Slatin and Accessibility Institute Dedicated to Accessibility For All
DRW Professor John Slatin knows that in order to teach well, sometimes you have to push students out of their comfort zones. Just ask anyone who has taken E388M/STS331, “The Web Multimedia and the Virtual Body.” One day early in the semester, just as students have logged onto one of the 24 computers in the classroom and are ready to begin browsing the Net, Slatin says, “Everybody ready? Great. Now unplug the mouse.”
Each semester, the response is the same. There’s a shuffle of movement—and then a dazed silence. A few moments later, tentative clicks sound from remote corners of the room as students struggle to make the computers do what they want.
“I tell them to do this at home, too—to stick the mouse in a desk drawer for seven days and figure out how to navigate the computer without it, as people with visual and mobility impairments do.”
Blind himself, Slatin cautions that no simulation allows a perfect understanding of disability, but he believes this exercise and others like it (he has designed dozens) help students appreciate the barriers people with disabilities face when interacting with technology.
“There’s generally a range of responses to the exercises—puzzlement, frustration, anger. Then excitement—and recognition. And then they start learning how to adapt. Invariably someone hunts around and finds a list of keyboard shortcuts, posts it to the class listserv, and gets to be hero for the day,” Slatin says, with a satisfied chuckle.
But the real eye-opening moment comes when he asks students to try to make plane reservations on the Internet using JAWS, the screen-reading technology people with visual impairments use to access information from computers.
“In most cases, it can’t be done, because the interactive forms on the websites haven’t been designed with a screen reader or a visually impaired user in mind. When students see that, they’re frustrated, surprised, and a little awed that people with disabilities can function on the Web at all. I try to work on that ‘awe’ a little bit. I show them that people with disabilities can get around the Web very well, if web designers use the appropriate programming tools.”
This is Slatin’s educational mission: promoting accessibility for all users of technology. His approach to teaching it grows out of his awareness that college students—some of whom will become the web designers of the future—need to understand more than governmental guidelines about accessibility and technological methods for making web content accessible. They also need to understand the human experience that makes accessibility necessary. Only then can they appreciate its ethical dimensions.
“Accessibility is the technical expression of a social value,” Slatin says. “If we’re truly committed to equal participation in our society, then the web has to be accessible to everyone.”
Recent legislation endorses the right to equal access. In June 2001, the federal government passed the Federal Section 508 standards, which ensure that all federal departments and agencies must adhere to certain accessibility guidelines. The standards are based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, which were produced by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG), a project of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
In Summer 2006, UT rose to the challenge of ensuring equal access by adopting the 508 standards. In so doing, it ensured a steady flow of projects for the Accessibility Institute (AI), which Slatin directs on campus.
Nestled in a corner of the Flawn Academic Center, the AI houses a usability lab where Slatin and his staff test UT websites and software to ensure that they can be comfortably navigated by all users. Even before the 508 guidelines were adopted, the AI supported the redesign of the UT, UT Direct, and the General Libraries websites. It also worked with Liberal Arts Instructional Technologies Services to plan and test Texas Politics, the online textbook designed for the required lower-division course in government and used statewide.
“For the most part we focus on visual accessibility, making sure pages can be read with screen readers,” says Slatin’s colleague Dr. Kay Lewis, who helped him set up the lab in 2000 and oversees much of its operation. “But we’re beginning to get questions about audio, too.”
The questions Lewis refers to arrive via phone and email from departments all over campus. “We pay attention to trends—for instance, for a while I noticed a growing number of questions about CSS (cascading style sheets). And then we do research so we can answer those questions and know about the accessibility impact.”
Some of these answers are available at AI’s website, http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility/index.html, which posts materials created by AI staff, including recent articles that examine the use of audio cues to improve usability and the benefits of involving students with disabilities in software design. The site offers handouts, courtesy of the Student Web Accessibility Project, that identify accessibility problems with MOOS, blogs, content management systems, and other web features; and its TxReadabilty Tool and Art of Alt tutorial are accessed by scholars and technology professionals around the country.
The AI also supports UT courses that examine accessibility issues, such as RHE 312, “Computers and Writing: Accessibility and Usability,” taught by DRW Associate Professor Clay Spinuzzi, who now directs the CWRL (it was headed by Slatin between 1989 and 1998). Spinuzzi’s students design usability tests for websites and use the lab’s equipment to administer and videotape them. Then they examine the tapes to determine where people have trouble using a site and how designers might improve it. When they reach their conclusions, students turn their final reports over to the designers, so they can use them as a resource.
Whether or not they have formally studied accessibility, interested UT students can look into the possibility of working at AI, either as a paid part-time employee (they hire between 3-5 a year) or as a volunteer. “We don’t expect people to know about accessibility before they work here,” says Lewis. Instead, they look for applicants who have a genuine interest in accessibility and a desire to be trained in it, and they offer them ample opportunity for hands-on work experience. In fact, most user testing at AI is conducted by student workers, including those who coordinate the Student Web Accessibility Project.
In keeping with their mission, Lewis and Slatin purposely hire many students with disabilities—not only because they are the ideal users for website tests, but also because of the message their presence sends to non-disabled workers in the office. “Hiring students with disabilities is one way we help make non-disabled people more at ease with disabilities in general,” says Lewis. “If they work with someone who has a disability, they get the idea that a disability is nothing to be uncomfortable about.”
John Slatin is pleased with the work AI has done over the past seven years, but since technology changes rapidly, he’s looking one step ahead. In addition to working with W3C to improve the federally mandated guidelines, he is eager to grapple with the accessibility problems posed by new instructional technologies, such as podcasting.
“It’s important not to restrain instructional innovation. If professors are finding ways to incorporate new technologies in meaningful ways in their classrooms, we need to let them do that—but we need to ensure that all students can access them.”
Alice Batt
September 2007