Web Accessibility (Group 2)

Listen to an audio recording containing a description of Section 508 Guidelines.
If you do not want to listen to the recording, please take a look at the transcript.

Enjoy this video demonstrating the installation of Accessibar for the Firefox browser.

To create the sample video I used the Camtasia Studio screen-casting software, which made the whole process very easy. After recording the raw footage, Camtasia allows you to add captions. I had written a transcript prior to making the video so I simply copy and pasted it into Camtasia's caption suite and matched each line up with the time I wanted it to appear at. An additional accessibility issue that we had to address was the format of the video. Ideally we want our video to be able to be viewed on every computer. Camtasia has nine different options ranging from Flash video, RealMedia, and even GIF animation. Initially I encoded the footage as an AVI video but then we decided to make it a MOV file instead. Again making this change with Camtasia is very easy as I simply loaded the footage and reproduced the video. In my brief experience, making a video accessible was fast and simple.

An accessible CAPTCHA would need a number of adjustments, many of which may not be the easiest to come by, at least in free CAPTCHA tools. The CAPTCHA would need to use color blind friendly colors. An audio file containing some other verification method would need to be made available to those having trouble reading the letters. The reCAPTCHA tool uses an audio test containing a set of digits that can be entered for authentication. An example of a terrible CAPTCHA is shown below.

The reCAPTCHA tool with more accessible features is shown below.

A concern with using audio would be that those without high bandwidth connections may have some difficulty streaming the file. An audio file should always be provided to ensure the blind have access but if audio is not available, an alternative solution could be used. Put some sort of instructions in the body text of the website, telling users to write a certain sequence of letters in a following text box. "see are too" etc. could be read by the screen reader (CR2). Being part of a lot of body text, it would be difficult for a bot to distinguish it from the rest of the information on the screen. Throw a big title or link next to it, and the screen readers can quickly find the section containing the CAPTCHA. All that needs to be done on the back end is match the strings.

Other forms of verification can be used to eliminate frustration with difficult to read letters. Alternative solutions could use a sequence of color blind friendly colors that the user would need to identify. Users could be given an image and a description whose accuracy they would have to verify (does this picture depict a blue car?). At the moment, reCAPTCHA is accessible and has the added benefit of digitizing books whenever a CAPTCHA is completed.