Maryland Department of Disabilities
Mar 19th, 2015 by MDTAP Blog
Equipment Link has an exciting new look! Please check it out at www.equipmentlink.org
And here are some of the newest items listed –
Mobility, Seating, Positioning
Speech Communication
Daily Living
Mar 18th, 2015 by MDTAP Blog
Web Accessibility and SEO
Web accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO) are both about getting relevant content to users. Accessible content and search engine optimized content are both machine readable. Accessibility and SEO best practices are closely aligned. Proper alternative text for images, good heading structure, descriptive link text, descriptive and succinct page titles, ensuring keyboard accessibility, providing captions and transcripts, identifying the language of the page, using text instead of images when possible, providing clear and consistent navigation and page structure, and several other best practices help provide accessible and search engine friendly content.
Mar 17th, 2015 by MDTAP Blog
CSUN 2015
Contributed by Joel Zimba, Special Projects Coordinator, MDTAP
During the first week of March, MDTAP staff attended the 30th Annual International Conference on People with Disabilities. Everyone in the know seems to simply call it “CSUN,” referring to Cal State North Ridge.
CSUN brings together thousands of participants from around the world. It would be impossible to attend all of the hundreds of conference sessions, and nearly impossible to explore the vast exhibit hall. CSUN becomes an overwhelming “choose your own adventure” experience.
Each of the conference tracks could easily be their own separate conference. Policy and legal covers international standards all the way down to court rulings and new agency policies. Education might acquaint you with the challenges of new standardized testing or new approaches for teaching math to blind college students. Then there is technology, which includes the latest offerings from assistive technology vendors to Microsoft introducing the new accessibility features of Windows 10. There is more than enough for everyone and then some.
Of the vast array of exhibits, three quarters of them featured vision-related assistive technology. Every vendor had something newer, smaller or faster. That said, there are certainly emerging trends. Products from book readers to glasses that are sprouting cameras which can read printed text or even recognize faces. Everything is going mobile and connecting to the cloud. In short, many of the technologies we have mentioned on the MDTAP BLOG, “Where It’s AT,” are maturing into products that are making their way to market.
Perhaps the most valuable part of CSUN is rubbing elbows with the best and brightest in nearly all fields related to disabilities. I have no doubt many of the projects and products discussed at this year’s CSUN were first imagined during an after-hours discussion in previous years.
In the future, I might demonstrate a device in our Assistive Technology library which I first saw at CSUN. Perhaps I discussed it’s pros and cons with the engineers. And my feedback may have been useful in shaping the final product. That’s the AT life cycle. It starts, in the early Spring, far away from the ice and snow, at CSUN.
Mar 16th, 2015 by MDTAP Blog
In July 2014, the NLM Family Foundation and The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University co-sponsored a special one-day workshop, “Harnessing Technology to Improve the Lives of People with Autism” at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the potential of adaptive technology to open up for persons with autism new avenues for acquiring knowledge, improving social communication, and achieving a greater degree of independence and control over their lives. Topics included an introduction to personal health informatics and personalizing autism technology, examination of the use of avatars to engage individuals in learning how to control intended movements and speech production, employment opportunities and vocational training programs for those with ASD, consideration of the potential of the iPad and other mobile technologies to support communication and inclusion, and a computational behavioral science approach to developing innovative technologies to enhance research and practice with individuals on the spectrum.
A summary of the presentations and discussions which took place at the workshop can be viewed on the Foundation’s website: http://www.nlmfoundation.org/documents/NLMFFBrandeis2014TechnologyandAutism.pdf
Mar 11th, 2015 by MDTAP Blog
Requiring JavaScript
Some advanced web applications would not be possible without JavaScript. Both Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 allow JavaScript to be required so long as the JavaScript content and interactions are compliant and accessible. Whether you should require JavaScript is not really an accessibility question. It is a general usability question. Some users (most users indicate less than 2%), regardless of disability, may have JavaScript disabled. When possible, the functionality should be available without requiring JavaScript. When this is not possible, the functionality should fail gracefully (i.e., inform the user that JavaScript is required).
It is a common misconception that screen readers to not support JavaScript or that users with disabilities always disable JavaScript. The approach to accessibility is then to only ensure that the non-JavaScript version or fallback content is accessible. A screen reader user survey found that 98.6% of respondents had JavaScript enabled, meaning that in this case, nearly all screen reader users would not get the accessible fallback but would instead get the inaccessible scripted content. In order to be compliant and accessible, all scripted content and functionality must be accessible.
Mar 10th, 2015 by MDTAP Blog
Do you use Twitter? Do you use it for work? If so, there are some key actions you can take to ensure that the content you’re tweeting is accessible. Check out our tips: Twitter
Got questions about social media and accessibility? Send questions to mdtap@mdtap.org – we just might be able to answer them.
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