outreach update

On June 20 I did a presentation: International and National standardization
(recommendations) and resources on web accessibility to a group of  library
people where I showed the video "Web sites that work" and presented mainly a
collection of links to WAI resources, eEurope, and equivalent Danish Sites
with recommendations and god advice regarding web accessibility. I talked
about why International cooperation is important and why one must think
about these matters when making web sites. The whole one day seminar was
about accessibility, the other speakers were from the Danish State
Information Office , which hosts the Danish Guidelines, The Danish Library
for the Bind who has a consultancy service to the libraries regarding
special needs and persons with reading difficulties and V I persons, and the
Equal Opportunities Centre for Disabled Persons talked about Bobby and other
testing tools, They are the ones who tested all the government web sites in
1998 and 1999, and finally one from "Best on the net" talked about how they
are checking for accessibility when reviewing all the sites under their
project. My PowerPoint presentation can be found at our web site
http://www.visinfo.dk/Info/organisation/medarbejder/hbj/  Unfortunately I
don't think it's accessible, you can see a html presentation or download
both the html and the ppt files as a zip file.
Last week I did a  JAWS demonstration and told about accessibility to a web
and multimedia company, who are going to make a web site with information
for teachers with V I children in their classes. The plan is to make a
resource web site with all relevant information so when a teacher who has a
V I student in e.g. cooking or biology he or she can look at this web site
and find practical examples (perhaps with pictures/video clip) for his or
her lessons, also we want to use pictures and maybe video clip to show
orientation and mobility etc. When I mentioned SMIL they were very
interested so I pointed them to the resources at W3C/WAI also they asked if
they can use XML and sure as long as everything is accessible according to
WCAG etc. In our contract it says that I must approve what ever they do and
finally the site must be approved in a user test. (This is a project in the
Visual Impairment Knowledge Centre)
Finally we had a meeting in  the expert group for the Danish Guidelines
under the State Information Office where I told the latest news from the
meeting in Amsterdam and we agreed that some of the other people in this
group should join next time we have a meeting like the one in Amsterdam. We
talked to someone from "Best on the Net", who promised to try and get more
about accessibility when they have a revision of the checklist and try to
convince the board that accessibility and audio files could be a theme for
their suite of articles that they plan to put on the web site from next
year. In about one month the new Danish synthetic speech will be available
to the public and we have seen a tendency that webmasters put audio files on
their site as a mean of accessibility, unfortunately one cannot use these
files together with JAWS, you can open the file and then wait for the whole
file to be played, typically it is a report from a governmental office (The
Ministry of Research and IT have made all their publications available as
audio files with the new Danish Speech Synthesizer). If you use this link
you will find a Press Release and in bottom right a link: "Få dokumentet
læst op med talesyntese = Hear the document read with speech synthesis"
that will start the speech synthesizer 
http://www.fsk.dk/cgi-bin/doc-show.cgi?doc_id=79391&doc_type=35&leftmenu=NYH
EDER 
The Press release is actually about the Government's new IT group who shall
help the Government making Denmark one of the leading IT nations.  


Kind regards
Helle Bjarno
Visual Impairment Knowledge Centre
e-mail: hbj@visinfo.dk
www.visinfo.dk 
phone: +45 39 46 01 04, fax: +45 30 61 94 14
mail: Rymarksvej 1, 2900 Hellerup, Denmark.

Received on Thursday, 5 July 2001 06:59:00 UTC