ROUGH EDITED COPY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
CIRCLE CAMPUS
DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY EXPO SESSION 1
DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY 101:
ACCESSIBILITY FOR ALL
10:00 a.m. - 10:50 a.m.
APRIL 9, 2009
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:
DILLON REPORTING SERVICE
100 NORTH LA SALLE STREET, SUITE 1500
CHICAGO, IL 60602
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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facility communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> KEVIN PRICE: Hi. I want to introduce -- I want to welcome you to our first UIC Digital Accessibility Expo. This has been something that we've been working on for the last few months, and we're excited to have everyone here. And I'm really excited to have the speakers today who are going to present on digital 101, giving you sort of a run down of giving you a basis for digital accessibility. And what we're going to do today, and what's the Expo, the exhibits next-door and what's going on later in the day, we want to give everyone sort of the basis today during this presentation. So I'm pleased to have everyone here. And like I said, the people who we have here are speaking today are some to me some of the pioneers, people who work really a lot in the field in this state.
To give you a little bit of run down, Janet is the project coordinator for the accessibility technology Great Lakes ADA center. She has 15 years of experience and knowledge in the area of assistive technology.
>> JANET PETERS: I'm not that old. It has it would be two years, right?
>> KEVIN PRICE: And she's worked with business entities, state and local governments, education institutions to advocate for equal rights for individuals with disabilities. She has her certification in assistive technology from Cal State University in Northridge and an academic background in computer science and currently obtaining a masters in education from the university of Minnesota twin cities. And she's my friend. She's been my friend for years, so I am pleased to have her here. And of course, Mike has been working in the State of Illinois for quite awhile. He is the assistive technology and accessibility specialist focusing on the efforts of improving accessibility of information systems for people with disabilities. Mike works with a wide range of public and private sector clients to help access the accessibility of existing systems designed to develop newest accessible systems and train staff to assist and design development. Working as a consultant to the State of Illinois, Mike has spearheaded many accessibility issues including the development of the Illinois web accessibility standards and the Illinois information technology accessibility act. Prior to working with MSF&W, Mike served as the chief rehabilitation engineer at the Illinois department of rehabilitation services where he specialized in using assistive technologies to enable individuals with disabilities to do their jobs.
Well, I'm really pleased to have them here. I want everyone to give a warm welcome because we appreciate them coming here and sharing their expertise in digital accessibility. Thank you.
(Applause).
>> MIKE SCOTT: Thanks, Kevin, and thanks, everybody, for joining us this morning.
Again, I'm Mike Scott. I'm with the company called MSF&W based out of Springfield, Illinois. And in my current role and in the previous role, I've worked extensively with the State of Illinois really focusing on digital accessibility, and usually digital accessibility 101. What I want to take a few minutes this morning to share with you is just kind of the overview, the background, hopefully to lay the foundation to kick off this Expo. Some of this stuff you may have seen before. Some of this stuff may be new, but I've learned the hard way that you never want to assume. Lots of different people have lots of different experiences when it comes to accessibility. And we're not always talking the same thing. So I want to take a few minutes just to talk about what is accessibility, why is it important, how do we actually achieve it, and we'll take some time to actually see some demonstrations of some of the leading assistive technology tools that people with disabilities use when they're trying to access digital information.
So we don't have a whole lot of time to run through this all so I'm going to go kind of quick but at least it should give you a taste about some of the main things, the main ideas and the main concepts that we're talking about.
First of all, I always like to start the presentation asking the seemingly simple question what is disability because often we're talking different things when it comes to accessibility. Let me just ask the question, how many of you are familiar with the concept of accessibility, just in general? Great. It looks like everybody in the room. How many of you have had some firsthand experience with information system accessibility, have read about it, experienced yourselves, supported other people? Excellent. And how many of you have had the opportunity that yourself or working with someone else to actually experience using an assistive technology to access a web site or an information system? Okay. A few more. Great. It's good to see we've got some background here.
Just to kind of recap when we're asking the question what is accessibility, and really we're talking about a narrow slice of accessibility when we're talking about information of accessibility, but in essence we're talking about accommodating people with disabilities. And obviously when it comes to information systems, not every disability is going to impact my ability to use a web site or a computer system. So we're talking about disabilities that affect the senses and the abilities that we use to interact with or interface with modern computer systems. And primarily that breaks down into just a few categories. Number one, we're talking about disabilities that affect vision, low vision or blindness, and we're going to take a look at some of the leading tools that we use to accommodate individuals who have low vision or blindness. Of course, that's the main way that we get information out of computer systems today is by looking at it. Secondly we're going to look at some tools by people who have physical impairments, specifically impairments that affect the use of their hands. One of the two main devices we use to get information into our computers to control our computers? Keyboard and mouse. I heard it whispered back there. And obviously both of those things require the use of hands, and we're going to talk about that a little bit and take a look at examples and tools that we can look at when someone doesn't have the ability to use a keyboard or mouse.
The next category increasingly important category when it comes to especially web access, is accommodating the needs of people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
How many of you have watched a you tube video? I know everybody has. How many of you have posted a you tube video. Everybody wants to be in on this video thing. And that's great. We're seeing richer and richer media out there and it's a wonderful thing, however, it requires that we pay attention to a new class of accessibility. Primarily, what do we do for folks who can't hear what's in my video and we'll take a look on how we do captions on videos. And it's becoming easier and easier to do that.
And lastly, I don't want to skip over this last category, it's a very important category, and that is people are learning disabilities. And we've actually discovered, especially in working in educational settings, that people with educational disabilities are the single biggest group that we are serving especially as an education institution. As a hidden disability, we often don't know. Learning disabilities are also a little bit trickier to accommodate. We don't have the kind of history and the well defined, you know, this product and that product like we do for some of the other disabilities. But we're going to take a look at one example of a tool that's brought together for the techniques to accommodate the other disabilities and is proving to be very useful for people with learning disabilities. So that in a nutshell is what we're talking about as far as accessibility today.
Now, I've talked several times here that accessibility is all tied into accommodating the needs of people with disabilities, and we primarily accomplish that through the use of assistive technologies. And assistive technologies are any kind of technology, hardware, software, you name it, but any kind of technology that is used to help people with a disability do their job, go to school, accomplish whatever task it is that they like to accomplish. So it's a very broad category. But as I mentioned before on a previous slide, we're talking about a narrow slice of that. And so what I want to do today, take a few minutes here to actually talk about and demonstrate for you some of the tools, some of the assistive technology tools that are used most commonly when we're trying to accommodate the needs of people with disabilities as far as accessing web sites and accessing information systems goes. So the first category of disabilities that we talked about were vision related, vision and blindness. And I want to show you a few tools here that can be used to accommodate the needs of people who have a wide range of different levels of digital loss. I'm going to bring up the UIC home page. I hope they won't embarrass you guys to do the demonstration on here and just show a few techniques that are possible. Obviously starting at the mild end of vision impairment, there are actually a lot of people out there, a big group of people out there who wouldn't label themselves as having a disability. There are a lot of people out there who have mild visual impairment, whether it's just with age, my vision is starting to go or what it might be. But all I might need in order to access a typical web site is just a little bit of magnification. I just need it to be a little bit bigger than what it is now. And luckily all the leading web browsers have the ability, and sometimes they give you a couple options to do it, have the ability to increase the size of the screen. How many of you used a large font in a web browser before? Great. Most of you have seen it. In Internet Explorer, we've got a couple ways of doing it, but what I'm going to show you is the text size. It give me five options. And I pick largest and sure enough the text on the screen gets a little bit bigger. Can you read it in the back now? Good. The good news is that tool is free. If you've got a computer and a web browser, you've got that tool. So it's free. It's ubiquitous, it's relatively easy to use when people know about it and I guess the good news is it's relatively easy to make the web site work with that tool. However, if you're not paying attention, it is one of those things even a well intended web developer can accidentally code their page in a way that will prevent this feature from working. So one of the things that we do in supporting accessibility is we make sure that proper coding techniques have been used. So a simple tool like the text sizing enlargement is going to work.
I'm going to go ahead and shut that down, put it back to normal. And I'm just going to mention ‑‑ we need to go further than that. Another tool that we often use is the ability built into most operating systems to actually change the colors of everything that are on the screen. I'm not going to turn it on right now because we're a little pinched for time, but what I'm going to do is switch up to the next product I want to demonstrate. And that is a screen magnification software called zoom text. How many of you have seen zoom text before? How many of you have actually used zoom text, either supporting somebody or using it yourself? Zoom text is the leading product in the United States right now in the screen magnification category, that is, any kind of software tool that is designed to magnify what's on the screen. The way zoom text works is pretty straightforward. Once I have zoom text running, I can then use the control panel to increase the size of the text, pretty much as big as I need it to go. So now you can read it in back, right? Absolutely. I can't tell what's going on here so I'm going to bring it back.
For what it's worth, in working with individuals with low vision as a rehab engineer in my previous career, typically once we got higher than about 4 X or 5 X in zoom text, at that point we typically started suggesting that the user switch up to the next category of screen reading which we'll take a look at in just a minute. So typically we're going to be running zoom text at between 2 and 4, 5 x magnification. In addition to that magnification, zoom text is automatically going to allow me to pan around the screen. So if I'm looking at the upper right-hand corner of the screen and I want to see what's on the left, I can just move the mouse to the left. It will pan over there, just as if I had taken a zoom lens on a camera, zoomed in and then I have to move the camera around to see the whole view. So it's very easy for the user. Just move your mouse around and it will be right on the site. And in addition, zoom text also gives us all kinds of control over the colors that a page or screen is displayed in. It gives me a number of preset colors and I can flip, for example, to inverted brightness and what you see on the screen now is everything, the white background has turned black. The white text in the foreground has turned white. The links are relatively bright blue and relatively bright pink. But you can see that it has adjusted the color of everything that I'm looking at on the screen. And the reason for that is sometimes people with low vision will find that certain color combinations are easier for them to read or they'll find that a white background, the glare that comes from a white background causes eye fatigue over time so they prefer to have a black background. Or there's all kind of individual needs. So, for example, we've got some schemes in here that are yellow on black and white on blue, blue on white. And all kinds of, just about anything you can imagine, zoom text will give you almost any color combination that you need. So screen magnifier is going to magnify the screen, handle the paning which comes with magnification and give me some tools either to enhance the contrast, changing the colors but basically allowing me to customize the way this screen appears. From a web developer's standpoint, what we worry about is okay, great, I know there is this third party zoom text that's going to make everything bigger and change the colors so I don't have to build that into my web site necessarily but I do need to be aware that somebody might be looking at my web site in a way that's very different than how I was looking at it when I designed it. So I need to be careful of not presenting something, not conveying information with color alone, not filling out whatever is highlighted in red is a special feature for today because it may not be red when somebody with zoom text is looking at it. So the good news is the assistive technology does the hard work and as a web developer, I just need to pay attention so that I am recognizing that a user might not be seeing exactly what I'm seeing when I design the site.
Okay. The next category up when we're talking about visual impairments is the move to a full blown screen reader and a screen reader is a piece of third party software that will actually monitor what's going on on the screen and read it out with a synthesized voice. I'm going to start off and show you just real quick here jaws, jaws is the leading screen reader in the United States right now. There are some other close competitors. Google eyes is also a close competitor. And jaws, I'll get it up here for you. And with jaws talking, I'm going to switch back to that browser window. Okay. It has a lot to tell us this morning.
Okay. So I started jaws and I got back to the UIC web page that we were looking at.
Jaws is going to do a pretty amazing thing. It's started to announce things. When I switched the window, it told me welcome to UIC and basically what it's going to do is as I pointed to different points of the page, it is going to read to me. However, I'm not going to use the mouse to point to parts of the page because if I can't see the screen, even though I might physically be able to see the mouse, if I can't see what that pointer is, I have no idea what I'm pointing to. So in addition of doing the job of reading everything out loud, jaws also is going to give us a rich set of keyboard commands so that I can do everything from the keyboard that a site user would be doing probably with the mouse. So I'm going to start out with the keyboard command to tell me where I am, to move to the top of the page and tell me what page I'm on. That happens to be control home.
"Welcome to UIC.
That's great. That way I can confirm that, hey, I'm on the page I need to go to. As I start reading down the page and I'm just going to use the down arrow. And it said blank. We'll just ignore that. The next thing we heard it say is link skip to main content. It's actually saying something we don't see on the screen up here. There's nothing on the top that says that. It's actually reading to us an invisible tool. It's been coded into the UIC web site to allow a screen user to skip past the menus and jump to the main area of the page. I'm not going to take advantage of that right now. I'm going to continue reading down.
University of Illinois of Chicago.
And the next thing we hear is link University of Illinois of Chicago. It's in the upper right‑hand corner of the page where we've got the words University of Illinois at Chicago. Again it told us what we wanted to say. It didn't only say University of Illinois at Chicago. It also said link. Usually in this case, usually it is some color underlined. A screen user doesn't have the benefit of knowing how does this look. So the screen reader is also doing the complex task of communicating that essential information that we get, that a site user gets visually in a way that that can be understood through speech. So in this case where as a site user recognizes blue under line means I can click on this, a jaws user understands if I hear the word link, I can click on that and it will go somewhere else.
Let me continue reading down. The next thing we hear is list of 8 items, again something I don't see on the screen. What we do see on the screen is the link bar right across the top. And sure enough, if I count them, there's a list of several links in a row, and there are eight of them. And again something we get visually, we get more than just literally seeing home admissions, alumni. We take a quick glance at that, say here's a series of links. I may not choose to pay attention to them based on whether I'm interested or not. So the screen user is doing the same job. It is telling me there are a list of things there. I'll go ahead and read a couple of them. Link home, link admissions, link alumni.
And so forth. We can see the link reader is not only reading out what's on the screen, it's giving us information about what the role about the things, what's a link, a list, so forth. There are also some very powerful and very useful tools built in that allow me to essentially skim the page and jump just to the section that I want. If you think how a cited user uses a web site, if the sited user used this, they don't start reading left to right on the page. Does anybody do that? No, they don't. I know you're lying.
What a cited user does is visually scan this page, usually in a Z shape kind of pattern and focus in on the sections of the page that are outlined by the different graphical treatments and we focus in on the headings, the big bold welcome to UIC, the big bold black events, it takes me a fraction of the second to see what's on the page. So, for example, if I was coming to this page and wondering, you know, what's in ‑‑ what are some events that are coming up. I heard there was an accessibility Expo or something, can I get more information on that, I'm going to skim real quick, real quick focusing on the events column and sure enough there's something there.
Well a screen reader user doesn't want to have to read through every single text on this page before I get to the events side bar. I'd like to be able to do the same thing and screen reader actually gives me the ability to do that.
I'm going to use jaws headings list command.
Headings list dialogue, welcome to UIC.
And what jaws does here is actually look at the code behind this page to see what things on this page has the programmer identified as headings. And headings in web pages come in six varieties, 1 through 6, kind of depending on their level and outline of the page, if you will. And what the headings list shows me is all the headings on the page, and I can read through them. The first is welcome to UIC. The second one is news, and the third one is events. And I say, oh, yeah, I'm interested in events.
"Enter, heading level to events."
I click on that.
"Visited link Digital Accessibility Expo."
So what I did was bring up my list of headings, I wanted the events, I clicked right there and I started reading right there. So I was able to get a sense of what's on this page and then focus in and just start reading right exactly where I was interested. So very powerful tool, as I have worked with the state to train jaws users over the years. Before we had this headings list capability, using the web was possible, but it was painstakingly slow. Now that we have the links list, the headings list and other things like that that capitalize on the information that is possible to provide, possible to get out of a web page, screen reader users not only is it possible for someone that's blind to use a web page or information system, it's actually becoming efficient. And now we've got staff throughout the state who keep up with their sighted peers and be able to get through the screen they need to.
Now, again the screen user is doing the heavy lifting, but it was up to the developer of this site or the developer of whatever program, to make sure that the information was there. And that last one was up to the developer to make sure those headings were actually marked up with the code that indicate headings, things that the screen recognize. So we like to look at it as part of a two-part solution. The assistive technology does the hard part and the developer has to meet it halfway in order to give the assistive technology the information that it needs. And that's really what accessibility and achieving accessibility is all about, is figuring out how do we meet the assistive technologies halfway. So obviously we can go a lot deeper with jaws, but for the sake of time, I'm going to stop there and I'm going to shut off jaws.
And let's take a minute then to talk about the next category, and that is, how people have limited use of their hands can run into problems with dealing with web sites as well. Primarily as we mentioned before, as you mentioned before, when we're operating a computer system, we're using a keyboard and/or a mouse. And it doesn't take much of an impairment of the use of your hands to make especially a mouse unusable. Even for people who don't have an impairment, who just don't have experience using a mouse, getting that motion of moving the mouse, holding it perfectly still while I click without dragging, I had the experience of helping my great-grandmother use a computer over the telephone, and just to point out how to track it, how the arrow, the cursor corresponded, very, very complex, and then double clicking, it just wasn't going to happen. But it doesn't take, it doesn't take much of an impairment to make a traditional mouse unusable. It doesn't take a whole lot more impairment to make a keyboard unusable. The good news is we have a whole lot of devices, I use an alternate mouse device, a thumb track ball just because I prefer the ergonomics of it. But mouses come in all different shapes and sizes. There are mouse devices you can operate by your feet, by looking at something with your eyes. If you can imagine it, we can use it as a mouse practically. There are also all kinds of different shapes and sizes of keyboards, enlarged keyboards, split keyboards, keyboards with big keys and little keys, you name it. All very useful devices. However, when we get up to the more severe disabilities, when we're talking about someone who has maybe severe cerebral palsy or quadriplegia or amputation, it's really not I need a different shape of a keyboard but I'm not going to be able to use a keyboard at all. That's when we move into the category of assistive technology tools called speech recognition. And I'm going to show you real quick a speech recognition tool called dragon naturally speaking. How many of you have seen it before? How many of you have seen dragon dictate from the day?
In the day, 15 some years ago, dragon dictate was the leading speech recognition tool. It was targeted only to people with disabilities. It cost $10,000 to buy the software and $10,000 to buy the fancy 486 computer to run it on. It was an expensive proposition. And I point that out because this is one of the neat categories of the assistive technology that have started to cross that barrier, started to cross into the mainstream. It didn't take long for people without disabilities to say hey, I'd like to talk to my computer too. I saw that on Star Trek. I want to be able to do that too. So just a few years ago dragon dictate was $20,000. Today you can go out to best buy and by it for a hundred bucks. So it's a neat example of how assistive technology has crossed that barrier into the mainstream and the nice thing is the price has come down. I see it's ready for us and we can do a quick demonstration of dragon, and you can vouch for me. I'm not going to touch my keyboard.
Wake up. Start Internet explorer. Maximize window. Scroll down. Scroll up. Click search. Accessibility. Choose to. Go back. Go to sleep. I'm not really on the Internet, so I had to fake doing the search there. But you get the idea. I was able to get to this page, bring it up, scroll it up and down, click the search box, type something into it. I could have easily said click Digital Accessibility Expo. Without the Internet, it would have been an error but you get the idea. I was able to operate that system completely by voice without having to use my hands. So very powerful tool and it is ‑‑ it can make a difference between for someone who has a double amputation or cerebral palsy. It can mean being able to work or being able to go to school with a tool like this.
I'm going to shut it down for now. And let's take just a moment here to talk about this new and up and coming category, addressing the needs of people who are deaf or hard of hearing on the web.
Now, what we need to do for people who are deaf and hard of hearing is really the same as what we do when it comes to broadcast television or movies or whatnot, and it's basically we need to provide captions, closed captions, open captions, some form of captions so that someone who can't hear the audio track of a video can listen to it. And I'm just going to bring up a real quick demonstration here of a flash video, so this is the same formatted video we use on you tube and Google videos and everywhere, a flash video that are available in Adobe's flash CS 4 that are really starting to make captioning really doable. What we see here is the video on the top part of the screen. What we have here is the control bar and this play button time seeker and over on the right what we're most interested in, a caption button. And this play back skin is provided as part of Adobe play back cord. They provide a whole slew of them that have the caption button included right on them. And basically when I put the captions on and I play.
"Someone watching a car accelerate toward light speed would see something very strange. It would seem as though the car itself were getting shorter".
And as we see on the screen here, as a video is playing its audio track, we can see the captions on the screen. I can turn the captions off and on using that button. I did still take some work to get the captions there. I had to put the text in, and I had to tell it what time to show it at. But again, we've got some emerging tools, some new tools, that are making that much easier. It still is an extra task so it's not automatic yet. But again it's getting a whole lot easier. I created the caption file as a text based file. I used flash CS 4. I tell it here's my video. Here's the file name of my captioned file and it does the rest. So it's not automatic yet. It's not ‑‑ it doesn't automatically put the words there using speech recognition, but it does give you the ability, all I have to do is point it at my caption file and it's good to go. So it's very exciting to see that captioning is really becoming doable and really becoming possible.
So the last category that I mentioned earlier, and I just want to take just a moment here to demonstrate a relatively new tool, of the categories of learning disabilities. And this has been a tough category for us engineers to address because it's not as well defined. But typically when we're talking about learning disabilities and information systems, it's typically reading disabilities that come into play, whether it's dyslexia or other disabilities that affect reading and comprehension. And what we have available to us now, what I'm going to demonstrate is one tool of emerging kind of new set of tools that we don't even have a good name for it yet. I think I called it a reading aid there. The product that I'm going to show you is called browse aloud, and with browse aloud running, basically all I need to do is if I'm looking at a web site and I want to have something read out, I just simply point my cursor ‑‑ let me turn the volume down. Sorry about that. Okay. We'll try that again. I point at it. And.
"UIC students earn 14th straight bid to national mock trial championship."
Usually a user who has browse aloud will have it talking all the time. Once it runs, you can't see it on the screen, it's cut off, but on my system tray I've got a little icon that shows that browse aloud is running and then I point my cursor to it and it does two things and this is very important because this is where we see different technologies brought together in an interesting way. Not only does it read what I pointed to but actually highlighted the words as it read. And people with different types of readings disabilities know this multi modal approach is really the key. Yes, it can be good to here hear it out load but it's really good to see it and track along so I get the visual and the auditory at the same time, the multi modal intervention, and that's what really can be useful for people who have learning disabilities.
Interestingly, we're also discovering that this is a handy tool for anybody who has low literacy for whatever reason, if it's English as a second language or in general, a lot of people can benefit from this read along approach where I see it highlighted and I hear it at the same time. So a neat tool. It's new to us. This is actually a tool out of Ireland, very popular in the UK but relatively new to the US and we're seeing a few competitors out there to do similar things.
I'm going to go ahead and shut down browse aloud for now. I want to take just a few of our remaining minutes here to talk a little bit about why are we doing all this. So what we've seen so far, we've talked about what is accessibility, what comes to the information systems. You saw a demonstration of some ‑‑ a highlight demonstration of some of the leading tools that are out there. Hopefully you got a sense there of really how revolutionary some of these tools are and how enabling they can be. But let's take just a moment to talk about why is accessibility important? How many of you in the audience are developers yourselves? And how many of you are in charge of developers? And how many of you are involved in the decision process, whether it is in buying something or building something or deciding whether something is going to get made or bought? Okay. Good. I'm going to hit it from all the angles here. Why is this important? Why do we care? Well, there is the positive reason to care, and that is your customers, your staff, your students, yourself. Accessibility impacts real people, and whether you're doing it because you feel it's right to include people or whether you're doing it because you know, hey, as a private company, that certainly is in my favor to be accessible to more customers, as an employer I want to enable my staff to do their job, as an educational institution, I want to make sure that my students can have full access. And actually the statistics show, although we all know we can lie on statistics, but they show that between 10 and 20 percent of Americans have a disability at some point in their life. I think the latest statistic says 20 percent. We talked about before not all disabilities are going to affect the use of an information system so it's probably closer to the low end of that range. Maybe 10 percent of people have a disability that impact their ability to use information system. But even 10 percent is a lot. We've got maybe 60 people in the room here. That's half a dozen of us. It's a small but significant number of people that we are helping when we address accessibility.
Also it's a growing number of people. As our population ages, accessibility needs, even by people who don't label themselves as, quote, unquote, having a disability, as our population ages, more and more people are having accessibility needs. Again, whether it's because I get tired of looking down my nose at my bifocals or I can't hear as well as I used to, you need to have accessibility as people get older, and the last useful reason is that accessibility and usability very often go hand in hand. In working with state agencies and private organizations, we often find that addressing accessibility because maybe we got told we had to, is a perfect excuse to address usability, which lots of us want to do. We want to make our systems more user friendly but we don't ever get the go ahead to do that. We have worked with a lot of project teams where we say hey, we can do user. We say, yes, most of what we use.
Then of course there are the negative reasons, the law. The stick that goes with that carrot. You all are probably aware that we have a number of laws that address disability. The Americans with disabilities act is the grand daddy of all the laws. Passed in 1990 does not specifically say we have to make our information systems accessibility, because in 1990 did we have web sites that we know of today? Very small number of us had the web in 1990. When they wrote the ADA, they didn't know about yahoo. So the ADA lays out the general requirement that as an employer, as a governmental organization, as a private organization providing services to the public, we have got a responsibility to make sure that we provide our services in an accessible way. The ADA doesn't specify what that accessible way is, but it just generally lays down that rule. It's a very powerful but very general requirement.
Section 504 of the rehab act which actually predates the ADA has the same kind of requirement. That's one like you in the educational setting is required with 504. It had the same requirement for anybody receiving federal funds in schools. So the ADA and section 504 are the general rules, powerful but general. Section 508 of the rehab act, which was added much later, was the first time that we actually had in law some specifics. Now, the important thing about section 508 to recognize is 508 only explicitly applies to federal organizations, the federal government and agencies and so forth. It doesn't apply to us even if we're receiving federal funding. However, what section 508 does do is it, as the lawyers like to say, it informs the ADA. The ADA has a general requirement for all of us but doesn't give us any specifics. So when the courts bring up an ADA case, they say, well, what are the specifics? Well, the first thing they will look to is section 508. So ADA is a general requirement, applies to all of us. 508 applies to the federal government but is an example, a model, if you will, of specifics.
In Illinois we have passed in 2007 and went into effect last August the Illinois information technology accessibility act. And the IITAA basically says in Illinois ‑‑ basically it's our version of section 508. It says in Illinois, Illinois state agencies and state universities, we're going to lay out, here are our specific requirements. And the IITAA is modeled right off section 508. Section 508 happens to be being rewritten as we speak so we looked ahead. So it does go a little beyond today's 508 because we saw where 508 is going, we wanted to get ahead of the curve a little bit. But it puts a specific legal burden on us and it lays out the specifics of what we need to do to demonstrate that we have applied.
So the laws are in place and the laws are being tested and I want to take just a second here. There are a number of lawsuits that have come up over the years. America on line, IBM got sued over Olympics.com. Price line and Ramada.com got sued. State of Arkansas and the state of Pennsylvania, and most recently target.com. These lawsuits were initiated by the national federation of the blind where they said we have to hold people's feet to the fire on this. And just to use the target case as an example, the way these lawsuits typically go is that the NFB or the interested party will come and say, hey, I can't use your system. And in every example that we've seen so far, it's been an honest question up front. Can you help me out? Can you fix this? Can you do something better? And in most of the cases, after a little bit of deliberation, the lawyers look at the law, they look at the requirements, at what takes to get it done, and in most cases they've settled pretty darn quickly. Target was a little bit of an exception because they dragged it out. They said we're going to fight this. And the first thing they said was, well, under the ADA, we don't think it applies. And the federal circuit court said no, we're not going with that. The case goes ahead. And they said this isn't a class action suit. And the court said no, it affects the whole class. We're going to go ahead. After about a year and a half of fussing with lawyers, target came to the same conclusion that everybody else did, and that was we have to make this right. The lesson we try to learn from target is it's much more painful to drag it out than it is to do it right in the first place. So after a year and a half of who knows what kind of lawyer fees, target had to agree to repair the site, which was all that was being requested in the first place, they had to agree to external monitoring by the NFB's technical people to make sure they're getting it done right so they have a watch dog. They had to give the original plaintiff, I think a student from U of C Berkeley $20,000 to start up a tech lab, and they got to put $6 million into a class action fund to pay off the people who were put out because they couldn't make their web site accessible.
So the moral of that story is you can do it for the right reasons that we saw in the early slide, and you can still get some ‑‑ you can still get a pat on the back and some kudos, or you can wait until somebody brings a lawsuit and do it for the wrong reasons and pay a lot of money and go through the extra pain. So with that said, I hope everyone's convinced now. But we're running short on time here so let me just wrap here with a couple last little slides here to answer the question. The fourth question we've got is okay. We've learned about what it is, how the assistive technologies work, why we should care about it. What do we really need to do? How do we make web sites successful? And I've got the five minutes remaining so I'm good on time here.
Luckily there have been lots of other people who have done the work for us in figuring out what do I need to do to make a web site or an information system in general accessible? As I mentioned before the federal government laid out some standards in section 508. Those are changing so I wouldn't suggest worrying too much about the section 508 standards at this point until they're updated. Maybe more importantly, the W3C, the web content accessibility. They developed all the way back in 1999 some guidelines called the web content accessibility guidelines. They're currently on version 2 which came out the end of last year, and it is a comprehensive set of instructions on what developers need to do. And then lastly, in Illinois, we put together some standards in the IITAA that are really based on those two things. And for what it's worth, for those of us in Illinois, the IITAA standards are really very useful. One of the things we did was we wanted to make sure the Illinois standards were in line. So the goal was if you're compliant with IITAA, you are also compliant with 508. But we got asked by a lot of developers at the state to make this stuff a little easier to swallow. The section 508 stuff as you can imagine is a little bit governmenty, and the WCAG standards suffer from the well intended effort to be very general in nature, but the back edge of that sword is that they are not very specific. What we did in Illinois, is put the meaning of the standards, put them together in a way that says what it is, why do we need to care about it and what do you need to do. So it was actually complimented as a nice tutorial if you wanted to apply these other standards. So how do we make web sites accessible, number one, we know what the standard, get familiar with the standard and set that as a goal. Number two, we become aware of what tools are out there to help us. And there's lots of tools. I have a couple listed on the screen. One tool that we developed to make it quick and easy, if not complete, to check for accessibility. We have a web accessibility check list. And if you'd like to get a copy of this brochure, we have copies at the booth in the exhibit hall.
But this check list basically lays out some quick and easy tests that you can do to get a feel for whether a web site is in the ball park. It isn't the end all, be all. It doesn't replace testing with actual assistive technologies, but it's things you can do without having to buy anything, without having extensive experience to get a sense of are you in the ball park. If you find problems when you run this test, it's a sign that there is a deeper problem. If you get past there, it's a good thing. You're very likely going to be in good shape and then you can go onto the next step, which is get a full text, a good audit from a person who actually uses assistive technologies. So there's this check list we designed from owners to check their own work, but we found procurers also like it. And I can't demonstrate now because I'm not on the Internet, but U of I at Urbana Champaign has developed an accessibility evaluator. I know UIC has a booth and can demo and I encourage you to take a look at their booth to find out what the accessibility evaluate or can do for you.
So to wrap it up, keys to success, be proactive, get training and find the right resources. Know your standards, learn them. Don't assume just because you've heard about accessibility, that they know what you're doing. And lastly don't be overwhelm. It can be an overwhelming task to tackle this. The good news is you don't have to fix everything at once, especially in Illinois. The Illinois law is go forward. It's not retroactive. So if you have a web site with 10,000 pages that are already up, you don't have to go back and fix them. It would be nice to do that but you don't have to. The law says anything new that you put out has to be right. So in Illinois we made it a proactive in the law itself, and in practice, again as we've seen examples the NFB has brought lawsuits. Really their question is can you do something, can you take a step in the right direction, and if you can start out proactively that way, it doesn't have to be an overwhelming task. So last thing, and I apologize, Janet, because I think I took most of our time here. The last slide, I've got a list of some resources that can help. The Illinois department of human services that I work with contractually is the home of the IITAA documents. The Great Lakes ADA center and Janet has a booth over here in the exhibit hall, is a wealth of resources. Of course UIC disability resource center and the UIUC Center for Technology Accessibility has a booth and then our own company has a booth out there also. Thanks for your attention. I appreciate your taking the time out to listen. If you have any questions, why don't you go ahead and throw them out now until Kevin chases us out and you can follow up on anything you want. Janet and I and UIC folks will be around the rest of the day in the exhibit hall. Again, thank you. Does anybody have any last questions? Question.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Some of the manufacturers of web site development tools notably Microsoft with word, make a word document, word processing program which theoretically can take anything and make a BHTML save as and pop it right on the web. How much of that actually is accessibility, knowing that a page of 100 words or so winds up a 40 K file and how much of that is just junk that needs to be taken out and make a small web file sizes?
>> MIKE SCOTT: So I think a good question is we've got tools, word processing tools and other kinds of development tools. John, if you're on next, you can ‑‑ are you on next?
>> SPEAKER: I don't know.
>> MIKE SCOTT: Where's Kevin? Roxana, we're done. We can vacate. We're just answering questions. So we can get out whenever you need us out. Is it time? I can shut down this stuff here.
>> JANET PETERS: Can I just address that question quick? I do have a resource on this because not just your html needs to be accessible. You need documents, pdf's. Your entirely content needs to be thought about in accessibility. And those save as to html are notoriously inaccessible. John Gunderson has lots of resources as well as I have a handout that explains how to look at accessible content on the html. So you can come to the booths and pick that up.
(Applause).
>> KEVIN PRICE: We're going to take about 10, 15 minutes and then have the faculty session, instructional technology session, so if you want to get up for a few minutes, I appreciate it.
