While we're talking about disabilities in class, I can't help but think about disability on the Web. Nowadays, it seems everyone and anyone can create and establish his or her own website for whatever purpose. Unfortunately, not everyone is aware or conscious of the basic guidelines to assure his or her website is ADA compliant.
I like to think of "disability" as a constraint, which enables the term to be used more freely and to be considered more seriously across many topics. Everyone has experienced a disability or constraint at some point in his or her life, whether temporary or permanent. And its easy for us to associate these constraints with physical aspects through our daily lives. However, technology and the Web has become a part of our daily lives and I think its important that we learn at least the basics of Web design to assure ADA compliant on the Web.
Listed below are a few basic guidelines to remember to assure your website is ADA compliant:
Guideline 1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.
Provide content that, when presented to the user, conveys essentially the same function or purpose as auditory or visual content.
Guideline 2. Do not rely on color alone.
Ensure that text and graphics are understandable when viewed without color.
Guideline 3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly.
Mark up documents with the proper structural elements. Control presentation with style sheets rather than with presentation elements and attributes.
Guideline 4. Clarify natural language usage.
Use markup that facilitates pronunciation or interpretation of abbreviated or foreign text.
Guideline 5. Create tables that transform gracefully.
Ensure that tables have necessary markup to be transformed by accessible browsers and other user agents.
Guideline 6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully.
Ensure that pages are accessible even when newer technologies are not supported or are turned off.
Guideline 7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes.
Ensure that moving, blinking, scrolling, or auto-updating objects or pages may be paused or stopped.
Guideline 8. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces.
Ensure that the user interface follows principles of accessible design: device-independent access to functionality, keyboard operability, self-voicing, etc.
Guideline 9. Design for device-independence.
Use features that enable activation of page elements via a variety of input devices.
Guideline 10. Use interim solutions.
Use interim accessibility solutions so that assistive technologies and older browsers will operate correctly.
If you're interested in more information about this topic or have any questions about these guidelines, please feel free to contact me and I would happy to help. Thanks for helping to make the Web more ADA compliant.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The International Symbol of Accessibility
If you complete a google images search for the "International symbol of accessibility," you will receive thousands of images of a stick figure sitting in a circular chair that represents areas accessible for people with disabilities or, as I grew up calling them, handicap accessible.
I'm happy to see that the word "handicapped" has evolved to "disability" and now "accessibility." The concern I have with this "International Symbol of Accessibility" language is that without the image, I would assume this means a space is accessible for all people when, in reality, a parking space marked with the International Symbol of Accessibility is exclusively available for people with disabilities. I think using "accessible" is appropriate for describing walkways and buildings that have features that make them accessible to people using wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, or other devices that assist in mobility. Using this term to describe seating or parking spaces that are only available for people with disabilities, however, can be unclear.
I am really intrigued by the fact that while the "International Symbol of Accessibility" language is universal, the images are not. Compare these two images. The symbol on the right is the one we are familiar with in the states, the symbol on the left is from Canada. The simple adjustment of putting the person's arms in a moving position and allowing the person to lean forward puts that person in motion. The wheelchair is a device assisting in mobility. In comparison, the image on the right is the stagnant figure we are all familiar with. Tell me if you disagree, but this traditional image looks "wheelchair bound" to me. Canada's image looks active and in control. As we make an effort to update our language, I think its time we also update our image.
I'm happy to see that the word "handicapped" has evolved to "disability" and now "accessibility." The concern I have with this "International Symbol of Accessibility" language is that without the image, I would assume this means a space is accessible for all people when, in reality, a parking space marked with the International Symbol of Accessibility is exclusively available for people with disabilities. I think using "accessible" is appropriate for describing walkways and buildings that have features that make them accessible to people using wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, or other devices that assist in mobility. Using this term to describe seating or parking spaces that are only available for people with disabilities, however, can be unclear.
I am really intrigued by the fact that while the "International Symbol of Accessibility" language is universal, the images are not. Compare these two images. The symbol on the right is the one we are familiar with in the states, the symbol on the left is from Canada. The simple adjustment of putting the person's arms in a moving position and allowing the person to lean forward puts that person in motion. The wheelchair is a device assisting in mobility. In comparison, the image on the right is the stagnant figure we are all familiar with. Tell me if you disagree, but this traditional image looks "wheelchair bound" to me. Canada's image looks active and in control. As we make an effort to update our language, I think its time we also update our image.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
The DMV and Disabilities
The use of the term "handicap" or "handicapped" is no longer considered kosher. Since we had some difficult examples regarding parking for the disabled, I checked out the websites of some DMVs. It seems that DMVs lean one way or the other, but the term "handicap" is pretty common. States like California, Virginia, and the District of Columbia all seem to be hopping on the "accessible parking" wagon, but check out the images from different DMVs above. The left is from North Carolina's site and the right is from Nebraska's.
Interestingly enough, if you look up "handicapped" in Wikipedia, you are redirected to the page for "disability." And thus, the old term is slowly being pushed out of common use. I must note however, that if you look in the above screen shots, you will notice how "handicapped" is defined. North Carolina is looking for proof of permanence and Nebraska is looking for someone who applies to certain requirements:
"To qualify, the applicant must have a certified medical condition that limits personal mobility resulting in the applicant's inability to travel more than two hundred feet without assistance such as a wheelchair, crutch....."
So, we are working with multiple definitions here, and unfortunately for the RTC guidelines, there seems to be an inherent requirement for the government to define a severe disability. And yet, still I am wondering here how far off the concept of "disabled" is from "handicapped," especially since the "dis" part seems far more negative. How quickly can a term such as "handicapped" actually disappear from our culture? It's just takes so much time regardless of how much an organization fights for it.
Jessi
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
News
So, this is not meant to be my post, but the article I am linking was brought to my attention and I felt I should share it with the class. While disability sort of disappears in the article, it is interesting how it is the focus of the headline.
This article hits disability, politics, race and religion all in a few short columns of text. An audio clip is also available.
If you want some really fascinating reading and a view of the average internet Joe's (or Jane's) writing, check out the comments on the article.
Anyway, here's the link.
http://www.newsleader.com/article/20100222/NEWS01/2220318
This article hits disability, politics, race and religion all in a few short columns of text. An audio clip is also available.
If you want some really fascinating reading and a view of the average internet Joe's (or Jane's) writing, check out the comments on the article.
Anyway, here's the link.
http://www.newsleader.com/article/20100222/NEWS01/2220318
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Capitalizing (on) Disability: A Unit(y) in Professional Editing
The following is the presentation I gave at the 2010 WRTC Faculty Symposium on Friday.
I use my experience as a professional writer and editor for nonprofit, corporate, and academic environments to discuss various processes and forms of writing in my classes. For example, my work for a public relations department housed in an agency that helps people with disabilities has helped me to critically think about how we write and edit subjects, to borrow from Foucault, who among others, says that discourse about an object in a certain time, a certain space, constructs that object. To know something, to make something real, we talk about it, we document it, we notate behaviors, actions, opinions of subjects—and it is that documentation that builds a history of interpretation about the subject, and thus builds a history of the subject itself. In this way, people, objects, whatever, are always rhetorically constructed.
This is, of course, quite evident in Othered people; marginalized groups are constructed as Other by those in the norm, and as specialists in writing, rhetoric, and tech comm, we spend time talking about how people talk about such groups, such subjects. My focus, then, is on representations of people who are deaf, reflecting a unit on editing disability in my TechSci Editing. In this course we discuss that, as editors, we’re not simply editing other people’s words and images; we’re taking part in editing those people—their values and standards—themselves. And not simply the people who write the words we’re editing, but the also the people writers are writing about. We’re also situating ourselves among standards, sometimes competing standards, and we must be aware of the positive and negative consequences of following one standard over another.
Take for example, the word deaf. Deaf scholar and rhetorician Brenda Brueggemann, among others, notes the difference between a lowercase “d” deaf and a capitalized “d” Deaf. Lowercasing the word deaf represents the audiological problems of hearing. Capitalizing the word Deaf connotes Deaf culture, a community of people who use sign language to communicate, who advocate for the rights of Deaf people, who are quite aware of being and participating in that community in order to forward the values of what it means to be deaf. From a practical standpoint, these constructions make sense for editors who work as advocates for the rights of people with disabilities. As a public relations person for this nonprofit way back when, I worked with one of our departments called the Chicago Hearing Society, who maintained the position that Brueggemann takes: capitalizing Deaf whenever we’re talking about people who are deaf. And so, when I wrote, for example, press releases for CHS, I would, of course, capitalize the "D". Then I’d send out the release to media throughout Chicagoland. The largest newspapers in Chicago, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, for example, would print some of those news releases, but they’d edit the word deaf with a lowercase “d”. Now, this might not seem a big deal to the general reader; I suspect it’s what the reader would expect to see, and it certainly follows the AP style guide’s recommendations to not put explicit focus on a disability, which is what capitalizing the "D" does. It brings focus onto a word that we normally see as lowercase, emphasizing something different about this so-called disability.
And that’s part of the problem for Deaf people, for Deaf culture. Lowercasing the "D" is seen by—at least by Deaf people I worked with—as stripping a bit of identity away from them. Capitalizing on the capitalizing of the word Deaf gives Deaf people a sense of pride, of community membership, of the importance of belonging, of promoting worthwhile ideologies. Despite a 1990 recommendation by the American Society for Newspaper Editors’ who recommended capitalizing Deaf to connote culture, many editors have been slow to adopt such a suggestion. And so, we have Othered standards that compete with more hegemonic standards. And, quite frankly, at the end of the day, it really does sometimes come down to picking battles: do we as advocates for disability and linguistic rights refuse to write press releases to inform the public about our services, about Deaf culture, if publications won’t consider our own standards? Or do we just let it go? The answer to this last question, for me, is no. I continue to fight, continue to resist, unquestioned standards.
So, here, my company’s editorial policy conflicts with another institution’s editorial policy—both adding up to construct a history of our subjects—in this case, those who are deaf. And this competition reflects a history of struggle. In addition to struggling against discrimination against people with disabilities in the workforce, in education, and in other institutions there is the challenge to be heard, to be listened to, and to be so in a way that does not jeopardize or erase individual as well as collective agency, experience, and identity . . . an identity that some people with disabilities—not all—want to construct for themselves and to resist the identities other, more powerful institutions construct for them. And it’s that more powerful construct—the lowercase "d"—that the general reader has knowledge of. The struggle does get tiring, though, and I no longer do public relations. Instead I teach about these experiences in order to make students aware that these issues exist—and that, hopefully, they buy into strategic resistance as well, learning for themselves what battles are important enough to fight.
I use my experience as a professional writer and editor for nonprofit, corporate, and academic environments to discuss various processes and forms of writing in my classes. For example, my work for a public relations department housed in an agency that helps people with disabilities has helped me to critically think about how we write and edit subjects, to borrow from Foucault, who among others, says that discourse about an object in a certain time, a certain space, constructs that object. To know something, to make something real, we talk about it, we document it, we notate behaviors, actions, opinions of subjects—and it is that documentation that builds a history of interpretation about the subject, and thus builds a history of the subject itself. In this way, people, objects, whatever, are always rhetorically constructed.
This is, of course, quite evident in Othered people; marginalized groups are constructed as Other by those in the norm, and as specialists in writing, rhetoric, and tech comm, we spend time talking about how people talk about such groups, such subjects. My focus, then, is on representations of people who are deaf, reflecting a unit on editing disability in my TechSci Editing. In this course we discuss that, as editors, we’re not simply editing other people’s words and images; we’re taking part in editing those people—their values and standards—themselves. And not simply the people who write the words we’re editing, but the also the people writers are writing about. We’re also situating ourselves among standards, sometimes competing standards, and we must be aware of the positive and negative consequences of following one standard over another.
Take for example, the word deaf. Deaf scholar and rhetorician Brenda Brueggemann, among others, notes the difference between a lowercase “d” deaf and a capitalized “d” Deaf. Lowercasing the word deaf represents the audiological problems of hearing. Capitalizing the word Deaf connotes Deaf culture, a community of people who use sign language to communicate, who advocate for the rights of Deaf people, who are quite aware of being and participating in that community in order to forward the values of what it means to be deaf. From a practical standpoint, these constructions make sense for editors who work as advocates for the rights of people with disabilities. As a public relations person for this nonprofit way back when, I worked with one of our departments called the Chicago Hearing Society, who maintained the position that Brueggemann takes: capitalizing Deaf whenever we’re talking about people who are deaf. And so, when I wrote, for example, press releases for CHS, I would, of course, capitalize the "D". Then I’d send out the release to media throughout Chicagoland. The largest newspapers in Chicago, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, for example, would print some of those news releases, but they’d edit the word deaf with a lowercase “d”. Now, this might not seem a big deal to the general reader; I suspect it’s what the reader would expect to see, and it certainly follows the AP style guide’s recommendations to not put explicit focus on a disability, which is what capitalizing the "D" does. It brings focus onto a word that we normally see as lowercase, emphasizing something different about this so-called disability.
And that’s part of the problem for Deaf people, for Deaf culture. Lowercasing the "D" is seen by—at least by Deaf people I worked with—as stripping a bit of identity away from them. Capitalizing on the capitalizing of the word Deaf gives Deaf people a sense of pride, of community membership, of the importance of belonging, of promoting worthwhile ideologies. Despite a 1990 recommendation by the American Society for Newspaper Editors’ who recommended capitalizing Deaf to connote culture, many editors have been slow to adopt such a suggestion. And so, we have Othered standards that compete with more hegemonic standards. And, quite frankly, at the end of the day, it really does sometimes come down to picking battles: do we as advocates for disability and linguistic rights refuse to write press releases to inform the public about our services, about Deaf culture, if publications won’t consider our own standards? Or do we just let it go? The answer to this last question, for me, is no. I continue to fight, continue to resist, unquestioned standards.
So, here, my company’s editorial policy conflicts with another institution’s editorial policy—both adding up to construct a history of our subjects—in this case, those who are deaf. And this competition reflects a history of struggle. In addition to struggling against discrimination against people with disabilities in the workforce, in education, and in other institutions there is the challenge to be heard, to be listened to, and to be so in a way that does not jeopardize or erase individual as well as collective agency, experience, and identity . . . an identity that some people with disabilities—not all—want to construct for themselves and to resist the identities other, more powerful institutions construct for them. And it’s that more powerful construct—the lowercase "d"—that the general reader has knowledge of. The struggle does get tiring, though, and I no longer do public relations. Instead I teach about these experiences in order to make students aware that these issues exist—and that, hopefully, they buy into strategic resistance as well, learning for themselves what battles are important enough to fight.
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