- From: Anne Pemberton <apembert@crosslink.net>
- Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 11:22:15 -0400
- To: Greg Gay <g.gay@utoronto.ca>, w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Greg Gay, The "good surprise" when I got back to e-mail after a week at the beach, was your analysis of the problems of accommodating the needs of those with cognitive disabilities, especially learning disabilities! I would like to learn more about your model for special ed teachers. I look forward to your input into this knotty issue, and agree with much of what you suggest. But, I have a concern. It seems you seem rely on TTS as a major accommodation for these users. In my many years teaching learning disabled high schoolers, I spent a lot of time emphasizing the use of "visual aids" in reading material, such as pictures, photos, maps, graphs, tables, as well as titles, subtitles, bold and italicized text, etc, teaching poor readers to comprehend paragraph style writing by using non-paragraph elements to get to the meat of the information. Since TTS devices seem to divorce the visual elements from the text, and do a lousy job with tables that include boxed (non-linear) information, I don't see TTS as an appropriate accommodation for this population, or at least those parts of it with whom I've had experiences both professionally and personally. My professional experiences in rural schools, with poor medical services during early childhood, resulted in many learning disabled students who were unable to use auditory input in lieu of reading, so I question the ability of TTS to provide adequate accommodation by itself. Perhaps you are working with a more advanced TTS device? Anne At 09:05 PM 4/22/2000 -0400, Greg Gay wrote: >Hello Everyone >I’m just getting back to the gl list after being away for quite some >time. Wendy suggested at CSUN that I offer some input into the >discussion on guidelines for accessible design practices that >accommodate cognitive disabilities. It turns out I have some >experience on the topic <grin>. > >Over the past week I’ve had a chance to go through the last month or >so of discussion, and have managed to gathered a few thoughts. There >are many more than I care to post as a list message, so I’ll point to a >URL. > >http://snow.utoronto.ca/web-savvy/resources/wai_newgl.html > >The draft suggests a model for developing content authoring >guidelines to promote accessibility for those with cognitive >disabilities. The WCAG are interpreted in a cognitive model. > >Many of the ideas I talk about, and the basis for the model, are the >result of a web-based course I’ve spent the past several years >developing. The ultimate goal of the course is for participating >teachers to develop and pass on process-oriented learning skills to >their students. Though originally aimed at developing adaptive >behaviour in students with learning disabilities, the skills learned can > >be equally effective for other students. The site is created to be >navigable in a variety of ways, and presents materials in multiple >formats, among many other accessibility features. > >http://snow.utoronto.ca/Learn2/introll.html > >Good to be back! > >Greg > > Anne L. Pemberton http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Pav/Academy1 http://www.erols.com/stevepem/Homeschooling apembert@crosslink.net Enabling Support Foundation http://www.enabling.org
Received on Friday, 28 April 2000 11:22:50 UTC