[Fwd: RE: Assistive tech and direct accessibility]

Greg and I took an action to rework "assistive technology" and "direct 
accessibility features". Here's what we came up with:

*assistive technology* [adapted from WCAG 2.0] Software (or
hardware), separate from the authoring tool, that provides
functionality to meet the requirements of users with
disabilities. Some authoring tools may also provide *direct
accessibility features*.

Examples of assistive technologies include, but are not
limited to, the following:
* screen magnifiers, and other visual reading assistants, which are used 
by people with visual, perceptual and physical print disabilities to 
change text font, size, spacing, color, synchronization with speech, 
etc. in order improve the visual readability of rendered text and images;
* screen readers, which are used by people who are blind to read textual 
information through synthesized speech or braille;
* text-to-speech software, which is used by some people with cognitive,
language, and learning disabilities to convert text into synthetic speech;
* speech recognition software, which may be used by people who have some 
physical disabilities;
* alternative keyboards, which are used by people with certain physical 
  disabilities to simulate the keyboard (including alternate keyboards 
that use head pointers, single switches, sip/puff and other special 
input devices);
* alternative pointing devices, which are used by people with certain 
physical disabilities to simulate mouse pointing and button activations.


*direct accessibility features*
Features of an authoring tool that provide functionality to meet the 
requirements of users with disabilities (e.g., keyboard navigation, zoom 
functions, text-to-speech). Additional or specialized functionality may 
still be provided by external *assistive technology*.


Cheers,
Jan

Received on Monday, 2 March 2009 03:33:47 UTC