RE: Accessibility of Whiteboard Animations

There are different types of situations where whiteboards are used.  In the example provided by the original poster the whiteboard is used more as an illustrative tool that functions like multimedia and audio description is likely the best solution.  However, whiteboards are used more in a collaborative way in products like Blackboard Collaborate.    Some have provided some great details about how you could make animation accessible – clearly certain key frames are more important to communicate information and you could have the user walk through the recorded whiteboard.  There are however other situations such as interacting the with Whiteboard or knowing what was done in real-time that are important.  So far the product that did the best job in my opinion was Blackboard Collaborate.  From my memory they had an object view of the whiteboard allowing a timeline of objects that were added and this allowed keyboard selection of objects and keyboard modification of the objects to move them around.  While it wasn’t fully accessible it provided some order and list of things that were done and provided keyboard access.  So a user could know that this or that type of object or text block was added.  These items of course are out of context in the xyz plane if you can’t see the whiteboard but it provided the starting point something that is a very visual experience.

Jonathan

Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
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From: Sean Murphy (seanmmur) [mailto:seanmmur@cisco.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2017 10:43 PM
To: Gregg C Vanderheiden; Macintosh, Kristy (OMAFRA)
Cc: IG - WAI Interest Group List list
Subject: RE: Accessibility of Whiteboard Animations

I would be very interested if anyone has achieved this as a lot of products use white boards and is a very free flowing visual media. The usage I have seen is showing diagrams of flow such as a network diagram, software diagram, process flow, throwing random ideas on a white board when brain storming ideas and so on. Then the information is sent to the meteing attendee’s via an image file. AS the white board is very dynamic in nature and very visual. I cannot think of any reliable means of making the interface accessible for screen reader users. Low vision users would have a better time as long as high contrast was supported and magnification. What challenges a learning or hearing impaired person would have?

Capturing via audio I am not sure if this would work. As there could be more then one person updating the white board during the meeting and information might be missed, not understanding the follow correctly and be to difficult to follow due to the dynamic nature of the flow of information being shared. These are some areas of challenges I can see using a recorded audio meeting.


Sean Murphy
Accessibility Software engineer
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From: Gregg C Vanderheiden [mailto:greggvan@umd.edu]
Sent: Thursday, 11 May 2017 5:29 AM
To: Macintosh, Kristy (OMAFRA) <Kristy.Macintosh@ontario.ca<mailto:Kristy.Macintosh@ontario.ca>>
Cc: IG - WAI Interest Group List list <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: Accessibility of Whiteboard Animations

My thoughts…


if the whiteboard does not add any new information not in the audio — then it is redundant and accessible.
If there IS new information then it would need to be described.  Best way though is to just be sure that information is in the audio (and captions of course)

g

Gregg C Vanderheiden
greggvan@umd.edu<mailto:greggvan@umd.edu>



On May 10, 2017, at 11:51 AM, Macintosh, Kristy (OMAFRA) <Kristy.Macintosh@ontario.ca<mailto:Kristy.Macintosh@ontario.ca>> wrote:

Hi,

I am wondering if anyone has insight into how (and if) whiteboard animations can be made accessible to everyone. There are many examples of these in YouTube but for a baseline for discussion here is one specific example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZDTB8gmGvY).

-      Can this type of training tool be made fully accessible to all users (including those using assistive technologies) and if so what considerations need to be made?

Thanks,
Kristy