Unit 3: [Digital] Accessibility

How can we make digital technologies (hardware, software, websites) accessible and usable by all people? What obstacles exist? How can they be overcome?

By now, we've talked a fair amount about a range of technologies and disability (though there are also huge swaths of technology we haven't looked at closely). We've also touched on the issue of accessibility--Emily Atkinson's talk and Josh Miele's various materials, most notably. In this unit, we'll focus more closely on the issues around access to "digital" technology—software, the web, and the devices through which we interact with them.

For Day 8 [Wednesday, May 6]

Here are a few "introductions" to (web) accessibility from various perspectives. Read these with a critical eye--what can you tell about the author? How does their language align with, or diverge from, what we've been hearing about in the earlier units? (Would Josh, or the people of Kinetic Light, agree with the way these pieces describe accessibility?)

Also, think about how these pieces categorize disability--or even how they regard disability and disabled people in general. What differences do you see between the perspectives from units 1-2 and these?

Finally, look at what these pieces say about digital communication (much of what they say can be generalized beyond the web)? When you start thinking about communication from an accessibility perspective, what kinds of things must you keep in mind?

Why is it abbreviated a11y?

The Web Accessibility Introduction I Wish I Had

Introduction to Web Accessibility (WebAIM)

Introduction to Accessibility (digital.gov)—note that the intended audience seems to be a government employee, but obviously this could be useful for anyone (like us) who's thinking about accessibility. We may be following some of the links later on (including how to use a screenreader), but for today just read the text on the page.

Free Write

Each of the readings was from someone or some group that cares about digital accessibility—these are people that may or may not be disabled, may or may not have a good sense of history, and so on. What new or different perspectives on disability did you find in the readings? Are these more or less compatible with what we've seen so far, or do you see any contradictions or conflicts? Give a couple specific examples of compatible or contradictory perspectives.

Digital Scavenger Hunt

For most of today's class, you'll be on a scavenger hunt with your team. You'll look for tools that help people check the accessibility of what they produce, and you'll look for good and bad examples of accessible communication.

I'll ask the teams to post their results to this forum at the same time, so that we can all review and discuss together. (Please be prepared to post your answers as "text" here rather than attaching a document. Probably the easiest thing to do is copy the text below into your response, and insert your findings.)

Note: there are a lot of questions here—for some of them, the most effective work might be to "divide and conquer," assigning a particular question to each person; for others, it might be more effective to have everyone looking for answers, then come back and compare notes to select the best answer(s). One question specifically asks for each member of your team to find something. Spend a little time organizing yourselves before you just dive in.

Part 1: Automated Tools.

If possible, find the tools as described below. If it seems not to be possible, what's the next best thing you can find? Provide links to everything you find. If an item asks you to "note" or "describe" something, do so!

(By "freely available," I mean no payment or account/signup should be required. By "paid," I mean tools that require you to pay, either by "piece" or by subscription, to receive accessibility reports.)

  1. Find 3 freely available automated tools that will evaluate the accessibility of a webpage/website. Briefly note any substantial differences in functionality you see.
  2. Find 2 paid tools that will evaluate the accessibility of a webpage/website. Briefly note what, if any, features these have that free tools don't.
  3. Identify 2 potential website accessibility issues that automated tools won't usually find.
  4. Find 2 freely available automated tools that will evaluate the accessibility of a proprietary word processor document (e.g. one produced by Microsoft Word).
  5. Find 1 freely available word processor. Find 1 freely available automated tool that will evaluate the accessibility of documents it produces.
  6. Find 3 freely available automated tools that will evaluate the accessibility of a PDF document.
  7. Find 2 paid tools that will evaluate the accessibility of a PDF document. Briefly note what, if any, features these have that free tools don't.
  8. Find 1 tool that will evaluate the accessibility of a social media feed (platform of your choice)
  9. Identify 2 types of electronic communication that aren't included above; find a tool to evaluate the accessibility of each. (Email, instant messaging, and "plain text" don't count.)

Part 2:  Website Testing

Now use some of the (freely available) tools above to find examples of both excellently accessible and apparently clueless organizations. When I say "website," it suffices to evaluate the home page of the site, though if your tool claims it can evaluate an entire site, feel free to do that.

  1. Use your 3 web tools to evaluate websites for "large" companies. (What "large" means is up to you; the website should end in .com.) Can you find 1 that seems to pass most/all the tests? Can you find 1 that appears to be unaware of the importance of accessibility?
  2. Again, use your 3 web tools to evaluate websites for "large" organizations with .org websites. Again, can you find 1 that seems to pass most/all the tests? Can you find 1 that appears to be unaware of the importance of accessibility?
  3. Now evaluate alma.edu and two other .edu sites. How does Alma's site compare to the others? Again, can you find 1 that seems to pass most/all the tests? Can you find 1 that appears to be unaware of the importance of accessibility?
  4. Finally, evaluate some "small business" or personal websites. Again, can you find 1 that seems to pass most/all the tests? Can you find 1 that appears to be unaware of the importance of accessibility?

Describe your general findings: does one category seem to be "better" at accessibility? Worse? Does it seem like most sites pass most tests, or do most not, or…? Any particular surprises here?

Part 3: Document Testing

  1. *Everyone on your team*: evaluate the accessibility of a paper you've written in the last year. How did you do?
  2. Across your team, come up with 10 (or more, if you like) PDF documents you've received in the last year; try to represent a wide range of sources (and of course protect your privacy—no need to include documents about intensely personal matters). Test these and summarize your findings: how many passed most tests? Any type of source seem to be better or worse? 
  3. Test/evaluate the social media feeds of 2 celebrities. How do they do?

For Day 9 [Thursday, May 7]

Here's a short video of a talk by Chancey Fleet (who we saw on the Laura Flanders Show):

https://youtu.be/G-euohhF_Tg

As you watch, make a list of every new term she uses (I mean new in the context of this class); post your list here along with short definitions of these terms (you can use her words if you like, or paraphrase to capture the idea). Then write 200-250 words on the concept of 'friction' as she uses it. You might want to address: What does she mean by it? (She uses it in a couple different ways, I think.) Why does she choose the word 'friction' to represent this idea? (It's not literally friction like you'd study in physics, right?)

Now read and annotate this slightly technical article about a particular kind of computer game accessibility [https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N93958]. I think it's interesting because it's a kind of game that you might not initially think would be too hard to make accessible, but in fact there are some interesting and subtle issues. I have some instructions in the article (as annotations), as well as some comments. But basically there are 5 kinds of annotations I want you to make:

  • annotate any word you're not sure of the definition—look it up and annotate with a definition that works for you (if someone else has already posted a definition, but it doesn't help you, find another and post that)
  • annotate any technical concept you're not sure of. This could be a word that you recognize but seems to be used in a 'jargon'-like way. Annotate with your "best guess" about what it means (CS majors, your best guesses should be pretty good, but there certainly may be new concepts in here, which is great).
  • add an annotation to any paragraph which seems important/complex, summarizing the main point of the paragraph
  • annotate a few of the accessibility issues the author identifies in the game
  • annotate a few of the 'compensations' the author describes

You don't need to annotate everything you see—we can do this together--but do "your share," and feel free to add to and comment on annotations from other people.

Game Accessibility Poster

The article for today gives a perspective on the current state of game accessibility as of 2015--especially in the introduction. But what's the situation now?

For today and tomorrow, I'm going to slightly reorganize your groups and ask you to explore some aspect of the current state of computer game accessibility.

I'd like each group to focus on a different aspect of the gaming world:

  • Computer scientists: you'll focus on current issues in research, using a (vast) library of research articles (from both academic and commercial researchers)
  • Another group will focus on the gamers' perspective. (This will almost surely include the perspective of disabled players, but probably shouldn't be only that perspective.)
  • And another group will focus on the game developers' perspective. (Again, this should include the perspective of disabled developers, but will also need to include non-disabled developers.)

It doesn't matter which group does which, but I do want all three of these angles to be covered.

Here's the plan: you'll use class time today to identify 5 or 10 articles that speak to some question within your team's area. (You can either decide on a question before you start doing research for relevant articles, or you can start looking for articles before you narrow in on a question.) Make your question specific--a question like "what is the perspective of gamers on accessibility?" is way broad and will be impossible to work with in the short time we have. Of course, coming with a specific question tends to be a little harder than stating something broad. You might want to think about specific areas or uses of games (like serious/educational gaming), or a particular issue we've discussed earlier in the course, or....

By the end of class today, I'd like you to post (in the forum I'll create) an entry that gives your question along with a simple/informal annotated bibliography of the articles you've found. That is, you should provide for each article its title, a link to it, and 2-3 sentences about how it speaks to your question.

In Friday's class, I'll ask each group to make a 2-3 minute presentation about their question--just telling us what the question is, how/why you think it's important, and what kinds of articles you've found. Next week, I'll ask each group to make a longer presentation (8-10 minutes) that answers, or at least addresses, the question you posed. (Between the two presentations, everyone needs to present.)

Final requirement: the library. Computer scientists, you'll be using the ACM Digital Library (which you normally have to pay to use, but is free and open through June). Other groups, you may use "reputable" news and opinion pieces published online, and you must also use at least two articles from the library's databases (you can click "Off-campus access" to get, uh, off-campus access). You can of course use other pieces (like this one) to help you find stuff, but that's just a starting point. Everyone's sources need to be from 2018 or later.

For Day 10 [Friday, May 8]

Before Friday's class, get familiar with the screenreader on one of your devices. I'm going to be focusing on my mac laptop, but you can use either macOS, an iPhone/iPad, or a Windows computer.

Here are links to basic instructions (from the digital.gov reading)

and if you're using an iPhone/iPad, here are some instructions for VoiceOver on those devices: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/iphone/vision/

Spend an hour getting familiar with how screenreader works--it takes much longer than that to be become expert (and I'm certainly not expert!) but please come to class with a basic sense of how it works and what it can do.

Screenreader Activity

Starting with your basic understanding of how your screenreader works, let's look at a few things together. I encourage you to use your eyes as little as possible, and get a feeling for what it's like to get a sense of the organization of a web page without visual cues. Remember that Josh told us something to the effect that the best screenreader still totally sucks. As we're going through these things together, think about (a) what difference does it make when something is/not designed with accessibility in mind? (b) what problems do you experience even when something is designed to be accessible? (Probably some of these problems are because we're inexpert users but still...!)

Feel free, for the purposes of this exercise, not to use the screenreader as you're navigating the steps of this exercise (except where noted).

Websites

Team One, I think it was, found that the UM website did a pretty good job on accessibility. So let's start there: https://umich.edu.

And let's check out https://www.alma.edu/.

And one more thing. Use your screenreader to navigate Moodle. How easy is it to do the things you usually do on Moodle?

Here's a typical webpage for a professor—it passes all the accessibility checks. Explore it a little bit: https://patitsas.github.io

Documents

You might want to download these and view them with your computer's PDF viewer (rather than your web browser), especially if the screenreader+browser combo is extra-awkward.

Here's are two PDF documents that are held up as examples of accessible PDFs—what do you think?

https://itaccessibility.arizona.edu/sites/itaccessibility.arizona.edu/files/documents/ClassBrochure.pdf

https://itaccessibility.arizona.edu/sites/itaccessibility.arizona.edu/files/documents/acrobat-xi-pdf-accessibility-overview.pdf

and here's Gov Whitmer's plan for reopening Michigan (actually important information):

https://www.michigan.gov/documents/whitmer/MI_SAFE_START_PLAN_689875_7.pdf