Accessible Information Technology

What We Learned

Making IT accessible is great for business because search engines also search alternative text tags of pictures for information. If accessible, with proper headers, pages download faster than non-accessible web pages on mobile units. Accessible web pages can be exciting. They can have rich, interactive animations AND still be accessible – even to mobile devices.

Resources

Free Web Page Checkers Recommended by Glenda Sims

• WAVE: http://wave.webaim.org/
• World Space: http://worldspace.deque.com
• Zen Garden: http://www.csszengarden.com/ to see what an extraordinary difference cascading style sheets can make to an otherwise plain accessible web page.

Free Tutorials

• W3 Schools: http://www.w3schools.com/
• Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices: http://www.w3.org/WAI/mobile/

Other Web Access Experts

• Jim Thatcher: http://jimthatcher.com/webcourse1.htm
• Jim Allan: http://www.tsbvi.edu/
• Heni: http://www.iheni.com/

IT Conferences

• CSUN: http://www.csunconference.org/
• Closing the Gap: http://www.closingthegap.com/
• SXSW: http://sxsw.com/attend
• Knowbility: http://knowbility.org/

Accessible PDFs

http://refresh-detroit.org/2008/12/02/ten-tips-for-creating-usableandaccessiblepdfs/

Captioning

We use Automatic Sync Technologies (https://services.automaticsync.com) to caption our shows. They are very professional, and cost effective. If you have shows you want to make available on the web, try MovCaptioner by Synchrimedia (http://www.synchrimedia.com/). It is only $25 and very easy to use. Currently, it is only available for the Mac.

Web Content

Gene uses Dreamweaver by Adobe. It is easy to check the accessibility of your web page. Most professional web authoring applications will have accessibility features. As long as you can get to the code of whatever web authoring tool you use, you can make web sites accessible.

Cynthia Curry has free podcasts on iTunes about accessible information technology. Contact her at http://maine.gov/mlti/about/contact.shtml