I want to make sure that my students are aware and are prepared to
deal with the real world, whatever that will be for them.
Age: 37
Position: professor
Organization: university
Xiaoping has students that will be involved in a wide variety of professions. Each of them will intersect with business and non-profit organizations that may or may not be aware of the benefits accessibility has to both those with disabilities and to the company. He is also concerned that those students that are part of the virtual classes are able to easily share their work. He wants easy access to information for himself, his staff, and his students so that they can all be ahead of the game now and in the future no matter what their profession ends up being. He believes in being proactive but doesn't want it to take all day to find what is needed or take a brain trust to diagnose the information. It has to be usable even if English isn't the person's first language. He does some design himself and he requires each of his students to create a web page as part of class so that they can share materials and projects. He would like to have his administrative assistant and his students be able to find the information they need on their own so he doesn't have to re-write accessibility information for them. A primary goal of the class is to have students complete the class both knowledgeable and excited about accessibility. Another goal is that they will then eagerly implement accessible features in all of their future web design projects.
Potential:Xiaoping is an innovator. He likes to chart new territory but he is not a web designer and is not interested in this consuming all of his time with this. At the same time, he senses this is important for his own teaching, outreach, and research as well as for the professions his students will soon have. He is torn between high ideals, high time demands, and lack of reliable, succinct, and usable information.
I am supposed to find information for the vice president about
accessibility
for a report. I know from my work with women's committees and
programs on campus that
this is an important issue for us as an institution.
Age: 52
Position: executive assistant
Organization: university executive office
Chandra knows how to do word processing. She can save a word processing file to html. She does not know how to make a web page from scratch or how to use a web page creation software but she is very capable and a fast learner. She has heard about accessibility and that it is important but she doesn't really know any technical details. Recently, she has begun to experience some difficulty with carpal tunnel and has had to adjust the font size to view on-screen documents due to diminishing aging eye sight. She has to pull all this together by the Wednesday Board meeting. The web accessibility information will be used to augment new web publishing guidelines for the university under development. Chandra's first goal is to gain enough information about accessibility to provide a sound and comprehensive overview presentation for the Board meeting discussion on accessibility and university web publishing guidelines. She doesn't know for sure if there is or is not something she can do do make her web viewing easier on her carpal tunnel symptoms. Her second but still primary goal is to learn more about accessibility in the Internet environment and how it can affect different disability types.
Potential:Chandra could become a key advocate in at the University for accessibility from her personal experience and through her connections in various women's advocacy on-campus. Right now, she is just concerned about pulling this report together. She feels overwhelmed by her lack of technical experience and understanding. She also feels overwhelmed by the amount of information that is available and is befuddled as to what is and is not important. If there were something really simple to look at or a key to all the information, it wouldn't be so hard. As it is, accessibility is something she wishes she had a whole lot more time to learn about or a much easier way to figure out what is important.
We have some grants that are tied to the Dept. of Education but
our university
has selected the W3C as our web standards. I need resources detailing where
the Sect. 508 federal standards and W3C agree and disagree. I also
need resources
to assist me with consulting with product developers in research, business,
and education.
Age: 61
Position: executive assistant
Organization: university professor and
research/business consultant
Su is a professor with multiple grants that have language written into them requiring that her web sites comply with Section 508. All of the class and other research web sites are supposed to be W3C compatible because that is what the University has decided is their overall standard. Su would like to have a list that shows what is common and what is different between the W3C and the federal standards. That way she can do all the in-common coding and simply change the few things specific to grants for the Dept. of Education. Su needs to follow standards to keep grants going but she does not want to be looking for the same information over and over again. She would like a "cheat sheet." She doesn't have time to read a lot of books at this point of her career and doesn't want to spend a lot of time scanning multiple web sites. She believes in "Make it simple." Her fundamental goal is to find general comparison information and tool comparison information help her achieve accomplish multiple standards compliance quickly and easily.
Potential: Su is very near retirement. She has taught herself programming and HTML. Su has created her own web pages and now has a couple of grad students that will help her out. She has a broad spectrum of off-campus clients in the research and business. Some are affiliated with either education or artificial language and technology field. Others are interested in the disabilities area but have little comprehension of the scope of the issues their clients might encounter with their products. Su has the potential to impact a large number of products at the development stage as well as to affect policy in research, education, and business.