Webpage Accessibility.

Hey there. I was thinking about how I needed to make the image in my last entry accessible. When I say accessible I mean accessible to disabled people, like making it so that screen readers (programs designed to read webpages out loud) can help people with visual impairments to view websites.
Also I’ve been thinking about accessibility because its a subject that comes up at university pretty often. I’m doing multimedia which means I’ve taken a few website design and programming courses.
I’m doing some pretty intense web programming this semester actually.
I’ve got an assignment at the moment where making the website accessible gives us a sizable portion of our grade.

Accessibility is good. If people don’t pay attention to accessibility it makes things a whole lot harder for people with disabilities to get around on the internet.
There are all kinds of things that can make websites inaccessible. Like, using a flash menu where you have to click the mouse and can’t use the keyboard. That could make things difficult for people with mobility issues.
Using low contrasting colours can make things a pain etc.
Y’know, disabled people have as much right to the online world as we do but if people making web content aren’t paying attention to this shit then they’re just not able to access the information out there.
It’s not like able bodied people are out to exclude disabled people.* Mostly its just an extension of privilege. We don’t think about the needs of disabled people because we don’t experience having those needs. We don’t see what they need unless we’re paying attention.

Here’s some sites listing accessibility guidelines:

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
These guidelines were created by the W3C folk. I can’t remember at all what W3C stands for, but these people are important on the internet. They set HTML standards and shit.
Their guidelines are very strict and fufilling all of it could be difficult/time consuming if you are a web developer, which most people aren’t. This isn’t the latest version of their guidelines I don’t think.

508 Standards, Section 1194.22
These are some guidelines for the level of accessibility required on gonvernment sites. I assume these standards apply in America but their information is good.
These standards are a bit more relaxed. There are good descriptions for every requirement. I can’t really say what it’d be like to read for people who aren’t all up ins on web development being as I’m into this web development stuff quite a bit, but I find this document very easy to read and understand.

Now I know that most folk aren’t web developers, but there’s something simple everyone should be able to do - and thats providing text alternatives to things that aren’t text, like images and video.
One of the simplest things people can do is use alt tags on their images. For example the HTML for an image without an alt tag might look something like this:
<img src=”image.jpg”>
To make this accessibile you can just throw in an alt tag. (Alternative text tag) to add a description to the image. Doing that would look like this:
<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”This is a description of the image - well really its an explanation of an alt tag but you get the point”>

If you’re on wordpress I don’t think they actually show images if there’s no alt tag at all. When you click the image button to put an image in it comes up with a text box asking you to fill in a description. The description is what goes in the alt tag. If the image is used for more then decoration, and is used to illustrate some sort of point or convey any information then it’s important to fill those tags in and give the descriptions.
It’s terribly simple and does so much for accessibility.

I came across some pages to help test the accessibility of a website.
juicystudio
cynthiasays

I ran every website in my blogroll through the last one (cynthia says) testing for the section 508 requirements.
3 out of the 15 pages linked on my blogroll failed the first section, the one about providing text alternatives to non text elements. (Most but not all of the other sections were passed by all of the blogs on my list, likely because of the way wordpress sets things up.)
Some of that failure might be the part of wordpress. I didn’t really look into which templates had what etc, because this was meant to be all very quick.

At any rate - adding alt tags is easy. I also tend to provide transcripts of video that I upload, though that is more time consuming. These are simple things most of us can do. I mostly thought I’d make a post about this because I only found out about this accessibility stuff after going to uni and doing web development courses. There are things every day users, like bloggers can do and p’raps not everybody knows about them.

Hopefully more people might be aware of accessibility issues now, or might know where to do to get the guides and whatnot. I hope to have helped somehow…

*Though they’re often not out to help them. When accessibility gets brought up in class lecturers usually coach it in terms of “You might not want to put in the effort for disabled people or care about social justice issues but it’s illegal if you don’t design your sites so they’re accessible.
My brother is going into web development and I told him about accessibility. He got angry and said that it made him want to go out and kick a disabled person in the head for making him have to do extra work. >.<
I’ve seen a bunch of pages trying to coax web developers into following accessibility guidelines by saying “It doesn’t just help disabled people, it also helps your search engine optimization or it makes websites accessible on portable devices” because you know. The minority of people accessing your website on portable devices are more important then disabled people.
Or something. >.<

Yesterday was blog for choice day - but I guess I have a habit of posting too late for this kind of thing. Truth be told, I don’t know what to write too well.

Should be enough to say that women deserve the right to choose whther or not they’ll have children, because that sort of decision you’know would affect ‘er life. Important sort of stuff.
So I definetely beleive Roe vs Wade is a good thing, people should hve the right to determine what happens with their own bodies, and all that good stuff.

Still… I don’t know, I hear that black women in America were given forceful abortions and forceful sterilization,m and I think I’ve read the same sort of thing happened to Australian Aboriginals. Also, there are situations that happen like they did with Katie Thorpe, where her parents wanted to sterilize her ’cause she was disabled, and she shouldn’t have to deal with disability and motherhood at the same time.

Sterilization and abortion is great stuff when not forced on people without privilege, but when talking about reproductive health and choice I guess I want to mention that there are people who have had abortion and whatnot used against them, people who have not had free choice to have those things. So, when we focus on reproductive choices I don’t know, it would be good to talk about people who’ve had had them stripped away not just by not being able to have abortions when wanted and needed, but also who’ve had them forced on them.

*mumblyjumblynotgoodatwordsagain*

It is 1:00am December 25th. So, merry christmas, happy holidays, seasons greetings and all that good stuff. I hope that no matter what you’re doing and how you celebrate whatever you celebrate - or how you sit on the couch if celebrating isn’t for you - that you have a good time.
(That isn’t good English is it?)

The Hogfather has been on the last two nights. It’s been good. I enjoy Terry Pratchett, and I enjoyed that movie. Oh, I can’t remember the name of the book but one of them - the one about the girl who dressed up as a boy and went to war - it touched on feminist points and it got me. It was great.
Reading ‘The science of discworld II’ he said things about feminism too. He was talking about how people have always used stories to shape people in different cultures. About how you could dehumanize someone because they don’t know your rituals and your stories. He called these stories the “make a person kit” and said something along the lines that the make a person kit doesn’t work the same way for girls as it does for boys because girls havn’t been people*
he said that even with feminists working there really isn’t a model of story telling for women and girls yet that matches the developed ‘make a person’ kit of stories for men.

Really I’m just going on a tangeant there by talking about how Terry Pratchett seems to know somethings of feminism. What I wanted to talk about was the tiniest little thing I saw in The Hogfather.

Alright. So, The Hogfather is a lot like Santa. He’s discwords Santa. They celebrate Hogswash, which is discwords Christmas. This is one of those ’someone kidnaps/kills santa/the hogfather and someone needs to save christmas/hogswash/the world’ stories and one of those people is the personification of death, who takes on the role of the hogfather, getting all his powers and stuff. In the book he SPEAKS LIKE THIS and I don’t think they quite captured capital letters in sound, but look here I’ve gone on another tangeant.

Death likes, but doesn’t always entirely understand humans. He sees bad things about Christmas/hogswash and he tries to make them better with his hogfatherly powers. Like, he goes to a store and magically whips up presents to give to kids, which makes the owner of the store very distressed because now no-one is buying things, and that’s what christmas/hogswash is about to Mr. Mall. Owner.

He sees that a poor child asks for expensive things. His helper says something like “Well that’s all very nice, but he’s getting a ball and an apple” and Death doesn’t understand. He should get what he wanted. It’s not fair that rich kids get rich things that they want and poor kids get a ball and an apple.
“You have to take into account their socio-economic status”
“That’s unfair”
“That’s the world”
But Death likes humans and thinks this is unfair so he uses his santa/hogsfather powers to give the poor kid what he wanted.

At this point it should be noted that in discword stories are real. The world is run on the power of narritive, and narritives are real in the story. So, at one point we see the real life version of the little match stick girl. Cold and dead. (That story is always so sad! It always got me.)
The guy helping Death understand about christmas/hogswash says that the little matchstick girl is part of the hogswash spirit, because people can look at her and think “Well, it doesn’t matter how poor I am, and how terrible things are for me because the little matchstick girl has things worse”
Death thought this was similarly unfair, brought the matchstick girl back to life and dropped her off with the city watch.

and THAT’s where I wanted to go with this.

I was reading miss crop chicks blog, and then some blogs off the side bar, and some blog off of there. So when I saw that thing, where he brought her back to life I just started thinking about diability. All that “I thank you lord for I am not crippled” sort of stuff.

It’s unfair to make people into symbols of being “worse than.” ‘I’m gateful I’m not like that person’ when that person is still a person.

Uhhh.

That is all.

1:00am rambles.

*I don’t think he literally said girls have not been seen as people. I’m putting my own words here because I don’t remember his.

I showed up at university for a three hour tutorial that apparently isn’t on, and then I have another class later which I’m waiting for. Basically I have several hours free at university today, so I’m going to blog.
Here we go.

Point of interest one: My group for digital video and special effects is doing a dark Alice in Wonderland video, sort of based loosely on American Mcgee’s Alice, but with variations and such.
Going through the original source, and the parts of American Mcgee’s Alice that we’re apparently going with I’ve started to feel rather uncomfortable about the disablism involved. Alice starts off in a mental institution and “wonderland” is all in her head, because she’s mad you see. Mad as the hatter.
There’s that line “But I don’t want to be around Mad people” Alice says to the mad hatter who responds with something like “but we’re all mad here”
I asked my group if we could do something to say that there’s nothing wrong with being “mad” and that the darker side of Alice’s personality have to do with something other then madness.
I was basically told that they’d be fine to have the hatter answer the “I don’t want to be among mad people” with “There’s nothing wrong with being mad, we’re all mad here” and asking for more then that concession is asking too much.
I think it’s too little and I doubt the “madness” isn’t bad message will come through from that line.
I’m playing Alice, and I’m not sure how I feel about it now.
Is this what cognitive dissonance feels like?

I ended up having a big conversation about race the other day in a circle full of white peeps. I’m not going to go into the details of the conversation like I often do, though I felt less stupid then I did with the “stupids” conversation. I felt like I had a grasp of what I was saying (sort of) and I think I got the idea across that aboriginals aren’t getting unfair favoritism regarding scholarships and tutoring.
Now at one point I said something like “Sounds like she just had a shitty tutor who did all the work for her. That’s got nothing to do with race.”
All the people in the conversation looked at me, and one of them even gasped.
Apparently I should have said “heritage” and not “race” and that saying race is in itself racist.
I said that race might not be a biological construct, but it’s definitely a social construct and that denying race is denying the voice of people who have had problems because of their race.
I don’t know. Everyone in the conversation (there was about five people) seemed to think saying the word race is racist.
I’ve never heard this one before, I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong. Does anyone know what this is all about?

Errm. Also. You know that dress I said I wanted ages ago? I umm… bought it, with some other things from the same company. It should be arriving in a day or two. The pleases me so damn bad.

Ohohohoh. My best friend who I love and adore, she and I had a bit of an upset conversation when I suggested white people don’t experience racism. She said that at her primary school she was beaten up, and followed home (then beaten up.) by a group of aboriginal students, and that the school wouldn’t touch it with a stick because of their race. She said if she were bullied by white kids (and she was) that they’d deal with it, but they ignored what the black kids did to her.
She left school at grade nine despite being so damned bright. She’s no good at maths, but damn that girl is sharp as a tack. (Technically leaving school before grade 10 is meant to be illegal, but she did it anyway.)
She said that the bullying was one of the major reasons she couldn’t stand school.
She heard the racism = prejudice + institutionalized power, but she’s not sure how what happened to her wasn’t more then tolerated in the institution, and wants to know more about what “institutionalized” means.
She says she knows that more then %90 of racism doesn’t happen to white people, and what racism to non white people is extremely rampant, and she knows that a black kid calling a white kid a cracker doesn’t have as much weight as a white kid throwing racial epithets about, but she can’t think what happened to her wasn’t racism.
I don’t know how to answer any of her questions so I’m throwing them up here, so hopefully someone can help me know what to say to her, because I totally don’t.

Errm…

If I can think of anything else to say I have three and a half more hours of sitting at uni doing nothing. I’m sure it’ll all come to me.

…

Today in class we had to do presentations on a website we designed for a particular topic related to User Interface Design. My group talked about prototyping, other groups talked about other things.

One group talked about designing web pages and other products for people who are colour blind. Their topic was interesting, their site was great and the way they did things was excellent. Not only did they write about it, they also got people with different types of colour blindness to look at the site, so they could make sure that colour blind people could easily read and see everything.
They found programs which help simulate what an image looks like for various types of colour blindness.
They even designed their links in a way that would make it easy for those ‘text reading for the blind’ programs to read. I mean, these guys were really on top of it. They were going out of their way to make sure that people with disabilities could read their website.

But I felt a niggle when I saw one of their pages was about “colour blind people” and not say “People with colour blindness” It just hit me. It’s the first point on this guide to remove ableist language: http://www.apastyle.org/disabilities.html

But, I didn’t know how to say that to them. We were supposed to ask questions and comment on other peoples presentations and their websites, and I got right into it, talking to people about their colour choices and such, but I didn’t know how to tell these guys that the wording on their page might be offensive to people. I mean, they’d put so much time and research into this and I… I know nothing. I’m an ignorant fuck. I told my housemate about it afterwards, but it’s not really the same thing at all. In fact, not nearly.

I’ve done that sort of thing before. I might say to someone who says something racist “You know, that’s incredibly racist” like the time my friend suggested that black men should kick the asses of racists (because it perpetuates the angry violent black man myth.) But a lot of the time I feel like I can’t say anything, because I don’t know anything. I’ve been told as such before.

I can’t even remember what the conversation was about, but someone said something, and I did my “That’s racist” thing, and an MOC who was nearby told me that I can’t talk about racism, because I know nothing about it, and well. He was right.

I have to stop fearing being ignorant, and stupid because really there isn’t anything wrong with ignorance and stupidity in themselves. My fear of being wrong, being ignorant, and being shut down stops me from talking about areas where I benefit from privilege.
I read somewhere (Shrub?) that the right to always be correct is an example of white privilege that us white folk need to let go of.

At the same time. I am an ignorant fuck. I don’t want to go about ‘educating’ or ‘informing’ people about things if I don’t know what I’m really talking about. I don’t know, I’m not very bright I guess. I mean…

I guess the only solution for this is to get myself educated. To educate myself.