I’m forever biased to accessibility now that I work in the field. Everywhere I go I can’t help thinking how something relates to it. Could be a menu at a restaurant, the ever popular ramps for wheelchairs or, something as simple as a streetlight.

Let me just start and say Croatia is a stunningly beautiful country, full of life, beautiful beaches, amazing food and great people. Also bear in mind I am not visually-impaired, nor did I spend my entire vacation trolling around the country for ADA lawsuits:)

Overall, I was actually very impressed. It is a very old country, and as such has numerous well documented challenges on getting around as someone using assistive technology and/or aids. The roads/sidewalks are remarkably accessible; at times I almost thought I was in Canada or the US as I listened to the crossings beep at me repeatedly. Seems everyone has their own beep, here in Canada it is more like a sharp whistle, while in Croatia it was more like synthetic beeps.

ATM’s and banks are fully accessible, many even have ramps and electronic doors to assist those in wheelchairs, or the mother pushing a stroller.

A number of beaches were actually accessible. I was surprised to find a few folks in wheelchairs getting around just fine, and in my broken Croatian, was able to determine that is in fact the case. I did not meet any locals who required accessibility, most were tourists from Germany.

The physiology of the visually-impaired is quite different in Croatia. I met one local blind gentleman who was more than happy to speak with me (after buying a shot of local Rakija of course). He agreed with me that in many ways, Croatia is well ahead of the curve in dealing with typical challenges. The major cities are great, and almost all forms of public transportation offer any number of ways to interact. The smaller towns and especially the older cities are however, much more challenging.

This is a problem that seldom exists in North America.  How many thousand year old castles do we have here? How many thousand year old cities do we still live in? I’m not sure what to expect from the local government, and can’t see anyone willing to address accessibility which would require basically destroying old Roman towns, roads etc.

The one area he did call out was electronic accessibility. The government there is just now undertaking all things electronic, and he repeated to me a number of times the inaccessibility of government services online. We also spoke in detail about financial services. I got the impression that while a number of their websites are accessible, their statements are not. I explained what Xenos Group does for PDF accessibility of high-volume transactional output (good luck translating that!), and he seemed to think that is a great approach. Financial independence is what he kept repeating which seems to be a very common thread across the people I generally deal with.

Would be an interesting question for the community and/or an ADA lawyer – how far can you take physical accessibility without destroying culture and history of a nation? I for one think there is a happy medium, one that can help those who need it but, still protect the beauty and history of a country.

I had the pleasure of co-staffing the booth with the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). In attendance with me were Paul Schroeder, David O’Neill, and Marc Grossman.

Co-staffing our booth actually worked out better than I could have hoped. The AFB’s focus was on ADA compliance, including websites and anything physical such as bank machines for example. Putting accessible electronic statements into the mix fit very well, and everyone we spoke to was quite receptive to the approach.

Americans with Disabilities Act: What You Need To Know, was by far my favorite session of the week. It was moderated by Virginia O’Neill, Senior Counsel, ABA Center for Regulatory Compliance. The session had two key speakers; Karen Stephenson, an Associate from Seyfarth Shaw LLP in Chicago as well as Paul Schroeder, VP of Programs and Policy at the American Foundation for the Blind in Washington.

Virginia almost brought tears to the audiences eyes, telling a quick story about her husband, and some of the challenges he has faced after suffering a number of strokes in the past, and the relevance to her daily life and of course, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Karen brought us down to earth. She spoke about a number of important aspects of the ADA, especially relevant to the recent changes which were implemented in the last year. The service animal discussion was particularly engaging – have you ever heard of a “miniature horse”? Well apparently they are out there, and people are actively using them over service dogs for a number of reasons, first and foremost they are stronger than most dogs and apparently cheaper to maintain. Do you have a service animal policy, and does it include “miniature horses”?

Paul provided an enlightening presentation (with David’s help:)). Paul should be a motivational presenter! His attitude and demeanor are of the highest regard, and the relevance to the community of blind and visually-impaired is obvious and apparent. Although not part of legislation yet, he spoke highly of Actuate, our commitment to accessibility and of course, our solution for accessible statements.

One of the angles he used is difficult to measure. According to the ADA, although Braille and Large Print statements are considered acceptable “alternatives” to paper-based ones, he called out some key differences in them, and reasons to
adopt an accessible electronic format instead:

• Many Blind and Visually Impaired individuals do not use Braille, hence it is not really an acceptable alternative
• There could be a delay of up to one month in actually receiving the alternative statement
• Preference. Most Blind and Visually Impaired would prefer receiving electronic copies of their statements. Not only does it give them independence but, it allows them to partake in this critical aspect of society which is often overlooked.

My 2 cents; you need both, alternative and electronic. There will always be a need for statements in Braille, Large Print or even Audio CD. Electronic is simply a great option, and one that will easily comply with the ADA rules and regulations, and avoid hefty lawsuits!

Want to see our setup at the show? I’ve posted a pic here.

Are you a bank or financial institution looking to make sure you are in compliance with the ADA? Here are a few contacts worth talking to in order to get the job done:

ADA Consulting (Website or physical, including ATM’s)

Marc Grossman,
American Foundation for the Blind

Alternative Statements (Braille, Large Print or Audio CD)

T-Base Communications

http://www.tbase.com/

Accessible Statements

Xenos – a Division of Actuate

http://www.xenos.com/xe/solutions/transformation/accessible-statements/

If you want to see the current accessible credit card sample, please click on this link.

The important piece to note is that many elements of the PDF can be changed, which is why we work so heavily with the AFB on testing and usability of our templates and outputs. Xenos Developer Studio lets you easily define sections, fields, read order, alternate text and deal with tables. It is very easy to go into a template and modify it to your liking.

Want to see more? We have 3 videos on Youtube which outline Xenos Axess:

Presentation:

Xenos Axess PDF  Accessibility Solution

Demonstrations:

Xenos Axess – Product Demonstration – Part 1

Xenos Axess – Product Demonstration – Part 2

The presentation is a bit out-of-date now but, still mostly valid. It is a high-level description of what problems we solve. The product demonstrations (2 parts) are much more detailed, and show the power of developer studio in creating and maintaining these templates.

We are already in a number of cycles with various institutions, and am really looking forward to not only getting it implemented but, pulling in our friends at the AFB for usability testing and eventually, certification of a clients high-volume transactional output as accessible.

We are not done yet! We have some final testing with the various associations on-going, and still have some paperwork to do for our conformance claim (WCAG 2.0 AA). In the meantime, please do not hesitate to send feedback on the sample statement:

Peter Ganza, Director, Product Marketing @ Actuate

pganza@actuate.com

Twitter: pganza

What is the word “accessible”? I hear so many people use the word in a variety of contexts, especially in the wonderful land of software.

Accessible is “the quality of being at hand when needed.” It shares a number of adjectives such as: capable of being reached, of being read with comprehension and easy to reach.

I recently found www.visualthesaurus.com and have been playing with it ever since. Although I suspect the interface is very inaccessible, it’s been an interesting way to bring up words and visually navigate the thesaurus. Below please find two screenshots from it, one on “accessible” and the other on “accessibility”.

You should find that not only do both words relate, but that they are almost exclusive to each other and are joined by one common phrase: availability (inaccessible is there too but, lets leave it out for now!). We could argue nouns, verbs and adjectives till we are blue in the face but, according to the visual maps (thanks @ VisualThesaurus), only “availability” is present in both.

Everyone uses accessible everywhere. Software vendors claim their products are accessible, meaning you can get to it. SaaS and cloud providers pretty much guarantee you that you will have an accessible service or experience. There are a host of companies that all focus on making their product or service accessible, or in this case, available. At the conference, I lost count how many times I heard the A word used in one form or another. At first it bothered me but, I’ve now made the distinction in speaking with folks at the show, and at the bar.

Accessible is what it is, accessibility is really the word we should be focusing our efforts on. It is the easiest way to tie user experience with assistive technologies for those who are impaired in some way.

What do you think?

On a related note, you will likely find their website (VisualThesaurus) is pretty darn inaccessible. Compared to ours on the ATRC webchecker, they have 4x as many potential problems and almost 20x as many known issues.

When one looks at HVTO (High-Volume Transactional Output) environments such as banks, financial institutions and insurance, we find different solutions based on volume requirements.

For small or medium volumes of statements, typically customers requesting an individual, or series of statements, T-Base is your best bet. If you are receiving anything from your financial institution today in an alternate format such as Braille, Audio or e-Text – there is a very good chance it comes from T-Base already.

At Xenos (Actuate), the challenges we address are on the high volume side of things. Axess is a great way for these institutions to transform any existing print stream or ECM content into fully accessible PDFs in a completely automated way.

As partners, we can come together to reduce the time and complexity in addressing the alternate statement needs of these large organizations. 

Who is T-Base? T-Base Communications provides accessible statements and documents in braille, large print, e-Text and audio as well as online with our industry leading AccessOne PDF and web accessibility. We are the North American leader in provision of information in formats fully accessible to, and preferred by, your blind, deafblind and partially sighted consumers.

I’ve visited their headquarters in Ottawa, and worked with these folks for a while now. They are a dedicated and impressive group of people providing critical services which are often over looked.

Does your Braille bank or credit card statement show up weeks or even a month after typical statement dates? That is an issue we are hoping to solve in future.

Imagine the alternate format provider’s dilemma. They typically receive a secure electronic copy of the statement which was requested. Unfortunately, statements not only vary from provider to provider but, even within a particular institution one may find various formats and composition engines.

That is one of the most exciting opportunities for us from my perspective. The great thing about our technology is that we can sit on top of existing infrastructure, and don’t necessarily have to displace anything. We can normalize all the formats to one common one, and forward selected transactional documents which require alternate format processing, directly to our partner, T-Base.

Not only will this result in cost and storage savings for the institution but more importantly, it could significantly reduce the time it takes for T-Base to actually get the file and turn it into an alternate format.

 
Caught this article from Newsnet5 recently as well, it talks about Smart Drive Technology. If you watch the 1:30 video you’ll see just how amazing these USB disks are for those with disabilities. I know screen readers have been on sticks for a while but, the team at Patriot has taken it to a whole new level.

 
Saved the best for last! Check out this page which shows actual videos of screen readers using ARIA interfaces. ARIA is probably one of the most difficult pieces to web accessibility for screen readers. Having interactive interfaces through screen readers seems difficult, if not impossible, and yet the W3C standards seem to be making their rounds. I’m pretty excited about this from an Actuate perspective, as we generate tons of interactive content on a daily basis.

Good timing on the part of Knowbility. There will be a webinar on “Making Your Government Website Accessible” on February 24^th at noon CST. If you can’t make the webinar, check them out on twitter – always some great info.

We are very close to releasing our fully accessible (and usable!) sample credit card statement! It’s been a long road this last year working through some required enhancements, mainly due to our friends at various non-profit organizations for the visually-impaired. This is of course, is very positive! We are not experts in accessibility, and I can only take testing so far. Great to see everyone excited about what we are going to achieve with Xenos Axess. Interested in getting the sample beforehand? Drop me an email or DM me on twitter and I’d be happy to share it.

Had a really good meeting last week with a roundtable of accessibility professionals representing all Canadian major financial institutions. Really enjoyed the session and look forward to connecting with everyone going forward and, hopefully uncovering some opportunities for our high-volume transactional output accessible PDF solution.

February will be a big month for Actuate, Xenos and of course, me! Some major product announcements taking place which include accessibility. I’m also foaming at the mouth to get our latest partnership announced which will open up some doors for both respective organizations, and give us more credibility in the space that we are trying to pursue.

Last but not least, I finally broke down and got myself and iPhone4. As someone who is not (yet) visually-impaired, I was amazed at how easy it is to use the built-in accessibility features. I think back to conversations years ago where people would say things like “a blind person will never be able to use a touch screen interface”. Today, everyone is talking about a blind man being able to drive. <hint> <hint>

In typical government fashion, the Treasury Board Secretariat made some very cryptic statements around “fundamentals and facts.” I fail to see what is driving their position in this matter.

It states that the government is “committed to providing accessible online information and services to Canadians, and is continuing to look at ways to make information more accessible to all Canadians.”

I understand there are 146 departments and agencies which provide internet programs and services, representing some 23 million pages under the gc.ca domain. Pushing individuals to in-person, by mail or phone-based services does not sound like an acceptable alternative to me, and is completely counter to the statement made above around accessible online information.

So which one is it? Are we committed to providing online and accessible services, or alternatives which do not involve the web?

I recognize there may be significant cost involved in achieving at least some basic level of web accessibility but, they should not have committed to it back in 2001 if they didn’t want to spend the money to make it happen.

Looking through my blog statistics was interesting to say the least;

37 total posts over 6 categories (38 if you count this one)

24 comments

1700+ total views

64 hits (busiest day)

In terms of traffic, my #1 referrer is Twitter, LinkedIn is #2 and xenos.com is #3. This is fairly in-line with what I had anticipated, as most of the conversations are taking place on Twitter/LinkedIn.

So what were the most popular posts? See below..

Accessible Volcano’s

- What a fun trip to Europe that was. Of course I decided to go around the same time an Icelandic volcano woke up. I’ll never forget that experience, and really enjoyed the accessibility event in Paris.

Attitudes on Accessibility

- Had some good traffic and discussion on this one. I still think it’s amazing to actually experience the difference in approach here vs. Europe. Odd that on this side of the pool we need to be pushed way more than our European counterparts.

Why the web is getting harder for AT

- Just look at the Yahoo! Homepage from 2000 and tell me what you think! What a difference a decade can make.

2010 was a great year for Xenos, and for Actuate.

Now that we’ve completed a ton of market awareness around high-volume PDF accessibility, I’m looking forward to the next stage; partners and sales enablement. Early in 2010 we’ll be announcing some partnerships/alliances with key associations and organizations for the visually-impaired. There is an entire eco-system of vendors out there dedicated to one piece of accessibility or another, and while we can handle high-volume presentment, we will look to experts in other fields to help round out the solution.

Hope everyone had a great year and holiday season! 2011 should be a great year, especially for the accessible community. Thanks to all my followers, especially those who RT my posts on twitter. You know who you are!

Can we talk? Better speech technology with Phonetic Arts or Google Wants Its Products to Talk Back to Users

What a great development this week. Really, who wants to use a keyboard or mouse? Wouldn’t it be great if things were really like Star Trek? As someone who is not visually impaired (yet), I would prefer this more natural method of communication.

For my VI community, what a difference that would be! Ask a question from your PC, and get an answer – all in your native tongue.

Interesting to note that many of Google’s developments, including mergers and acquisitions are in many ways, over-looked. If you really think about this, in 10 years time we may not remember today’s technologies, simply because Google is looking to solve problems in new, innovative ways.

It seems almost weekly we are seeing trends to finally break away from the decades old interfaces we’ve all been bred to use and enjoy, without evening thinking about whether or not there is actually a better way to do things.

This is one of the few topics that for me, is quite personal. As a product manager in former lives, living as a product marketer today – this is something that crosses the divide between those two roles, and accessibility.