As a British resident I’m not aware of how well known the story of Martha Mason is over in the States, but from the limited material I’ve been able to gather thus far she sounds about as inspirational a person as you’re likely to hear. I don’t think there are many better demonstrations of the web improving a person’s quality of life.
Read moreAfter offering guarded praise to YouTube in my last post for their auto-captioning feature for English language videos I had the urge over the weekend to test how accurate and timely they really were.
So by uploading a publicly licenced video from the Internet Archive, which demonstrates how to download, print, and make a book, I was able to compare my own captions created using the free caption- and audio-description authoring tool MAGpie with those that YouTube had extracted.
Without question the most effective way of making audio and visual content accessible to the widest audience – including those with disabilities – is through the provision of text-based alternatives. Why? Because information rendered in electronic text can be easily enlarged for people with low vision, spoken aloud so that it’s easier for people with reading disabilities to understand, or rendered in whatever tactile form best meets the needs of a user. So what are some of the text-based options available to us for different types of audio and visual content? What could we be doing? What should we be doing? And how can a web content strategy help?
Read moreGenetically inherited – or acquired through illness, accident or poisoning – colour blindness is a condition affecting approximately 8% of men and 1% of women in developed nations. The absence or altered sensitivity of one of the three cone receptors at the back of your eyes causes the individual difficulty in distinguishing certain colours from one another. While not a disability, the condition can at times be frustrating. I’m sure anyone with a form of colour blindness has fielded many a ‘what colour does this pencil look to you?’ question ad nauseam.
Read moreWhile the severity and symptoms of dyslexia vary from person to person, what can learning more about how some people with dyslexia see the written word help us to create better web content?
Read moreThe advent, and subsequent mass adoption, of embedded Flash audio and video content we’ve been exposed to in the last five years or so brings with it many challenges, but none more important than the issue of universal access.
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