Born Accessible - Books in Browsers

Born Accessible Books in Browsers October 25, 2013

What is Accessibility for Print Disabled Students?

Jessica, Steffon and Shane are three of 250,000+ members who can access Bookshare’s library of 210,000+ books, textbooks and periodicals with reading tools tailored to their special needs

http://youtube.com/watch?v=sUMmzi3nmig

Challenge: The Need

30 million Americans with print disabilities

15-20% in U.S. have language-based disability

285 million people with vision impairment worldwide

115% More requests for alternative materials at UC Berkeley in 4 years

Challenge: Everyone’s a Content Creator

$1.1 billion in new edtech financing in 2012

2,500% more expensive to retrofit for accessibility from print

(or print equivalents)

A Critical Strategy

All materials

Born Digital

Must be

Born Accessible

Accessible Content Highlights

Structure Navigation Sections

Text Reflowable Style/Content Formatting

Tables & Lists Headers Ordering

Math MathML Description

Images Descriptions Multi-modal (touch, sound)

Video Track: subtitles, description, etc.

Widgets ARIA Multi-modal

Images are Challenging (especially STEM)

What is an Accessible Image?

●  Provides different mode of access to visual information contained in an image

●  Beyond just alt text!

SVG Is Ideal for Accessibility

●  SVG can contain textual and structured descriptions and data –  http://describler.com –  http://d3js.org/

●  Author with SVG and if need be distribute as PNG/JPEG

●  SVG can more easily be turned into tactile graphics

●  SVG has potential to be 3D printable

●  SVG can be sonified –  http://svg-sonifier.com –  http://github.com/benetech/svg-sonifier

STEM Descriptions Need More than 120 chars About this description

Author: John Doe, Ph.D. in Water Engineering

Target Age: 9-12

Target Grade: 4-7

Summary

The image depicts the cycle of water evaporating, turning into clouds, falling back to earth in the form of precipitation and being filtered through sediment.

Long Description

The image depicts the natural process of evaporation and precipitation and how rain water gets filtered and cleansed through the earth's sediment.

On the left-hand side of the image is a lake...

A weather event such as a rainstorm eventually returns the precipitation to the ground...

The natural filtering agents in the soil...

Annotation added by teacher

In the winter we get snow instead of rain.

Simplified Language Description

The image shows how water becomes clouds, then rain, and then gets cleaned by the soil.

Tactile Image

[Tactile image]

In the upper left corner of the tactile…

Simplified Image

[Simplified image]

Moving front the top left corner of the image

You can add long descriptions to

HTML 5!

Poet: Crowdsourcing Image Descriptions

Mathematics

●  MathML support is taking steps forward –  Safari and Firefox visually render MathML –  Aural rendering in Safari, Chrome(Vox) and is coming in NVDA –  Visual and aural rendering in IE 9 with MathPlayer plugin

●  But steps backward as well –  Chrome dropped MathML support –  IE 10 & 11 do not support MathPlayer plugin

Stopgap Math Accessibility Solutions

●  MathJax JavaScript library for all browsers

●  MathJax + Chrome(Vox) on the server as a web service –  Input: MathML or LaTex –  Output: SVG with embedded descriptions or PNG/JPG with alt

descriptions

Interactive Content / Widgets ●  Simulations ●  Interactive Number Lines ●  Quizzes ●  3D models ●  http://www.w3.org/community/stemwidgets

How Can We Discover Accessible eBooks?

Schema.org Can Provide an Answer

Recipe HTML 5 Tagging Example

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Recipe"> <div itemprop="nutrition” itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/NutritionInformation"> Nutrition facts: <span itemprop="calories">240 calories</span>, </div> Ingredients: - <span itemprop="ingredients">3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed</span> - <span itemprop="ingredients">1 egg</span>

Accessibility Properties

• auditory, textual, visual Access Mode

• alterna5veText, MathML, cap5on Media Feature

• hasAdapta5on, isAdapata5onOf Alterna5ves

• flashing, mo5onSimula5on Access Hazard

• AccessAPI, controlFlexibility Others

http://a11ymetadata.org

Google Custom Search Example

Search for “history” titles on Bookshare filter by presence of image descriptions:

http://www.a11ymetadata.org/bookshare-tags-over-195000-titles-with-accessibility-metadata/

What can you do?

1.  Leverage standards, such as HTML 5, WAI-ARIA, EPUB 3

2.  Build content creation tools that make accessibility easy

3.  Create reading systems that are accessible to use, leverage standards and build on open source projects like Readium

4.  Hack – http://github.com/benetech

http://bornaccessible.org

Born Accessible - Books in Browsers

Education

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