11.02
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting a guy named Wade Wingler. Wade is the Director of Assistive Technology for INDATA. The INDATA project is a program of the Easter Seals Crossroads that offers services and knowledge to the community with the goal of making technology available to those with disabilities.
Web Services, and Butler in general, has been quite cognizant of our need to make our websites (and other information channels) accessible to those with visual, auditory and other types of impairments. Rob Hartman, an IT staff member who splits his time with Student Disability Services, has been instrumental in helping us all stay aware of and compliant with the various challenges that ADA, Section 508 and WAI create for us. Rob coordinated Wade’s visit as well.
Although I did make an audio recording of the session, I am yet to get it exported from my iPhone in a useful format to post here. I hope to do that soon. Meanwhile, I did want to mention that Wade found few issues with Butler’s current top-level pages. Most of the issues he found are quick fixes.
There is a Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool called WAVE that I think all of us on Web Services should install in our Firefox browsers. We are missing an H1 tag on our home page and the search box is unlabeled, but many of the important coding practices have been followed. So, when he stepped through our site using JAWS for Windows, the screen-reading software worked quite well and enabled him to effectively traverse our site as a blind person.
We will always have things to learn in this area and will constantly be challenged to provide the next level of assistive support for our website consumers (closed captioned video, e.g.), but due to our early stance on this issue and our adoption of key Web standards, we have made great strides in making our content accessible to all who seek it.