E-mail List Archives

Search E-mail List Archives for

Number of posts in this thread: 3 (In chronological order)

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Thu, Mar 22 2012 6:48AM
Subject: blind people and web accessibility presentations, does anyone here have a favorred strategy?
No previous message | Next message →

Hi gang

This is mostly for the visually impaired amongst you I am afraid, the
rest of you are allowed to read as well. :)
I am giving a few accessibility presentations in the coming weeks, one
for university class, one for professional developers at one of our
largest web development and web services company (in Iceland of
course)
My question to you is how you most efficiently show examples of the
things you are talking about, color contrst, heading structures,
importance of linked text and alt tags, perhaps ARIA markup.
On the one hand, Powerpointis unwieldy, and the only way you can
really show these things in PP is using screen shots, and I definitely
need sighted assistance for that, making sure the images make it into
PP, with correct sizes and colors, and those are the images I am
expecting.
The other way would be to use my computer and my screen reader with
live examples, either a page I mock up for the occasion, or a real
page that demonstrates the problem.
This process is more accessible, but I am never sure how well my
actions are communicated to the sighted audience, and I find that I
quickly lose interest if I am watching someone mess around with web
browsing and their screen reader.
I also know that Jaws at least has the tendency to take the focus
off-screen, so that people stop seeing what I am doing altogether.

So anyone with experience have thoughts on this? Another thing that
would be very useful would be a collection of pages or photos of a
certain problem, color constrast for instance, in a prepared
powerpoint format, so that individual slides about these problems
could be easily copied by someone who is visually impaired, and
repurposed for web accessibility presentations.
Cheers
-Birkir

From: Tony Olivero
Date: Thu, Mar 22 2012 7:12AM
Subject: Re: blind people and web accessibility presentations, does anyone here have a favorred strategy?
← Previous message | Next message →

Birkir,

I typically use a couple of different techniques. For static informational
slides, I will often have a sighted colleague, or a hired reader, assist in
composing the slides and ensuring graphics and other elements are placed
correctly (it is possible to insert text and graphics using a screen reader,
but I find it often helps to have someone look over the deck). If I actually
want to demonstrate screen access software performance I have done a
combination of live and canned presentations, depending on the situation.

One possibility for showing focus is to run MAGic in parallel with JAWS
(even in demo mode, assuming your demo won't run over 40 minutes). A visual
focus rectangle is provided around the focused element, keyboard, tab, etc.

While I agree that it can be confusing if a demonstrater is having issue
with a demo not performing as expected, it can also be one of the most
effective ways of showing how SA software behaves.

For canning a video demo, things get a little more complicated, especially
if you want to maintain that focus rectangle. I've got a couple suggestions.
Feel free to contact me of-list if that's something you want to know more
about.

When presenting the PowerPoint deck, I usually use Braille display, or an
earpiece with JAWS running, to make sure the slide I want to be on screen is
in fact the one being displayed.

I hope this helps. Please don't hesitate to let me know if I can give you
any other suggestions.

Tony

From: Steve Green
Date: Thu, Mar 22 2012 5:48PM
Subject: Re: blind people and web accessibility presentations, does anyone here have a favorred strategy?
← Previous message | No next message

I have done a lot of demonstrations like this, and have always done it as a
double-act between a sighted person (me) and a totally blind screen reader
user. My part of the talk would be based around a PowerPoint presentation
and we would incorporate lots of short demonstrations on live websites that
were preselected to illustrate specific points. We tried to keep these
short, perhaps a couple of minutes.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd