Making the GRADE: Improving Access to E-Learning. Presenters: Robert Todd and Curtis Edmonds. >> CURTIS: My name is Curtis Edmonds with the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, joined here by Robert Todd and Marsha Allen and Robert Hamburger. We're all at the center. We're part of the college of architecture at Georgia Tech. We're representing the GRADE project. GRADE is an acronym that stands for Georgia Research on Accessible Distance Education. And we are funded by the Office of Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education under a grant which provides us funding to research and apply different findings in the area of accessibility in distance education. And we're pleased to be with you here today on the southwest DBTAC webcast. >> AARON: All right, everybody, I'm back on. Curtis, thank you for introducing the topic. I had a little technical difficulty here. You've already introduced the topic. Have you introduced your co-presenter? >> CURTIS: I have mentioned their names. I haven't given anybody any biographical information yet, not knowing where you were. >> AARON: Sorry about that. My name is Aaron McCullough and I'm with the Southwest DBTAC which is also known as the Disability Law Resource Project at ILRU which of course is your sponsor for today's event. I'll be moderating the webcast but primarily sitting back and letting the presenters go forth and give you information. But I'll also be voicing your question to those presenters. Before we get started, I want to remind you about sending us questions. In order to submit a question, you can click the submit question button at the bottom of your RealOne Player screen or simply address it to webcast@ilru.org. That's webcast@ilru.org. Please send those now or at any point during the presentation. I'll pose your question to the presenters as they pause for questions. Additionally, if anyone has any technical difficulty today, as I had, please give us a call at (713)520-0232. Again, today's topic, making the GRADE, improving access to E-Learning and I'll leave it over to the presenters right now. Curtis. >> CURTIS: Okay, thank you, Aaron. Just to give you a little bit of information about the structure of the GRADE project and then I will let my other co-presenters kind of introduce themselves and talk about the issues that they want to talk about. The GRADE project, again that's Georgia Tech Research on Accessible Distance Education basically has a three track model that we're following. And we set it up this way so that we could work on different resources and different issues on a nationwide basis. The goal of the project basically is capacity building. Why is this important? Capacity building is important because no matter how much funding we get or how many people we employ, we are simply not going to be able in this project to ensure that every distance education course or module or offering or even any online education that's done through a traditional classroom format is accessible to everybody with a disability. There simply aren't enough resources available to do that. What we can do is build the capacity of people at different institutions across the country so that they can work on their campuses and in their courses as faculty members or as staff or as campus administration to make sure that distance education is accessible for all people with disabilities. The first track involves professional development. Primarily, this is done with faculty members of the it's done through our Access E-Learning course. I'm sorry, excuse me, tutorial. The Access E-Learning is available online at accesselearning.net. The Access E-Learning is a ten module tutorial that is free and is available to everyone who wants to register, and the different modules involve different areas of accessibility in distance education. Anyone can go in and take all of the tutorial or just different parts of different modules of the tutorial and get information on how to make distance education accessible for people with disabilities. For example, one of our most popular modules involves accessibility of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is a very valuable tool developed by Microsoft, part of Microsoft Office that enables people to put up presentations in a graphical format. Unfortunately, a lot of the time with PowerPoint is delivered over the web, it's not accessible for many people with disabilities. The module takes you step by step through the process showing what the access problems are for people who use screen readers or people who have -- who are blind or have low vision may experience when accessing a PowerPoint slide online. And it shows you how to make that accessible to everyone and also to make that more usable. The Access E-Learning has been available now for several months. We've had a great deal of success with that and from all across the country have been using it and giving it really rave reviews. The second part of our efforts on the second track involves distance learning at Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech has a great deal of distance education offerings, mostly in terms of engineering and technology and mathematics because that's the kind of school that Georgia Tech is; and we're working with different professors and different instructors here at Georgia Tech to make sure that their distance education offerings are accessible to all students, including students with disabilities. We have retro fitted one course in design by a professor who is the former director here at K. A. TEA. Samples of that course are available online at our website which we'll give you here. It's on aging awareness and design, and we've been really -- really worked hard to make that accessible for everyone as well. The third track involves a partnership with mayor low. You may or may not be familiar with MERLOT. It's an acronym for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. That's a very difficult acronym and they do serve Merlot wine at the conferences they have. I just thought you might want to know that. MERLOT is a database of different educational modules that can be used in distance learning. There are literally thousands of little pieces of courses and other data that are in the database. You can search that through different topics. It's things that professors and faculty members can actually add in to their courses, and we're working with them to develop voluntary standards for accessibility in these modules and to try to identify modules that are especially good best practices in terms of distance education. So that gives you a little bit of idea about our project. What I'm going to go do is go around the table here and ask each of my colleagues to say just a few words to kind of introduce themselves and who they are and the role they play in the project. >> ROBERT: Curtis, thank you very much. I'm Robert Todd, I'm a research scientist here at Georgia Tech and at CATEA. And I'm involved in this project because it actually is a synergy of a lot of interests for me. I'm a rehabilitation counselor by background and also have a degree in H. C. I. related studies, and so human computer interaction. So put those together and you might can understand why this would be something that I would find very interesting. We are moving ahead with the project. Curtis mentioned sort of the basics of what we're doing with the three areas. We're also retrofitting other courses and one we're interested in is a graduate course in fluid mechanics, which is a very interesting type of thing to make accessible to all people. And another one that we're working on is in health science. We're trying to run a gamut of different types of courses and as Curtis mentioned MERLOT is one of our partners and we're going to be trying to make that available to everybody through the MERLOT database. So a little bit of information about me and a couple of extra points about the project and I'd like to also let Marsha Allen, our web designer, introduce herself. >> MARSHA: Thank you, Robert. My name is Marsha Allen. I'm the web developer for access E-Learning, have been from the beginning of it for its design and its interaction. My background consists of -- I'm a certified therapeutic recreation specialist, and have been working in the field with people with disabilities for over 15 years. >> and last but not least here we have a G. R. A. who has worked very hard on this project and I would like to let him introduce himself as well. >> ROBERT H.: Thanks, Robert. My name is also Robert. I'm Robert Hamburger and I'm the research assistant here for the GRADE project. I do a lot of the introduction work helping out Marsha and Robert and Curtis with making some of our web resources, and I'm a graduate student and I do computer interactions with a focus on information design. So studying accessibility here has been a great pleasure. >> and Robert has been very helpful to us in putting together a lot of the technical pieces we have on our website. The technical assistance pieces are designed for people who are interested in accessibility in distance education, but don't really have the time to take any of the different modules and the tutorial. They are generally run between one and two pages. They are available off of our website this is www.catea.org/grade. You can go there and look at one of the 11 or 12 -- is it 12? I think it eye 12 technical assistance pieces which have topics like how do you make a Microsoft word document for accessible for people with disabilities? How are people who use screen readers access distance education? How do people with epilepsy access distance education, and similar topics. And those will have the answers to a lot of the questions that you may not get to have answered today. Along that line, do we have any questions so far? >> AARON: Not yet. >> CURTIS: Okay. Well, we certainly do want to encourage you to do that. You can hit the submit question button on your RealPlayer to submit questions and we can take those really at any time. One point I want to mention for folks while we're waiting for some questions to come in is that we also are working to do technical assistance so if you have specific questions, you've looked on the modules, you've looked at the fact sheets that we're referring you to and you still have questions about how to achieve some accessible distance education objective, give us a call, if you go to the website www.catea.org/grade that Curtis mentioned. You'll find contact information there and you certainly are welcome to contact us and we'll be happy to try to help you out. >> CURTIS: Another important issue -- not really issue but feature that we're going to offer as part of the GRADE program is going to be our national summit on accessible distance learning. We're going to be offering that in 2005 here in Atlanta as part of our grant program. We are going to invite people from all over the country with an interest in distance learning to come and have a discussion on how exactly we can work together to help promote some of the stuff that we're doing at GRADE, to help implement policies at different campuses on accessible distance learning, and also to kind of network and put together solutions for various distance learning products. And so we will have more information about that on the GRADE website as we go through. One important thing about our project is that we're focusing on what I like to call second generation accessibility. Those of you who are familiar with web accessibility know that making HTML pages, making Internet pages accessible to people with disabilities is something that we -- by this point in time know a great deal about. People who use screen readers, of course, typically have problems utilizing a lot of the elements that people put in to different HTML pages, whether that's graphics, whether that's tables, whether that's forms or what have you. And there are ways to make each of those accessible. And if you look closely at the federal Section 508 guidelines which are found online at Section 508.gov, or the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines that were put together by the Worldwide Web Consortium, and that's at www.w3c.org/wai. If you look at those guidelines, there are -- it's very clear what needs to be done to make HTML accessible. However, as we know, and especially in distance education, there is a lot of information that's available that's not offered in an HTML format. And there really aren't the support in terms of guidelines, in terms of instructions, in terms of techniques to make those types of things accessible. And we're talking here about many of the things that we touch on in the access E-Learning course. This could be a PowerPoint presentation. This could be a Microsoft Word document. This could be a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. This could be a Flash -- a Macromedia Flash application or animation. And there are all of these types of different platforms that people can use to deliver content over the web that do not involve HTML. And these need to be accessible to people with disabilities as well. We have very good high tech up to date standards in terms of Section 508, and in terms of the W. 36c WAI standards, these are simply not available for what we can call second generation items such as Word or Flash or PowerPoint. And again, these are typically offered in distance education, but they can also be offered in other educational and other commercial formats. So what we are focusing on is not just classic HTML web accessibility, but also on other forms of accessibility. And there are different things that you have to do to make a PowerPoint slide accessible that you wouldn't necessarily have to do in an HTML environment. >> and Curtis, not only that, among the modules that we have on access E-Learning to give you a quick run down. If you start with No. 1, disabilities, for people who don't have any real understanding of what some of the issues could be, say a professor or teacher who knows that he or she will have a course with 30 students, doesn't know who to expect, that would be an interesting place for them to start because it might get them understanding what the issues could come up in the course proactively. Additionally, that they know they have a student who has some form of disability, then the disability module will give a breakdown of some of the most common problems encountered by individuals either with sensory, cognitive, physical, motor disabilities that can affect their access to these second generation and HTML-based online learning resources. So that's module No. 1. No. 2 is access planning. One thing that we discovered when we were working on this proposal for this project and then afterwards even more so is that many people would be very interested in knowing how to make a product such as Microsoft office products or say video Flash, Word PDF modules, any of those accessible, but what they don't know how to do is to plan for the whole package. How do they make a course or how do they make a module for a course, what kind of resources do they need to look for in their own university or college settings. What do they need to think of if they want to modularize it so they can put more effort into certain efforts of the materials than others. The module No. 2 on access planning covers that and tries to direct people to how to get started in the first place. The other modules are for Microsoft PowerPoint, for Word, for Excel. There is one for video, because there are many issues with online video for distance education, especially for individuals with sensory impairments. For Flash because once again frequently used in online education and in PDF, acrobat F. D. F. format, very popular in online education and then the last two, 9 and 10 are for HTML. 9 is for sort of the beginning HTML or the basics and module No. 10 is for those interested on focusing on getting what they can out of scripts and java. So in a nutshell those are the topics. Some of the information that might be useful to know about the modules is that they are quite extensive. They range anywhere from an hour or two for completion up to some of them ten hours if you want to go through all of the material. You can take what you want and leave it -- leave the rest or you can go through all of the materials. And as I say, they are extensive and they also have labs as a part of them that show you step by step how to do the work. These files we've made accessible both in P. C. and Macintosh format so we can reach as many people as possible. And actually I think I'm rambling now and so why don't I wait and see if there are any questions. >> AARON: We have a question on -- well, we have a request actually that you repeat the E-Learning sites. >> sure, it's www.accesselearning.net. >> AARON: and we have a question about Internet audio sessions. >> okay. >> AARON: Essentially -- well, I'll read it verbatim actually. It's pretty complicated. This writer -- let's see, my students enjoy Internet class sessions such as those available on pal talk. We can have an audio class session and I can pose various items in a browser window such as web pages and PowerPoint slides. Pal talk is said to be accessible to screen readers though I have not discussed this with anyone using jaws or window eyes. An alternative product by talking communities is accessible to screen readers in that a couple of developers for this product are themselves jaws users. The question is as follows: What strategies have been used to include individuals with sensory impairment in these Internet audio sessions? I have not as yet had a person with a hearing impairment in my live Internet discussions and my initial approach would be to have a transcriptionist from one of the captioning companies to sit in the session and transcribe the session live in a private text window. the cost would be approximately 100 per hour for the transcriptionist. The person with the hearing impairment would then pose their questions or comments in a text window which would be available to all class members. With jaws or window eyes, there are no -- there is no problem accessing the Internet window program if I use iVocalize program provided by talking communities. Are there other products which are easier to use for individuals with hearing or vision impairments? >> the only other thing I could think to do is if the transcriptist is going to be really prohibitively expensive, would be to use something like dragon dictate which would be a voice recognition program. The problem with that is that the voice recognition programs aren't really quite sophisticated enough at this point in time to really say, yeah, this is something that you should always really want to use. I think that it's something that could be experimented with and certainly could be tested as a possible solution and obviously it's going to be a bit cheaper to have dragon dictate do it. The problem with that is you really run the risk, especially in a classroom where you're using a lot of technical jargon that the dragon dictate simply isn't going to answer. When I was in law school, I had a class on wheels. We had a student who was deaf participating and there was some sessions where they were using so many different Latin phrases that the sign language interpreter had a very hard time keeping up because she had to keep putting in all this stuff about the (Inaudible) doctrine and different case names and all that. It was just very, very difficult. I spent more time watching the interpreter than I did listening to the professors in some classes because she was having to finger spell everything and it was really annoying and so for a -- you know, a really technical program I think that is a voice recognition program would probably not be very helpful. >> and I'd just like to throw in to that our experience we're having now with the retrofitting for the fluid mechanics course is nothing more than corroboration of what Curtis is telling us. It's difficult to expect Dragon Dictate to understand the complicated formulae for engineering and physics and mathematics. Unfortunately, it's not a foolproof answer. >> AARON: We just got a rush of other questions in. Are you guys prepared to take a few? >> we're prepared. >> AARON: Can you address the accessibility of course management systems such as web C. T. and black board assuming accessible content is loaded into a class, how accessible is the final result, navigation, communication tools, et cetera? >> well, that's not something that we have really taken a close look at simply because of the nature of our course. What we have kind of based this on is that we know that web C. T. and black board have people that are accessibility specialists. We know that they are aware of the issues and we also know that there are people who have expressed some severe problems in accessing the different CMS systems. So we have approached this two ways: First of all, we're really looking at this from a faculty point of view. Because an individual faculty member is simply just going to use the CMS that their campus has already purchased and they need to be as responsible as they can be to make sure that they are putting out content within the CMS shell as accessible as possible. The second thing that we've done in each of the modules you will find information that is defined for a faculty member, one that's using black board and one that's using web C. T. and explain to them exactly what they need to do and the steps they need to take to put in the accessible content within their CMS systems. And the third thing I would have to say is that black board and web C. T. are really starting to get competition. The University of Toronto has developed a CMS program and I cannot for the life of me remember the name of it. I think it's A. tutor or is that -- no, it's not A. tutor. A-Prompt is their HTML accessibility tool, but it's the snow -- and I can't remember what the acronym stands for, special needs operating in windows, something like that, at the University of Toronto and they have what they claim is a fully accessible CMS. And of course black board and web C. T. make that same claim in terms of 508 compliance. But yeah, we recognize that the CMS systems are not perfect. There are people who are going to experience certain accessibility problems. Our focus is on the faculty to make sure that the content that they plug in to black board or web C. T. or whatever system that they have is as accessible as possible. >> MARSHA: and let me add, too, Curtis, that I believe you are correct that it is A. tutor. They also have produced an accessible task, too, that is available. Additionally, there is a handbook available that Georgia State University put out on web C. T. which includes the components of accessibility in that handbook. >> AARON: Okay, we have an additional question regarding PowerPoint. >> CURTIS: Okay. >> AARON: the question goes most of the PowerPoint educational modules focuses on converting it to HTML, but how does that help the user who needs to receive and edit it in PowerPoint? >> CURTIS: How does it help the user to -- say that one more time. >> AARON: Most PowerPoint education modules focus on converting PowerPoint to HTML. How does that help the user who needs to receive the PowerPoint file and edit it in PowerPoint? >> CURTIS: Okay, mostly what we're focused on in the module is a situation where the educator has a final PowerPoint and that's being given to the student to view. If you're giving a student a PowerPoint to edit that's obviously a different story. The main thing that you would want to look at in terms of having a student edit a PowerPoint is making sure that any visuals that you've used in PowerPoint are labeled properly and there is a way in which we show people how to do that in the module to label the different images in PowerPoint the same way you would use an off tag, if you're familiar with that, in HTML. And certainly it's a requirement that students have access to whatever version of PowerPoint, I think just posting a PowerPoint in that case is just going to be fine. You just need to make sure that as the student has PowerPoint, it's going to be able to use it, that they understand what they -- what kind of graphics you're using and what they represent. >> MARSHA: and also, Curtis, you want to make sure that -- that any time in PowerPoint if you use the text tool on the slides, that that information does not appear in the outline in the left hand part of PowerPoint. So you want to make sure not to use the text tools, there by making sure any information you put on the slide will be listed in the outline. >> AARON: All right. Those are all the questions that we have at the moment, but they are coming in regularly. So -- >> how about we tell you while we're waiting for that a little bit about the fact sheets that we mentioned earlier because some questions we might get here you might find out that we have fact sheets that address them and we'd be happy to make sure you get access to those. The ones that we actually have currently published -- we're working on others -- number 1, how do student who are deaf or hard of hearing access online distance education? No. 2, how do students who are blind or have low vision access online distance education? As you can see, these are pretty broad that's why we call them fact sheets. They are just the facts. No. 3, how do students with seeds our disorders access online distance Ed? No. 4, what laws and rulings impact the accessibility of online distance Ed? No. 5, what methods can faculty members use to post PowerPoint presentations to online distance Ed? We created this one because it's by far the most popular and requested one. No. 6, creating an accessible HTML file from a PowerPoint presentation. And once again an answer to a lot of questions we had on that very topic we created a fact sheet. No. 7, describing graphic files for students with visual impairments. We realize a lot of people have questions knowing how to do it appropriately. It's one thing to post an image and then make a text comment off the top of your head, but if it's another to do it appropriately so that it is understandable to the maximum number of people. No. 8, making Adobe PDF files accessible. Again, a very important topic for us since a lot of educators like to use that format. No. 9, introduction to HTML accessibility for those who want a quick and dirty on how to get an HTML page up. That would be appropriate. And lastly, an introduction to cascading style sheets so those who want to go a little further can at least get started using CSS to make their work more accessible. >> And we have one on Microsoft Word, also, No. 11. >> which is not up just yet. >> but it will be soon. >> we've also got a request to do one on accessible E-mail and we'll start with that, getting that work started on that hopefully this week. Aaron, do you have any questions for us? You've been very quiet which is not like you. >> AARON: Well, you know, I'm paying you back. I'm trying to intercept some questions. We do have a request that you could go into detail on -- some detail on making PowerPoint presentations accessible. If you could sort of detail maybe a little more what the fact sheet would cover. >> CURTIS: Okay, let's do that and actually I could either work with the module here and I might get bogged down do that so I will start with the fact sheet. Let's see, I managed to misplace that one and I had them all in front of me about two minutes ago. All right, so some of the things that we talk about in the module that -- basically there are five ways you can post a PowerPoint presentation to a distance education platform. You can post it as is in PowerPoint. We can -- we've told you and some of you may well know that's a problem, especially for individuals with visual impairments. You can utilize the save as HTML feature built into PowerPoint. You may have noticed that right there in PowerPoint itself there is a save as HTML feature, but there are problems with that and you get some code that is extremely scary. Something you might want to use on Halloween, I guess, if all else fails and can cause some real problems for accessibility. You can, three, save the PowerPoint presentation in a rich text format file. Four, use another software tool to facilitate the conversion from PowerPoint to something usually an accessible HTML format and there are tools to do that. Then lastly, manually create an HTML document from scratch and they all have advantages and disadvantages. The PowerPoint format is the easiest way of doing it, but number one, the student has to have either PowerPoint itself, the application or the PowerPoint viewer installed to be able to view it. Now the viewer is free, but on the other hand, it's still going to display in a graphical format. The student -- especially those who are blind or have low vision are not going to be able to access those directly. Also presentations stored in the native PowerPoint format can be very large. If you do the save as HTML version, which is available from your PowerPoint application, it can be viewed by anyone using the Internet kind of quick and easy way to do it, however, it also utilizes a very complex frame set that can be difficult to navigate for many students. Again, especially those with blindness or low vision but also many with mobility impairments, particularly say someone who was using a mouse stick, for instance, to do navigation. That's time-consuming. Pair. >> MARSHA: Can I add, Robert, that the save as HTML, the other issue with it is it does not render the same in all browsers. If someone is looking at it in Internet Explorer, they may be okay, but if they look at it with Netscape Navigator or another browser the content is often not readable. >> exactly. >> another way of doing it that I mentioned was to save as a rich text format file, and you can do that from PowerPoint. It allows you to expert in RTF or rich text format but there is a difficulty here, you can save it by -- the file by copying the outline and pacing it into a word processor in rich text format and that's readily usable by students with disabilities who can use Microsoft Word or Word Pad and other word processing software to access it, but the difficulty there does not transfer all the information that's available in the PowerPoint file. So you're not really giving an equivalent access to the person because they're getting an entirely different product when you do this. The resulting RTF file doesn't contain any tables, graphics, charts, any transitions which frankly I would argue is probably a good thing, but others would fight me on that one. Multimedia files, text boxes, that kind of thing, so when you're doing RTF you're losing a lot of information. There are tools that can facilitate conversion, wizards that can do this. We have those in our fact sheets and you can go online or request them from us and we'll be happy to send them to you and the third party tools do -- a better or worse job depending on which one you choose; but some of them have run time errors, many of them are a little bit buggy and I haven't seen one yet that will actually produce with the touch of a button an actual highest level priority, priority 3, WCAG guideline accessible product. There is one from -- I believe the one by the University of Illinois -- Wisconsin is the close one there that we've tested, but still a couple of little errors in there and so it's still not quite as simple as clicking a button. It is the Illinois one. So we're going back and forth here, but there are some that are good. You look on the fact sheet and there is the possibility that there are some quicker but not 100 percent. The one we actually recommend is still the most difficult one but the most sure and you'll see this if you look at or module is creating a native HTML file created from scratch to be accessible to everybody. There is more than one way to do it. You can create an entire PowerPoint presentation and make it into one large HTML page that can be easily searched and made fully accessible or you can separate each one of these slides into different pages and this is the -- what we generally recommend for those who want the ultimate in accessibility. A little more time, but we try to teach folks in the modules how to do it as quickly as possible. >> MARSHA: and as far as the native HTML files, we also do provide a template for that. So once you've done it once, you can just copy and pace that template to create any PowerPoint presentation from that. >> and the native HTML files also helpful in terms of when you add in different things to PowerPoint, the automatic program at the University of Illinois, for example, works very well if you just have a text only PowerPoint. A lot of PowerPoints are text only, but it's also a common for people to put in charts and graphs and pictures and movies and sound clips and all sorts of other stuff in their PowerPoint presentations and there really isn't an automatic program that's going to pick up on everything like that. So creating a native HTML file is the easiest way to make sure that you're actually putting everything in there making sure that people with disabilities have the same experience. The other thing is that the native HTML file contains the text of the presentation in a way that the regular PowerPoint doesn't in terms of being searchable and that's true if you have a very long PowerPoint file and you're looking just for one slide, maybe with one word, well, if it's accessible, you can actually use the search function in your browser to search through that page and find the exact file that you're looking for, the exact slide that you're looking for. >> AARON: Guys, I had a question actually. Does your module or do any of your modules deal with best practices, not just the technical aspect of making distance education accessible? I think for example, you know, chat seems fairly typical as part of distance education setup and often that presents problems for people with a wide variety of disabilities. I mean, do you offer advice for somebody structuring -- structuring an educational -- or I guess structuring a web-based educational module from the ground up on what maybe to avoid? >> actually, I'm glad you asked that. That's something that's part of our project that we are working on now. In the first place, if you look on Access E-Learning, the modules, you'll see that modules one and two will point in the direction of what you're talking about. The two modules on disabilities in general and how to plan to make a module. We kind of get started in that way, but what we're doing now is trying to collect information on best practices or one of the individuals that I've talked to who is very interested in this with us and trying to share information said, you know, Robert, I can't find any best practices yet, if I can just find some okay practices, I'd be happy and that's something we're compiling at this point. I just attended a summit recently for people all over the country who were interested in policy and best practices and we're staying in touch and working to share information with each other on accessible distance learning. We're working on that one is the short answer. We're going to be able to provide more of that information as we've gone through retrofitting these courses that we're still in process on. Definitely in the industrial design, the aging awareness course that we retro fitted, we really just need to have the time to sit down and write up some of the practices that came out of that as good and bad and the same thing is very true of the fluid mechanics course we're working on and the health science course. That last one, by way, is meant to be done online in a group format. So that's an entirely new venture for us that we're going to start undertaking this summer and all of this information we're going to get on the website as best practices and you're just going to have to wait for that one a little bit. We are still finding that one like everybody else. >> I'm actually working on one myself just so I know what I'm talking about. Working on a module, not a course really, because I don't actually get to teach, but a module about how the federal court system works, and that's incorporating some PowerPoint. It's incorporating some very difficult graphics, and we're just trying to figure out in terms of planning what you have to plan for and how you decide to make different parts of the module accessible. I'm hoping that that will be available in August and it will be linked also off of our website when that's completed. >> AARON: We actually have a question about the health science course. They are wanting you to hold forth a little on the specifics of how you would make the graphics the diagrams accessible to the visually impaired. >> okay, in that course and this is one we're actually about to begin. I haven't gotten the raw material on this one; but as I understand it, we are working with the professor who teaches the course. As I understand it, she herself is going to provide us with all of the alternative text for every one of the images, and she's interested in this being presented primarily as an HTML-based course, and so in that sense it's not that difficult a problem. She gives us the text. We decide how much of it gets to be simple ALT text for the image and how much of it gets to be a D. link or some other kind of link that takes you to a more complex information. But in this case we're working very closely with the professor to give us all of the alternates for the charts, graphs -- it's not a heavy course in animations in this case. The one we've done on fluid mechanics has been the big challenge in terms of that. And there, too, a great deal of it is working closely with the professor so you know what the professor means by the graphs and the charts and you don't make it up yourself. If I looked at that information in fluid mechanics and I had to give you the alternative text that would be a disaster, I promise you because I know nothing about it. But in this case it comes down to working closely with the professor and having them be willing to describe what they want to us for each of those images. >> AARON: We've received some questions about specific products mentioning again both web C. T. and black board. And in accessibility. Would you recommend that they use those two products, that they contact the technical assistance staff with web C. T. and black board? >> why, very much so. Web C. T. and black board have people on staff who just do accessibility, and I don't have their names or their titles handy. I know I've met representatives from both as well as E-college and I know that they have people who just handle accessibility for those platforms and that would be really the best place to go. pair as far as I know both of them have information on accessibility up on their websites as well and that would be a good place to start researching those systems. >> AARON: Okay, that's all the questions that I have at the moment, guys. Unless you guys have something additional -- or some additional content, we can call it closed? >> well, just a little bit -- also I keep in mind that we are resource that is available for anyone in higher Ed who is interested in distance learning. We are also speaking at a lot of different conferences, so I just spoke at a regional Edu-college this week and we have presentations coming up at the salt conference in Washington D. C. and the Sloan C. conference in Orlando this fall. Another resource that's available is your regional Disability and Business Technical Assistance Center. I work for the Southeast DBTAC which covers an eight state region in the southeast area and you can get technical assistance in distance education, online education or any other type of educational I. T. access in both secondary and post-secondary as well as elementary, postgraduate, whatever education by calling your regional DBTAC at 800-949-4232. You can find them at ada.org. >> AARON: We actually got one question that is slipping in if you guys want to take it. The question about graphics again, ALT text is only part of it. Again, it comes down to best practices. Do you have idea on how to design graphics for accessibility? >> I'm going hmmm right now because I don't know if that will come over the phone because we are thinking that one through. This is like a cheap answer, but it really is the true one. If you know when you create the graphic that you're going to have to describe this in text as well, or if it's an animation, then you will create it more effectively for these purposes. The general problem begins when people, you know, they play around and they think visually and they do something that's kind of cute or fun with it and then they realize after the fact, oh, I never realized I was going to have to explain this to anyone. So I think as long as you understand it from the very beginning that you're going to have to read it out to someone, one thing I told people to do in teaching accessible HTML design is take your graphic, number one, print it out in black and white first to see if you've got a good contrast and so on and if you're starting with the right contrast and colors, but secondly don't let someone look at it but talk to them about it and tell them what it is and see if they get it the first time through. If they can do that you may be on the right track if it's understandable that way. That's the method that I tell people when they are creating accessible web pages, make sure you can describe the graphics to someone who can't see it and just turn to one of your coworkers or friends to do that. Anybody else here want to chime in on this one? >> MARSHA: I have two other points to add to what you said though, Robert. Make sure that this image is being used to convey information. That's when you real -- you know, that's a personal point of view, but if you have an image that is more decorative and you do not necessarily need to describe it as far as best practices go. The other thing is that if you have an image that is just being used to hold space, to hold your page together, make sure that when you use that ALT tag which is what is used in HTML to produce the accessible graphics, that it goes ALT equals quote, quote, without any space between it. That will enable screen readers to skip over it. If you put a space in there, what they hear is space every time they hit that or if you put something like spacer, then that's what they hear is spacer. So that's a best practice for not -- for decorative or spacer images. >> and also keep in mind that your ALT tag only has 255 characters. If you've got an image that uses an awful, awful lot of information, you may want to consider a D. link. What a D. link is it follows the picture. It is a letter D. The D. is linked to another page and that page provides a longer description of the graphic. It's something that you can find examples on in access E-Learning. It's something we use frequently. >> MARSHA: I was going to add one other thing. When you're describing it, you don't want to say this is an image of. They know it's an image. You know, you could say, you know, a photograph if you wanted to be -- but it's not necessary to say this is an image of or a photograph of. You want to literally describe the image. >> we actually have a fact sheet on writing the various different types of graphic files. One thing that we have here is an example that is the -- it's a photograph from the NASA website. I like using the NASA website because they don't have copyright restrictions. They have a group portrait of the original seven Mercury astronauts, and we've got examples of different ways that you could use that picture if you were putting it into an HTML format. The long description that NASA uses says front row, left to right, Walter -- various astronaut names -- and it's just very, very long and it's a lot more information than you may need. Whereas if you just hit astronauts, that doesn't quite have the same information. Yes, they are all astronauts, but which astronauts are they? So it's just a question of using your judgment and making sure you're using the actual right language to make sure that the graphics and the ALT text convey the same information. >> and all of that we focus mainly on HTML as we've answered this, but similarly if you're working with Word or one of these other second generation products we've discussed. >> MARSHA: and then the one other thing that just to clarify, too, that you will need to provide along description for charts, graphs, complex images, photographs, those things do need -- will need to provide the long description. >> AARON: We have two additional questions. One asks for you to discuss mass M. L. and how it's interpreted by screen readers and other products. >> MARSHA: Can you repeat the question? >> AARON: It says tell us about mass M. L, the questioner has heard of it but want to know how it is interpreted by screen readers and other products. >> MARSHA: Are you saying mass? >> AARON: Mass M. L, I believe they may be referring to X. M. L. >> I wish we had our partners with IDET Communications here and who are working on the fluid mechanics course for us. And they probably have the answer to this one. I don't, and I don't know that we do at the moment here in the room unfortunately, no, I'm afraid to say. >> AARON: and just a note to the callers that are asking questions that are not particularly related exactly related to the topic or that we are unable to answer, we'll endeavor to E-mail you back with either the right answer or a contact to the person or persons with the right answer. The second question may be along the same line. This question relates to the use of CSS information on HTML. Are you guys familiar with that? >> yes, and we actually have a fact sheet on that. CSS is cascading style sheet. What a style sheet is, is it is a piece of text that attaches to your HTML documents. The great thing about a style sheet is that a style sheet can be -- you can use one style sheet for hundreds or thousands of different HTML pages. What a style sheet does is it contains the information about font size for different classes of text or color or background or whether something is italicized or not or what the margins are, what position it should be on the page. The really good thing about CSS and accessible design is that you can use CSS to allow users to create their own style sheet and format that page using that style sheet. So if someone has a learning disability and sees things best with black text on a pink background, which may be possible for some people, they can set up their own CSS file to have every page show up in that format. And that's -- that's going to be great for them because they're going to be able to design that page exactly the way that they want to do it. The problem with CSS is that you need to make sure -- and this is in both the 508 and the W. 3c is that your page renders just as well with CSS as it does without CSS And you can use the opera browser or a text only browser to kind of take away the CSS away from that website to make sure that someone who has an older browser that doesn't support CSS or a text only browser, to make sure that they're going to be able to use it as well. >> can I add -- >> yes, you can. >> right now there are two different levels of CSS and first of all the CSS 1 is attributed to font and color attributes while CSS 2 is attributed to space and positioning. It's generally considered that CSS 1 is generally considered accessible whereas -- like Curtis was saying, the CSS 2 where you're using style sheets to position elements on the screen in different places, it really comes down to turning off the style sheets and seeing if it still has a logical flow order. >> MARSHA: Two other things about -- two other quick points about CSS, too, is that whenever you're creating a CSS, you want to make sure that like for font sides ordinary any type of size elements that you want to use a percentage. This will enable the web page or the text sides to be adjustable to the user preferences. If I set my font size at 10, if I needed it to be larger, it would not adjust because I have set it at 10. So you would want to use it like 10 percent. >> and as the result of CSS being so prevalent, what the W3C has done, they are the Worldwide Web Consortium and they in charge of what HTML is, they have said okay from now on don't use the font tag or the B. tag which was the tag for bold, or the I. tag. That used to be very common in HTML and they are saying you should do all of that in CSS So if you're using Wave or another validator to check your HTML, a lot of times those tags will show up and it's really more -- there are other tags you can use that do the same thing, and W3C really wants you to do that. >> MARSHA: and deprecated is just a fancy term that is no longer in use or something that is only supported by a limited number of browsers. The W3C, as Curtis mentioned, also does offer a free online service where you can validate that your CSS conforms to the standards. They also do offer a validator to make sure that your HTML conforms to the standards. >> AARON: Well, actually most of the questions that -- or actually all the questions we're getting in now relate specifically to -- about this scenario. I have some technical difficulties where I missed 15 minutes. Can you repeat the websites where your fact sheets are available and any other websites that would be helpful? >> sure. The access E-Learning website is www.accesselearning.net. And then the website is www.catea.org/grade and you can E-mail us at aelcourse@catea.org. >> AARON: Okay, actually you may want to repeat those again. I'm not sure how our captioner is dealing with some of those websites. So if you can give us those again. >> sure, not a problem. Www.accesselearning.net. Www.catea.org/grade. And aelcourse@catea.org. >> AARON: All right. Let's see. What do you guys say -- why don't we call it closed and any other issue you guys want to cover? >> just one thing. We welcome people to go to access E-Learning.net and log on and take a look at it and give us any comments you have. We've valuations that can be done from the pages and we appreciate any feedback that we can get. >> AARON: Now, I want to assure everybody that as some of your questions of bottlenecked in our E-mail, we will get back with you individually and again answer your questions or send you links or contact information. In addition, this webcast and the next couple of days will be archived so I encourage those who maybe missed a portion of it to revisit it in the future. I do want to thank all of our speakers and they could give us their names again. >> sure, Curtis Edmonds. >> Robert Todd. >> marshal Allen. >> and Robert Hamburger. >> AARON: Again, thank you all. I hope everybody has had a good time and learned a great deal from today's webcast. Again, you know, it will be archived as quickly as we can do that and I encourage you to check it out as well as all of the other archived webcasts. We do have a number of IT-based webcasts already archived. I want to acknowledge NIDRR who funds -- who is the funding host for today's program providing our grant at the Disability Law Resource Project, the Southwest DBTAC. If anybody has any questions, we again want you to -- encourage you to call our 800 number, 1-800-949-4232. That's good nationwide. For our international listeners, sorry. You'll have to call us directly at (713)520-0232. I also wanted to thank the others who have mad today possible, the ILRU webcast team: Marj Gordon, Sharon Finney, Dawn Heinsohn, Vinh Nguyen, Rachel Kosoy, who I'm filling in for today. Albeit somewhat shabbily by comparison. John Searle who is filling in for Rob Dickehuth, our technical guru, and of course as always, Marie Bryant our realtime captioner who has put up with giving websites, new names and speaking quickly. Everybody have a good day and thank you for your time.