Faculty Development has added a blog for faculty to their informative site. Read Paula’s recent post
7 Tips and 7 Principles for Accessibility and Universal Design.
Faculty Development has added a blog for faculty to their informative site. Read Paula’s recent post
7 Tips and 7 Principles for Accessibility and Universal Design.
Information about making Qualtrics forms more accessibility is available at http://accessibility.psu.edu/qualtrics
Corner of College & Allen blog post
My name is Sonya Woods and I am an accessibility consultant with World Campus Learning Design and I met JooYoung when I took a Learning Design and Technology course this semester. He has a great story, so I decided to interview him for the Corner of College & Allen blog so that people can benefit from his experience and perspective as a student who is blind.
Sent in by Christian Johansen
Under a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday, edX, the nonprofit MOOC provider created by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has agreed to make its offerings more accessible to people with disabilities.
The settlement agreement, which marks the department’s first effort to challenge the accessibility of massive open online courses, affects the colleges that are members of edX as well as the nonprofit consortium itself.
Sent in by Elizabeth J. Pyatt
3PlayMedia is offering some timely free webinars on captioning including Copyright and Captioning (April 2, 2-2:45 PM) and Captioning Quickstart (May 7, 2-2:45). They also have some nice (captioned) recorded webinars focusing on workflow issues in particular. Web accessibility is a hot topic right now, with lawsuits, a Section 508 refresh, and the impending requirements of WCAG 2.0 fresh on people’s minds. There are also some recorded webinars to check out.
Sent in by Alexa Schriempf
A small, highly unusual exhibition, “Touching the Prado,” designed to give the blind or those with limited sight an
opportunity to create a mental image of a painting by feeling it. The show, which runs through June 28, occupies a side passage of the museum, near a room that contains an original of another work copied for the blind: a version
of the Mona Lisa by a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. Altogether, six 3D copies are on display, all of them rendering famous works in the Prado. They include Goya’s “The Parasol”; a still life by van der Hamen; “Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan” by Velázquez; and “Noli Me Tangere,” Correggio’s painting of Christ meeting Mary Magdalene.
The exhibition is one of the most sophisticated yet in efforts to unlock the beauty of the visual arts for those unable to see them. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London are among several museums that organize activities for blind visitors, including special guided tours, drawing classes, and “touch” workshops, in which blind people can feel sculptures. The Louvre in Paris also has a Tactile Gallery that contains
copies of some of its sculptures.
Sent in by Christian Vinten-Johansen
The proposed standards replace the current product-based approach with a functionality-based approach. The proposed technical requirements, which are organized along the lines of ICT functionality, provide standards to ensure that covered hardware, software, electronic content, and support documentation and services are accessible to people with disabilities. In addition, the proposed standards include functional performance criteria, which are outcome-based provisions for cases in which the proposed technical requirements do not address one or more features of ICT.
Given the trend toward convergence of technologies and ICT networks, the Access Board is updating the 255 Guidelines at the same time that it is updating the 508 Standards. The existing guidelines include detailed requirements for the accessibility, usability, and compatibility of telecommunications equipment and customer premises equipment. For example, the guidelines require input, output, display, control, and mechanical functions to be accessible to individuals with disabilities. The compatibility requirements focus on the need for standard connectors, compatibility of controls with prosthetics, and TTY compatibility. The guidelines define “usable” as providing access to information about how to use a product, and direct that instructions, product information, documentation, and technical support for users with disabilities be functionally equivalent to that provided to individuals without disabilities. The proposed guidelines include many non-substantive revisions to the existing requirements for clarity along with a few important new provisions.
Sent in by Terry Watson
While some of the more popular, commercial systems, such as Moodle, Blackboard and Desire2Learn, are built in a way that makes them accessible, some of the platforms designed by schools are more limited.
Those systems can be particularly challenging for students who have print disabilities – physical, visual, cognitive and other impairments that prevent them from effectively reading their course materials.
Once students with disabilities are accepted into an online program, they should prepare to be direct and open about what they need to succeed, experts say.
Even if a school uses a learning management system that is completely accessible to students with vision, hearing or other impairments, the odds are that at some point some students will hit a snag, says Lissner of the Association on Higher Education And Disability, who also works at Ohio State University.
Sent in by Alexa Schriempf
Topic : The Future of Video Player Accessibility
There’s no denying that online video makes up an increasingly important part of our everyday lives: online video traffic is expected to make up 79 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2018. There’s also no denying that individuals with disabilities represent a growing percentage of the population: in the 2010 U.S. Census, 19% of the population had a disability, a number that is only increasing with medical advancements and an aging society.
For software developers, this means keeping pace with technological improvements that accommodate all users—which is not easy. In this webinar, developers from YouTube/ Google, JW Player, Video.js, and University of Washington will come together to discuss video player accessibility. Taking a look at their different players, we will discuss the current capabilities, known shortcomings, and plans for future development. This webinar will provide a forum for major developers to take a top-level look at the future potential of video player accessibility.
Sent in by Sonya Woods
Topic : Section 508 ICT NPRM – an Overview
This webinar will provide an overview of the U.S. Access Board’s ICT Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that was released for public comment on February 18, 2015. The public comment period on the ICT NPRM will be open for 90 days. Staff from the U.S. Access Board will review the proposed text of the rule which jointly updates the Section 508 Standards and the Section 255 Guidelines. They will give an overview of the proposed changes and will cover the process for commenting on the proposed rule. Major proposed changes that will be covered include:
The Accessibility Web site team is pleased to announce that we are migrating to Word Press by March 16, 2015. The site was rebuilt with the idea of improving navigation and streamlining content maintenance.
If you find an error on this site or cannot find some content, please contact us at accessibilityweb@psu.edu.
On February 12, 2014 the National Association of the Deaf (NAD at nad.org) announced it was filing two class action suits against Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) alleging discrimination against the deaf and hard of hearing communities by providing video content which is either uncaptioned or inaccurately captioned.
You can read more at