Category: podcast

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audio podcast

Podcast #59: Jeffrey Frey on Accessible Podcasts

Dennis speaks with Jeffrey Frey and discusses accessible podcasting, guidelines on audio/video web accessibility, and Jeff’s role at Rice University.

Jeff is the Web Services Manager for Enterprise Applications in the Information Technology Department at Rice University. He provides technology solutions for faculty, staff, and students on campus as well as teaches new technology courses at the School of Continuing Studies. He is available for podcasting consulting, is involved in the creation of podcasts for businesses and non-profits, and has owned a technical consulting company and an audio/video recording studio.

Download Web Axe Episode 59 (Jeffrey Frey on Accessible Podcasts)
[Transcript for podcast 59]

Links from Jeffrey Frey’s Blog

Transcription and other related services

From Tom Brinck

Like myself, Tom is from Michigan but now works and lives in the Bay Area in California.

Categories
audio podcast screenreader

Podcast #58: Aural Style Sheets

Dennis and Ross explain aural style sheets, a nifty part of CSS2.

Download Web Axe Episode 58 (Aural Style Sheets)

News & Announcements

What are Aural Style Sheets?

A way of controlling speech synthesis and auditory icons with CSS2, usually through a screen reader.

H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 {
voice-family: paul;
stress: 20;
richness: 90;
cue-before: url("ping.au")
}

Supported by: Emacspeak, Fonix SpeakThis, and the Opera Browser

Benefits

  • More control over how screen readers will render your documents
  • Also beneficial for those who want your content in a mobile manor (on the road, exercising, almost podcast-esk)
  • Near future, more devices may access internet that you may want read, such as car

Example: Speak-numeral element

digits: a string of numbers is spoken as a whole number (123 = one hundred twenty-three)

continuous: numbers in a string are read successively (123 = one two three)

Elements

  • volume
  • speak
  • pause
  • cure
  • play-during
  • spacial elements (ways to have two voices appear from different areas)
  • voice character
    • speech rate
    • voice family
    • pitch
    • pitch-range
    • stress
    • richness
  • speak-punctuation
  • speak-numeral

Links

Categories
ajax podcast screenreader

Podcast #57: AJAX and Accessibility (Part 2)

Previously, Dennis and Guest Mark McKay began the discussion on nearly taboo subject of AJAX and web accessibility in Podcast #49: AJAX and Accessibility. Now in Part 2, Dennis and Ross discuss the problems and solutions in greater detail.

Download Web Axe Episode 57 (AJAX and Accessibility, Part 2)

The Problems & Solutions

  • Notifying screen readers updated content
  • For JavaScript disabled browsers, use Hijax and progressive enhancement
  • The dreaded alternative page
  • The future?

AJAX Links

News

Announcements

Categories
guidelines podcast wcag

Podcast #55: WCAG Samurai

The WCAG Samurai is an “independent group of developers convened in 2006” and headed up by Joe Clark, accessibility guru. In this podcast, Dennis and Ross discuss the WCAG Samurai’s errata to the W3C’s WCAG 1.0 web accessibility guidelines. This includes:

  • what it is and if we should use it
  • discussing the 12 main points
  • which WCAG 1.0 Priority 3 guidelines to ignore

Download Web Axe Episode 55 (WCAG Samurai)

The WCAG 1 + Samurai Guidelines

  1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content
  2. Don’t rely on colour alone
  3. Use markup and stylesheets and do so properly
  4. Clarify natural-language usage
  5. Create tables that transform gracefully
  6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully
  7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes
  8. –
  9. Design for device-independence
  10. Use interim solutions
  11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines
  12. Provide context and orientation information

Related Links

News

Categories
podcast table

Podcast 54: The Summary Attribute

By now most of us should be pretty familiar with creating an accessible data table–use a caption, TH for row and col headers, scope attribute, and the summary. In this podcast, Dennis talks about the least familiar of these techniques–the summary attribute of the table element. The summary attribute is WCAG Checkpoint 5.5 (Priority 3).

Download Web Axe Episode 54 (The Summary Attribute)

Examples of good summary text:

  • The number of employees and the foundation year of companies in Orlando, Florida, in 1988.
  • A warming trend has been observed in Cache Valley, with temperatures about 5 degrees above historical averages over the last two months.
  • This table charts the number of cups of coffee consumed by each senator, the type of coffee (decaf or regular), and whether taken with sugar.
  • Total required by pollution control standards as of January 1, 1971. Commercial category includes stores, insurance companies and banks.

Sample Code (from 456bereastreet’s Bring on the Tables):

Table 1: Company data
Company Employees Founded
ACME Inc 1000 1947
XYZ Corp 2000 1973

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