Last you read here, Access Ability was going into stealth mode while I took a few days to examine a university web site for accessibility. Unfortunately, that task ran longer than I had anticipated and hence, it has been more than two weeks since I’ve posted anything here.
Well, to quote an old cliché…”I’m back!”
I feel that it would also be most appropriate to toss out some related links to the very subject that was the cause for my absence, web accessibility. Maybe it was coincidence or just plain karma, but there was an abundance of accessibility related news in the last two weeks. Go figure.
In an interesting undertaking, a digital instructional design professional at Kansas State University is taking a first-hand look at using assistive technology to access technology dependent classes. In the
Instructional Design Open Studio blog,
on the May 17 post titled Accessibility in eLearning, this person writes that (s)he is taking two versions of the same class, one will be online and the other on-campus, but both are mediated via technology, which the user is going to access with assistive technology and blog the experience.
I hope the site’s author will try to use JAWS to access the information and see the navigation headaches that the blog's employed Flash feature creates. With JAWS, they might also notice the indication of headings on each and every line of the posts in that Flash presentation. It is just a guess, but I don’t think that the user intended each line to be noted as a heading.
Nonetheless, the effort to take the classes with assistive technology by somebody who is not usually an AT user is a good and worthwhile effort and I commend the undertaking. I’ll be interested to see what the findings are.
In another recent finding, I noticed that on
Duff Johnson’s PDF Perspective,
A blog targeting the production of pdf documents, there was the May 14 post about the recent AGI Acrobat PDF Conference. In it, the writer discusses how he worked to make accessible pdf production interesting. He also offers a download of his presentation. Of course, it is in pdf format!
I have read a previous post by Duff Johnson on that blog concerning accessibility and have it bookmarked as a site for research. It is good to see professionals in the production world continue to take note of the importance of accessibility.
If you are interacting with a web developer about accessibility and the discussion of web applications versus web pages has ever come up, you may be interested in what
Christian Heilmann wrote in his May 20 post, titled How to Make Your Web Applications Accessible – The Human Way.
In that piece, Heilmann shoots down what is apparently a common developer’s defense that what they have created is a web application, not a web page. Heilmann asserts that “web applications should be more accessible than web sites.”
I like the logic in that statement. Now, if we can just get the developers to buy into it. Keep pushing, Christian!
Finally, in keeping with my personal philosophy of not griping without offering solution, I present the following information for authoring accessible web content. There is a review of
Immediacy CMS
on the latest pages of
IT-Director.com
In this review, Peter Abrahams says that Immediacy is an easy to use content creation tool which creates both accessible content and compliant code.
He adds that, “Immediacy provide a variety of plug-ins to provide specific website functionality; one of these is an accessibility plug-in. This plug-in enables a user to change the overall text size and the background-foreground colour combinations these changes can be important to people with visual impairments or dyslexia.”
He presents a specific list of qualities that the software gives that makes content creation sound easy to do.
Additionally, the IT-Director.com site also has other helpful and informative links concerning accessibility. In particular, there is a link on the latest update on the review of web accessibility 2.0.
Now that I’m back, I’ll soon be posting more regularly. Thanks to all of you that have maintained a vigil on this site.
Showing posts with label PDF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PDF. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
PDF Equalizer makes Google Books accessible
You’ve got to hand it to the folks at
Premiere Assistive Technology
as they’ve made inroads for accessibility once again.
According to a press release for PDF Equalizer, it is easy to understand the powerful functionality of this latest offering from Premiere Assistive Technology.
From the press release:
“PDF Equalizer is a tool that can open and read aloud PDF Files in their original format without any required file conversion. It is designed so that individuals who use electronic documents can have the true "equal access" to those who use the printed version, plus a few extras. PDF Equalizer allows individuals to select and control what is being read aloud as simply as using your mouse to select the text to be read. If listening to audio of the text is beneficial to you, PDF Equalizer can also turn a PDF Document into MP3 files that individuals can listen to on their MP3/MP4 players. PDF Equalizer can convert each PDF page into a separate MP3 file so it is easy to navigate or create a playlist of the pages you want to hear.”
“PDF Equalizer is a "must have" tool for those who take distant learning classes. The superior note taking capability in PDF Equalizer is unmatched. Notes are automatically synchronized with the PDF page to help keep them organized. At any time, the user can extract all notes into a single Microsoft Word document. If you have too much to read and need to condense the amount of material, use the powerful built-in "content summarization" feature. You can summarize a single topic or an entire book. If you can't find a publication in your native language, don't worry, the translation feature built into PDF Equalizer can translate text on the fly. You can also imbed hyperlinks for direct access to the Internet and there is an integrated dictionary that allows you to immediately lookup definitions.”
This useful piece of assistive technology does more than just make access to pdf documents easy. It also makes
Google Books
Accessible. This feature alone makes the PDF Equalizer's functionality stand out alone in the field of assistive technology. No other pdf reader on the market that I am aware of does this.
If you’re not already familiar with it, check out Google Books and see what a powerful research tool it can be for students.
Google Books has been around for a little while, letting users read passages of print books on their computers, yet also protecting the publisher’s copyrights by not allowing the screen to be printed. In the past, however, it has been completely inaccessible to those who could not read the picture of the text displayed on the screen.
Now, with PDF Equalizer, all those who have been previously excluded from this rich resource can now read the print material via the web…without having to purchase the whole book.
And, like so many other titles from Premiere Assistive, PDF Equalizer is available for free as a fully functional demo so you can try it out. I’m guessing that if you try it, you’ll make that purchase. The price, like so many others from Premiere Assistive, is also reasonable—only $89.95.
If you want more information on this product, check out the official
PDF Equalizer page
On Premiere Assistive’s web site.
Finally, also from that press release, I gleaned an interesting statistic from
the National Institute for Literacy--
nearly 42 million Americans struggle with literacy.
I’m just curious how many of these people are going to college and have a diagnosis of some type of disability. My guess would be a good number of them. Even if just one percent of these were college students, that is still more than 400,000 people. And, this is yet one more tool to help provide access to material which has been previously inaccessible.
Premiere Assistive Technology
as they’ve made inroads for accessibility once again.
According to a press release for PDF Equalizer, it is easy to understand the powerful functionality of this latest offering from Premiere Assistive Technology.
From the press release:
“PDF Equalizer is a tool that can open and read aloud PDF Files in their original format without any required file conversion. It is designed so that individuals who use electronic documents can have the true "equal access" to those who use the printed version, plus a few extras. PDF Equalizer allows individuals to select and control what is being read aloud as simply as using your mouse to select the text to be read. If listening to audio of the text is beneficial to you, PDF Equalizer can also turn a PDF Document into MP3 files that individuals can listen to on their MP3/MP4 players. PDF Equalizer can convert each PDF page into a separate MP3 file so it is easy to navigate or create a playlist of the pages you want to hear.”
“PDF Equalizer is a "must have" tool for those who take distant learning classes. The superior note taking capability in PDF Equalizer is unmatched. Notes are automatically synchronized with the PDF page to help keep them organized. At any time, the user can extract all notes into a single Microsoft Word document. If you have too much to read and need to condense the amount of material, use the powerful built-in "content summarization" feature. You can summarize a single topic or an entire book. If you can't find a publication in your native language, don't worry, the translation feature built into PDF Equalizer can translate text on the fly. You can also imbed hyperlinks for direct access to the Internet and there is an integrated dictionary that allows you to immediately lookup definitions.”
This useful piece of assistive technology does more than just make access to pdf documents easy. It also makes
Google Books
Accessible. This feature alone makes the PDF Equalizer's functionality stand out alone in the field of assistive technology. No other pdf reader on the market that I am aware of does this.
If you’re not already familiar with it, check out Google Books and see what a powerful research tool it can be for students.
Google Books has been around for a little while, letting users read passages of print books on their computers, yet also protecting the publisher’s copyrights by not allowing the screen to be printed. In the past, however, it has been completely inaccessible to those who could not read the picture of the text displayed on the screen.
Now, with PDF Equalizer, all those who have been previously excluded from this rich resource can now read the print material via the web…without having to purchase the whole book.
And, like so many other titles from Premiere Assistive, PDF Equalizer is available for free as a fully functional demo so you can try it out. I’m guessing that if you try it, you’ll make that purchase. The price, like so many others from Premiere Assistive, is also reasonable—only $89.95.
If you want more information on this product, check out the official
PDF Equalizer page
On Premiere Assistive’s web site.
Finally, also from that press release, I gleaned an interesting statistic from
the National Institute for Literacy--
nearly 42 million Americans struggle with literacy.
I’m just curious how many of these people are going to college and have a diagnosis of some type of disability. My guess would be a good number of them. Even if just one percent of these were college students, that is still more than 400,000 people. And, this is yet one more tool to help provide access to material which has been previously inaccessible.
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