tom, you're certainly bringing up a lot of different areas, and I bet you could talk a long time about others that you see coming down the pike. It's interesting to me, I’m hearing a theme, and the folks listening to this won't yet hear the theme, but across the messages that you're giving, as well as what I know that both Sara and Jared are interested in sharing, is this theme of captioning, and is this theme of rich media and the barriers and some of the inherent problems that folks really nationwide are facing with respect to that. Let me just jump, Jared, to you, to talk about some of that. I know Sara's going to want to talk about some of the captioning work, as well. But what are some of the things that you see, you know, right on the bubble? What's happening?
Jared: I i will discuss the captioning efforts we have in just a minute. I want to talk about a few other things that we see. One of the real efforts that we're undertaking right now, and have through WebAIM and the National Center, is awareness. There are a lot of cutting-edge things and that's great and a lot of us are working on those, but there are still basic awareness needs that need to be filled. Even as far as just basic web accessibility, alternative text for images and so forth. So that's one of our primary things that we're focusing on.
Cyndi: Even though that's kind of an old tried and true problem, you still would pull that in?
Jared: I do think it is a problem because there are a lot of people that are still not aware that that's an issue.
Tom: and I would agree with that, by the way. All facts here, it’s a major argument that we make.
Jared: And so in a way we're kind of fighting our battle a little bit on two fronts. We need the new technology, and we need to make it accessible and push the boundaries, and we also need to make sure that these things, awareness is being, I guess, passed on to the people that are doing it, the developers, you know, whoever they may be. Tom, as you mentioned, the web is really starting to look less and less like an information resource, and more like an application. It's becoming very powerful and very application driven, and that demands even more that the people that are working on these applications be aware of even the basic web accessibility issues. So that's one thing that we're working on, and also developing tools that will help those developers in those web accessibility efforts.
Through WebAIM we have a tool called the WAVE. It’s a web accessibility validator that we found to be a very useful tool for helping developers evaluate the web accessibility level of their web site, and then it helps them apply the fixes that they need.
Tom, we also see a lot of interest, a lot of popularity in Flash, and other, I guess, technologies, media-driven technologies that are really pushing the envelope. And with those there are unique accessibility issues. And so we're trying to address those, as well. As well as working on developing standards that not only industry but education, everybody can use to look at those standards to help drive them towards accessibility. And finally our captioning efforts, we're working on some real time captioning efforts to, as I mentioned before, to deliver real-time text over the web.
Cyndi: Actually we're doing that right now.
Jared: We are, actually you can tune in and view the captions right now. What we're doing is we're working on making the process better, easier, and less expensive. We know that in education, and there are real-time captioning services that are out there. Unfortunately many of them are very cost prohibitive, especially for education, so we're working on some ways to really simplify that process and make it easier, and less expensive, as well as providing that technology so that it can work in a lot of very flexible, through a lot of different mediums. For instance we're doing this on the web. We'd like the technology to work with, say, satellite broadcasts or even radio. We're trying to develop, so if there's any type of broadcast, as long as an Internet connection is available, somebody that is Deaf or hard of hearing or stands in need of receiving that text, the captions, they can do that.
Cyndi: Well Sara, this is a great time for you to jump in. I know at least part of what you want to talk about, as well, is in the captioning work that's being done but there may be some other things that IBM is in the middle of that you'd like to share with folks listening.
Sara: Right, yes. Thank you. Yeah, well IBM as a technology company, we have access to a lot of research and development work that's ongoing, and I think, from an accessibility perspective we try to leverage that. So we are both users and also creators of a lot of the core technologies. There are a number, of course they span the range of disabilities, and of course they also span the range of, from product to sort of research prototypes. And so not everything I’m talking about is fully hardened.
In the fully-hardened category, IBM provides Home Page Reader technology, which I guess many of you working in a web space would be aware of, and that's a tool to make, you know, web accessibility, to make the web accessible to blind users, and not to make this a commercial but at least stuff I have seen have described it as a premier tool in that space. And highly useable and highly useful, and highly used. And so that's actually in the actual product space. Again it came out of work that was ongoing in the research labs and is now an actual product.
Cyndi: Sara I’d like to just chime in. We certainly find that a lot of individuals that do not have disabilities, developers, are enjoying that product as a way to test, as well.
Sara: Oh, yes, that is actually - you know, one of the sort of collateral benefits of home page reader in that it is being purchased perhaps as often by the developers as it is by end users who need it to access the web. And then actually leads to a lot of IBM's development focus because there's a strong acknowledgement that often what is required are tools that enable people to design more accessibly and indeed within IBM and through their World Wide Accessibilty Center there's an accessibility project office that tracks all of IBM's products for compliance and provides guidelines and support in terms of helping them make it more accessible. And clearly to the extent that we can provide tools that help people do this from the beginning, it will make everybody's lives easier and also be that much more cost effective. So Home Page Reader has turned out to be a tool that assists in that area.
There's a recent tool out of the Tokyo research lab focusing on accessibility and that is ADesigner which is also a tool that allows someone developing web content to experience their design as though they were blind. And so that's also a tool that's being used to aid and ensure that things are developed from the get-go with accessibility in mind. In the research space, and these are available, not as consumer products, but more through, you know, more through customized engagements, we have two tools, Web Adapt To Me and Easy Web, which are designed primarily for low vision and for users with cognitive issues to make the web a more accessible environment. So, for example, it allows you to, with a very easy to use interface identify how you would like to see the web, you know, font size, preferred colors, get rid of those background wall papers because I find them distracting, get rid of those jumping icons because I have cognitive issues or I’m a senior and that just adds to the distractibility of it. And then having done that you create a profile for yourself that mediates how you view the web from that point forward. And so that's been very popular and that's been made available and actually was underwritten by our corporate community relation, the Web Adapt To Me tool was underwritten by community relations, and made available to, you know, a charity project to various senior centers and so on and is now being integrated into some of our services offerings.
Then the tool again that I’m most familiar with and has to do with captioning is ViaScribe. This was created to address the problem that's been raised by a number of speakers here already in terms of providing real-time captioning in a more, you know, in a more cost-effective way. And ViaScribe was a tool we developed in conjunction with a number of universities who came to us saying they have a problem in the lecture environment in that they want to be inclusive and yet having a real-time captioner in every classroom or sign interpreter just wasn't feasible from an availability perspective or from a cost perspective. And so they wanted to use speech recognition to automate the process. If you're familiar with speech recognition this is a work in progress. So let no one leave this hall thinking that it's a solved problem.
Cyndi: Right.
Sara: But we've been working through the liberated learning consortium which was begun by Saint Mary's University in Canada, and professors are now lecturing through this pilot project using the ViaScribe tool and their lectures are captioned in real time. It is not perfect. It does not get any accuracy that the stenographer is getting on this call even with my rapid speech. And then after the lecture a nice feature it automatically binds the text, audio, and any slides or video material used in the classroom and posts it to the web. And so everyone now has this wonderful multimedia presentation at the end of the lecture. So it turned out to be a benefit beyond the Deaf and hard of hearing students that it was initially designed to accommodate, and benefits broader populations as well, students who have problems note taking and so on.
Cyndi: And certainly, you know, that is the wonderful benefit, as we all converge into more universally-designed products we're seeing that the benefits aren't relegated to, you know, the small number that folks making the decisions may think it's headed towards.
Sara: Yes.
Cyndi: You know, and I don't want to cut you off, Sara, you may have another product or two you'd kind of like to highlight but one of the things that is coming to my mind is, as you're talking about captioning and Tom talked about it, and Jared talked about it, and now I wonder if we're seeing a little shift in our field. So many of us had as our initial focus in access making things accessible to individuals who had low vision or no vision. Now I’m seeing a lot of focus, a lot of energy, on how to make sure that there is access to the Deaf and hard of hearing community, and right on the bubble, things just emerging, is what you were just talking about, which is that larger population of individuals with cognitive disabilities. And so it's interesting for me to hear almost a trend, or a trend prediction in just the conversation that we're having today.
Jared: This is Jared, I would add to that, that another theme that is driving this I believe is the technology itself. Cyndi mentioned the word universal design. We are trying to design for the maximum number of users but we're also designing for the maximum numbers of technologies. For instance, the captioning technologies we've talked about, we're working on ways to deliver captions through instant messaging, through cell phones, through hand-held computers. You know, things like that. So the technology itself is also one of the things, I think, that's driving this more universal design of applications.
Tom: and I think the pipe is getting bigger, as well. So not only is it the technologies that reside on the device but its the high-speed connection. When the Internet started it was text, and then graphics came along, and you know, now broadband connections make it easier to stream video, and make it more of a compelling experience for the end user. And I think now you're starting to see the Internet look a lot more like television in many respects, and I equate where we are with captioning on the Internet is where captioning started on the television. It started out with one program, World News Tonight, you know, broadcast, you know, well after it originally aired, and not even on the ABC network. It was on PBS and it had captions but it was a way for people to get information. And so we're at the very early stages of this captioning revolution on the Internet, and technology has to catch up to, you know, we know what captioning is, we know how to do it, but technology has to, I think, in many cases play a bigger role on the Internet than it did in the, you know, in the television world.
Cyndi: And certainly if there's promise of other technologies, I’m thinking back to what Sara was saying, voice recognition, can the algorithms become good enough, robust enough to really help out in that area, or will we always need to be working with someone that's doing captioning? And especially in classroom environments where it's not always one individual speaking, where you have students, as well, that ask questions or want to have discussions. This is quite a challenging area. Sara, were there any other, any other items that you wanted to, you know, bring some visibility to?
Sara: Right actually there is just one more that I think is germane to this discussion. Also with respect to your musing about the fact that there's more focus on that. Can we also flatter ourselves and I submit this as a question to ponder. Can we also say that we've made such good headway in terms of making the web accessible for blind and low vision that we now have basically the luxury to branch out? Now, I suppose that is a question I’m not saying we actually achieved it but perhaps we have made significant headway and that's what gave us the band width to-.
Cyndi: And I would posit the notion that the knowledge base is there for that to happen. I think whether it's actually happening or not is a whole different conversation.
Sara: You're much closer to that than I am which is why I just posed it as a question.
Tom: And I’d say the technology is changing where we're becoming more rich media and dynamic and the application field is going to present the next big barrier.
Cyndi: Sara, continue with the one other item you wanted to share.
Sara: right. Well I wanted to also reference to what Tom was mentioning earlier about AOL and relay. I’d want to just sort of comment on an experiment that we tried at research, and this was sort of just, we've tried it and it has been successful. And that is having a Deaf person participating in a meeting, and indeed we could all be in the same room, and three other hearing speakers had their instant messenger open and set up their speech recognition system that is ViaVoice to speak to instant messenger. And so we basically created our own little relay system, which was obviously using instant messenger was preferable to simply speaking into our ViaVoice system which would leave the Deaf person the job of scanning three different machines so instant messenger became the aggregate and allowed it to actually flow like a conversation. That's an interesting side experiment that we’ve done.
Cyndi: Well, that sounds really very interesting.
Sara: The other project I wanted to mention is an outgrowth of ViaScribe, and very relevant in terms of web accessibility. We got funding nearly a year ago, and actually in March of last year, to develop something that we affectionately call Caption Me Now. And the idea that we proposed was, as has been said many times on this call, there are more and more web casts out there and coming without captioning, even with all the best intentions of the developers, and the posters, it's just dauntingly expensive to caption everything in standard ways. And so what we proposed is, basically creating a prototype whereby if a user comes across a web cast which is not captioned, you click a button and that button goes off into the Caption Me Now space. That space actually has a number of different paths. If it's a very clear speaker, and actually a repeat speaker like whatever, say a president whose voice models we have, we can caption it largely using speech recognition technology and then do some post editing. If we can't use the speech recognition tool to do this, it can go through shadowing, where someone speaks it, or we can go to real-time stenography as we're experiencing now, and then it comes back to the user and he doesn't know what magical things have happened to this audio but it comes back as captioned audio. So we're developing this as a prototype.
Cyndi: Of course the end user really doesn't care about all of the machinations that have occurred as long as they're getting something that's useful.
Sara: Exactly. And our vision there is that we want to make this available, say to a government agency that has a lot of web cast information that is uncaptioned and therefore in violation of the law and saying, we have a solution for you. If you don't caption it a priori and make this button available and the agency can decide what speed they want and what price they're willing to pay and to some extent that also will determine what path we take in terms of providing it back fully captioned.
Cyndi: Right. Wow. My sense is that the four of us could talk for another complete hour, I’m very aware of the fact that our time is really moving along here. I’d like to just ask, and I’m going to open up a couple of questions to any of our panelists here and then we'll start taking some questions that have come in from folks that are listening. One of the things that I’m interested in having each of you comment on is really the development of either, whether we're talking about accessible products or accessibility within products. And how those are actually happening within the development cycle. You know, we've heard, for example, that adding on the cost of accessibility could range anywhere from 5 percent to 35 percent of the total costs of development. I’ve heard those things bantered around a lot. We hear a lot about the motivations of individuals that make decisions on development lines that, you know, in some spaces it may be market driven, and that's why we're not seeing a lot more products. Others, that it may be litigation driven or legislatively driven. I mean this is a rather big and amorphous cloud, I guess I’m speaking from. But would anyone like to jump in here and talk about the development of accessible technologies within their own group, and the things that seem to either limit them or the things that seem to really help, you know, carry them through. And this silence is golden. I’m going to have to start by picking on Jared, because he's right in front of me.
Jared: Well, gosh, you know, we're seeing a lot of these motivations. We've talked about a lot of these already. Cyndi brought up the fact of legislation and standards and guidelines, and sometimes I guess legislation that may not necessarily be aligned with standards or guidelines. And you know, Sara or Tom, perhaps you can kind of address how those are impacting you, but we see them as having a big, not only, not only are the standards or legislation applying to specific people but they have a secondary advantage of increasing awareness. Most people, most developers seem to be aware of Section 508 as far as the web goes, and we're seeing more and more legislation and standards that are applying. So we see that as one piece.
When it comes to the actual implications of designing with accessibility in mind, that's a tough question. When we're talking about the web, we always preach that it's, you know, it's fairly simple to make most web sites accessible. And when you're talking about alternative text and labels for forms, and those types of things. But as has already been mentioned as the web is becoming more of an application platform, it is becoming more difficult, and especially as it is being more media driven with Flash and streaming video and those things. So accessibility, the technology is always going to be a couple of steps ahead, I believe, of accessibility, and that's unfortunate but that's the way that it works. Much of that has to do with tools out there.
Cyndi: You think even as we migrate to more universally-designed applications.
Jared: I guess I make that statement more because of awareness issues. And the thing that we're talking about, I think we're starting to see a little bit of a shift. You know, it used to be that we would design applications, web applications, web media, whatever it would be, and then at some point we sat back and said boy we need to make this accessible, how much is it going to cost us? And is it worth it to us to do that? Now we, I think we have more and more people have the viewpoint of we're going to develop this web application or media, whatever it may be, and it must be accessible, how are we going to make it happen? And so that change in the way we're viewing it is having a big impact.
Cyndi: Well Tom, you know, as you speak, and I don't want to put you on the spot, this may not necessarily reflect what you see at AOL, but it may be more reflective of what you see in kind of industry at large. Do you see certain things that are particular barriers to the development of accessibility across product lines, or things that are really very helpful?
Tom: That's a loaded question.
Cyndi: I know, I saved it for you.
Tom: Let’s see, do I spark some controversy or do I take the high road? I think, you know, certainly there are barriers. Time to market is one. Right. In my case, or in the case of AOL, it's a consumer-driven service. So, you know, Section 508 hasn't played as large of a role as it might be for a company like IBM or Macromedia or Microsoft. So yes, we've been able to benefit from the awareness it's created. Yes, we've been able to benefit from a lot of technologies that have sprung up as a result particularly these validators that have come out and increased discussion around accessibility. But really, in our case, it's still very much an advocacy effort, it's corporate commitment. So it's really awareness. Awareness is huge and that's one of the pillars of our corporate policy. I think compatibility, quite frankly, and all of us agreeing to one standard.
For example, you can code HTML, and I have an example of our radio interface, radio at AOL is a product that has 200 stations of music and news, talk content, it's streaming radio. We had a web interface and we went to make it accessible and we want H tags and alt tags and this and that but it has, getting to that application feel it has like a tree view where you have categories, genres, music genres, jazz, classical, rock, and you click on these categories and then the stations that you know make your search more granular pop up. So maybe you're looking at '80's rock and not today, or whatever. One screen reader handles it pretty well, another screen reader doesn't handle it as well. And yet we're using HTML. So we all, I think, need to come to an agreement on the types of standards that we're going to code to. And a company like AOL, you know, my developers need bullets because there's a lot of competing forces for their time. And you know, I get one shot, so we've identified, you know, twelve or fifteen different requirements that we will agree to fully supporting, and you know, it's then, you know, out of our hands. And it's really how well the assistive technology does.
And you could take a look at that same scenario in software development where you know you have these API's for Windows, Active Accessibility from Microsoft. If you talk to an AT vendor they say well we don't follow that part of the spec. What does that lead my developer to say? And how do I drive that? We cannot optimize for one technology all of the time. And you know, in the case of AOL, it's a market issue, and you know, where, you know, the AT venders are more likely to work on their own time with applications that are going to have an impact for employability and consumer service gets a little left behind. I don't want to come off as sounding like I’m complaining because I’m not. I welcome the challenge. And AOL, we're committed to do the right thing. But you've asked the question and these are some of the issues that are out there.
Cyndi: Well certainly you have to choose a horse and ride it, and if there is, well, places where there is that much latitude where everyone can think that they are following the same set of rules, and there's absolutely no compatibility, that's a huge barrier. So this is an important thing to get out there.
Jared: And Tom, this is Jared, I guess I would maybe pose the question to you. You mentioned the need for standards and having uniform standards and getting the assistive technology vendors and the developers and industry to all kind of be on the same page with standards. Who do you think is going to do that? What do we need to do in order to get to that level of standards and standards compliance that those types of things can happen?
Tom: If I knew the answer to that do you think I’d be on this web cast? (laughter)
Tom: All of us have a role. I think we need some collaboration, maybe the Assistive Technology Industry Association has a role to play, maybe the, you know, other groups that are out there have a role to play. I mean each specific part of the industry has a group. IBM, AOL, and Microsoft are part of the Information Technology Industry Council accessibility working group which is about companies dealing with accessibilities that are in the mean stream IT part of the house. ATIA has their industry form for their vendors. You know, and some crossover, and some don't, and there's going to have to be some middle of the road place where we all can meet and quite frankly that's been difficult to do. You know, so-.
Cyndi: Although, you know, I think that there is some precedent for that. There have been some efforts where folks from very divergent points of view have come together and, you know, hammered out some tough issues. I think most recently of the NIMAS work, the national file format work that CAST kind of started that, but I know it was a consortium of a number of different people that came together. But this was people from the publishing industry, from a variety of walks of life, and they were able to figure out something that they could all live with. And I think that that's what you're saying is we need to find that mechanism.
Tom: And then all agree to stick with it.
Cyndi: Yes, interesting. Well I could stay on this one probably for another hour myself.
Tom: Glad we're not.
Cyndi: I’m going to shift, I’m going to ask just one last question to any of you who would be interested in responding, and then we are going to go to questions that are coming in. You know, it seems that, of course, I am at a university, we are at Utah State University, and certainly I’m aware of a lot of university entities, college entities, folks in academe that are doing work, whether it's web accessibility or assistive technology, the RERC’s and all that kind of stuff. I’m certainly aware of a lot of individuals in industry that are taking similar paths and in a way I’m a bit struck, and I wonder if we're, in our own little silos of information. Now, you know, Sara, you talked about some niece collaborative efforts that IBM has had with I think it was you said Saint Mary's College?
Sara: Saint Mary's University began the liberated learning consortium but now there are 10 universities world wide that are participating. I have ten universities that are among my nearest and dearest friends.
Cyndi: I wonder, and I’m certainly not putting this on the backs of industry, because I ask myself the question as someone in academe, what's the best mechanism for partnerships to be created so that really the best of both worlds can be happening? How can we as a field really do a better job leveraging the work that we're each accomplishing? So if anyone would like to speak to that, I think that's an important issue right now in the development of accessible technologies.
Sara: I can begin. Just given our own experiences within liberated learning consortium within universities and some of the things I see as key success factors. One is they came to IBM with a problem that we perceived as challenging on the research side. So what they needed as users matched what we wanted to work on from a science and technology perspective. They also came and actually they wrote a grant and so they had significant funding and were able to then bring in other universities. So we were not dealing with a single university, we were dealing with a consortium which gave us more world wide impact.
Cyndi: But they came to you with the idea, and possible resources?
Sara: Well the resources at least to cover their own components. We provide them with the software, and we provide them with the software free of charge and they offer us a living laboratory. They provide us with requirements, they test it, evaluate it, and so on. And so that's been of enormous value to IBM, so made the provision of this software, you know, clearly advantageous for us. Also it has had other collateral benefits in that they have become a key source of references for us, and also there's been so much promotional opportunity. There's been so much sort of good will that been written up so frequently in the press that it ends up having value for our main line businesses also. So we have both sides.
Cyndi: I wonder if folks just need to become a little bolder about approaching one another to form some working partnerships on initiatives. That's really the lesson of this partnership that you'd want to share with folks.
Sara: Yes.
Cyndi: Tom or Jared any thoughts on this?
Tom: Well, we have done some partnering ourselves, a couple have come to mind working with Intellitools on a keyboard overlay for their Intellikeys product for our mail and instant messaging applications, and doing that for a non-profit called Best Buddies and E-buddies which is a pen pal with, a pen pal program that AOL is involved with for people with cognitive disabilities, and you know, so that really helped us get into a little bit more understanding of what the alternative keyboard world was like, and we make those overlays available for down load for anyone who has an Intellikeys product.
And our captioning initiative came out of a partnership we have for the National Center for Accessible Media in Boston where they have a business partner program, and AOL needed some consulting on accessible, just general accessibility issues, and could also be involved philanthropically with a non-profit organization so that partnership really not only dealt with captioning but it dealt with a TV set top box project that was alive for a while around here.
So I think it is, you know, finding the right fit, and then from the non-profit side it's really, you know, a little bit of luck, too, in landing at the right person at IBM. Sara was the right person for Saint Mary's to land in front of, and you know AOL, I guess I would be. But there has to be a win that then industry can take back to the marketing unit or other places and say here's the other value for us to be involved in this.
Cyndi: Exactly. Well, and that's a keystone of any good partnership, is that there's really good outcomes for everybody.
Jared: And the only thing I would add is that we really see, at least being in education, we really see a need for more of these partnerships. There are a lot of groups and people in education through grant funding or good will and research initiatives, that are developing some very excellent accessibility tools and products. But don't quite have the knowledge or the ability to take those to market and really make them widespread, and I see it as being through partnerships that a lot of these things will be possible. And I think we all need to work a little bit more on our communication on those collaborations, and that is one thing that the National Center here is trying to do, is to help get all of us together, all talking together, so that those things can happen.
Cyndi: Well, let me just move now to a few questions that have come in. We did have a question that came in from Mandy from Eastern Kentucky University and I think we've answered this, Mandy. She was asking how universities are dealing with captioning aspects of web access and all three panelists talked about different tools that are either available now or under development now, and Mandy if we didn't quite answer that, feel free to just post it back into the discussion forum and we can, you know, more specifically deal with anything we left out there.
We have actually several questions that have come in from Gil and i know we won't have time to get to all of them but let me give you the one that seems to, and Gil is in the Washington, D.C. area. Gil is asking about other technologies, we've been spending a lot of time talking about web kinds of things. He asks, “with the proliferation of satellite campuses and cooperative partnerships amongst multiple post-secondary institutions, video teleconferencing VTC seems to be more prevalent as an instructional tool today. What accessibility implications are implicated there with vct? I’m going to throw that out. Jared, I know you've had experience with that.
Jared: Just real briefly, I guess one of the real problems is that when we go to some of those distance education video delivery type systems, there are so many different vendors, so many applications out there that do that, and not a lot of standards or requirements to build accessibility into those. And so that's definitely a need. A lot of the issues are things that we see on web, the lack of a multi-modal delivery we're getting just audio, just video, a combination of those - somebody's going to be left out. So I think we need those standards, we need developers to work on those things- .
Cyndi: That does go back to what Tom was saying, too, because the folks that are developing the proprietary technology may not be talking the same talk as those developing the accessibility patches.
Jared: Precisely. I think in the meantime, as far as a solution, many of the things we've talked about today as far as captioning and some of these other delivery mechanisms will work in a lot of these various situations. We really can, and we need to be creative. That's one thing that we're doing with our captioning tools, is we're trying to develop them so they're not only just for the web, so they will work with, say, satellite delivery, or video conferencing type applications like Polycom whatever it may be, to try to fill in that gap in the meantime.
Cyndi: Sara or Tom, either one of you want to get in on this? Okay. And let me see, Jared, did we have any other…
Okay, we are really just about at the end of our time for today. I thank you all so much for joining us, and please note that this web cast will be archived on our site. So if you'd like to refer to it later, or if you would like to refer this web cast to someone else, please do so. Our next web cast will be held in February, and if you'd like to receive information about that web cast, you can do that in one of two ways. You can either go to the ncdae.org web site and sign up as an affiliate - you'll receive a lot of information on a basis for from us, or just return in February and note that on your calendars now so that you can get the date and the time and the panelists that we'll have available for that. Just as a little FYI, National Center will be hosting web casts of this type every other month. So we'll go in February, we'll go in April, we'll go in June, we'll just continue this on.
Let's see, the other thing that I wanted to make sure that everyone knew about is that the National Center on Disability and Access to Education is hosting a follow-up meeting to the national summit, and it's going to be held in conjunction with the ATIA meeting which is the Assistive Technology Industry Association meeting that is held in Orlando. This meeting, NCDAE will be held one day before the ATIA meeting so it'll be on January 19th. The meeting itself will be from 10:00 to 3:00, it's a free meeting, and we will be providing lunch. We want to continue discussions that began in the national summit, and that we are continuing on the series of web casts. So if you'd like to get any more information about how you can attend, please e-mail us at our contact page on the NCDAE site. Also, if you're interested in staying, then, for the ATIA meeting, we will be able to help provide you with a reduced registration of only $325, which is a substantial reduction, and that's a nice deal. So our last little bit confirmed our panel for that meeting we have Carol Price of McGraw-Hill, we have, goodness, we have Ms. Hendricks of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Technology in Education Consortium, many of you would know that as MARTEC, and Ken Salaets from the IT Industry Council, and others. We would invite any of you to attend that would be interested in doing so.
We are at the end of our time and I’d like to thank Jared, I’d like to thank Sara, and certainly, Tom, for your time, for all of your great insights, and I hope to see all of us participating in the forum as folks post into it. So thanks so much, and we'll be visiting again over our web cast in February. Bye-bye.