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Lynn Zummo: Welcome to our Webnet meeting June. This is
the last meeting of the 09'-10' season. Sorry, I work for Cal
Performances and we were on by season. So this is the last meeting.
We usually reserve it for accessibility and for Lucy's group. So
without further ado, I'm going to get started with some
introductions. The first I was offered the opportunity to just give
a little bit of history of Webnet. Webnet's been around for about 13
years, and it is a group of volunteers who produce a meeting every
other month on topics that are generally of interest to web
developers on campus. It doesn't have to be necessarily someone who
works directly with web editing. It could be a programmer who is
doing applications programming. It could be someone who is doing
writing for the web. It could be a graphic designer. We have, like
I said, meetings every other month. And then in addition to those
meetings the general Webnet meetings, which you are all here for, we
have every other month. On the off months a meeting for special
interest group for Webnet editors. So, that is a different subgroup
of this group. There are, I don't know, six of us who are on this
steering committee for Webnet. We determine what topics are going to
be available each year and then we set up the schedule and invite you
all to come and listen to presenters and panelists. So my name is
Lynn Zummo. I don't think I said that. My name is Lynn Zummo. I am
the new technology coordinator for Cal Performances. And I am on the
steering committee for Webnet. So this is -- like I said, we usually
reserve the last meeting of the year for accessibility. And this is
the fourth time that we have done a meeting with Lucy's group. So
I'm really pleased that we are able to do this for the campus. It
seems to be a really hot topic. And so, anyway, I'm going to
introduce Lucy Greco, and I am really happy that she's available to
do these kind of meetings for us. Oh, by the way there is going to
be a sign-in sheet that comes around. I forgot to mention that. So
please write down your name and e-mail address and whatever it asks
for on that. She is one of the leaders of the campus Webnet, or the
campus Web Access Group and the access technology specialist for the
Center for Disabled Students. Lucy.
>> Lucy Greco: Thank you, Lynn. I'm very proud to be here
today. And I'm actually very proud to work at Berkeley as the
assistive technology specialist because I see this room full of
people, and everybody here is here to talk about accessibility. I
have never ever been rejected when I go to people and talk to them
about accessibility on this campus. People are always very
interested, very happy about accessibility. And even people who say,
"Oh, I don't know if this is accessible or not and I'm really worried
about it." Really have done a good job because they've at least got
that niggling in their mind and they've taken the first step and come
and ask about accessibility. So, I want everybody to give Berkeley a
round of applause for having a great accessibility environment. So
to give a little bit of history of web access, web access was formed
five and a half years ago as a group of people interested in forming
a policy on campus about technology in general and accessibility
primarily for that technology. And they met for about five or six
months and worked on kind of a draft policy which continued over the
next year, year and a half and actually got forwarded to the Office
of the President as a system-wide policy. It got denied. I'm sad to
say. But that denial was not, we're not interested in having a
policy on accessibility. We just don't know where the funding is
going to come from to sponsor that policy. So, we kind of stepped
back for a bit and the Office of the President said the campuses need
to take responsibility and that's where we come in because Berkeley
is currently ahead of every other campus in its accessibility
initiatives. Our web access group now runs clinics once a week where
somebody can request a clinic for any website they want that they're
working on or any web application they are working on. It doesn't
even have to be a web. It just needs to be something computer
related, bring it into the group and we run it through a screen
reader. We have experts who are in the room who look at the coding,
look at how the page is laid out and try and figure out ways to make
that website more accessible and inevitably more useable. We had a
BILD grant two years ago, which the BILD, grant how many of you are
familiar with that? Is the Berkeley Inclusion and Leadership
Diversity grant where we actually went out and specifically worked on
a couple of staff websites to see make them more accessible, which
was very successful. And now we've been in so many websites in the
clinic environment that I've been going through and trying to
actually catalog all the websites we've done and I've lost count.
So, on the sign-up sheet there's a slot there for people who might
want to bring their website or application to us for a web review.
Please put "yes" on the sign-up sheet and we will contact you and you
will get a chance to fill it out, or go through a web client
application review. Let's see, I think I didn't miss anything. I
would like to recognize all the web access members in the room. If
you could all stand, please. Hopefully I didn't miss anybody as they
walked in. We have Jon Hays from ETS, Steve McConnell from the
NewsCenter, Karen Eft from Office of the CIO, Kim Steinbacher from,
what is your department nowadays? Equity and Inclusion. Okay. Did
I miss anybody? Caroline Boyden, my co-lead, the most important
person, my co-lead from the Office of Letters and Sciences. And I
wouldn't be able to do web access without her because I may know how
to screen reader works but she knows how the coding works. I now
would like to hand over the meeting to Shel Waggener our Assistant
Vice Chancellor of Information Technology and the campus CIO, who has
been our biggest supporter and our strongest mainstay. When we go to
Shel and say something is wrong, we need accessibility in something,
he has never turned us away. He has always helped us. He has always
sponsored us. In fact, he is sponsoring this session today. He is
the one doing the recording of this session so that we can post it on
the web and have it archived for posterity. So, Shel, I'm turning it
over to you. And thank you very much for moderating our panel.
>> Shel Waggener: Thank you very much, Lucy, and I think we
should all start by putting our hands together in a special round of
applause for Lucy for all of her personal efforts to make all of this
happen. [applause] You know, one of the things that makes Berkeley
such a special place is people's passion for lots and lots of topics,
and this is one that I think there is a large number of individuals
on the campus who feel very passioned about. We have but three
panelists today, but I think we could have had a table full of
panelists of people who really care about this subject. But I'm
excited to be able to present the panelists today and hopefully have
a real interactive dialog with all of you on where we see web access,
web technologies, accessibility playing a role today and going in the
future and where you see the needs, and hopefully you'll have some
good questions and we can play stump the panelists a little bit as
well. So starting to my left, our first panelist is Jon Mires. John
is an accessibility expert with the Center for Accessible
Technologies. It's a local nonprofit group organization that among
other things provides consulting services to corporations, libraries,
governments to help them on creating accessible websites. Welcome,
Jon. Our next panelist is Tom Holub. Tom's the director of
computing for the College of Letters and Sciences here on the campus.
He first joined the L&S computing resource team in the desktop world
in 1995 and then eventually letting no good deed go unpunished was
promoted into management over time and took responsibility for that
group in2000 and has held that role as director of the Letters and
Sciences computing since August of 2000. He's very active in quite a
few committees on campus and cares deeply about delivering solutions
through technologies to everyone and all of our communities on
campus. He's also the co-chair of the IT Managers' Forum to provide
a forum for IT managers to address these issues. So, welcome, Tom.
And our final panelist is Bill Alison. Bill is a senior manager
within the Berkeley's IS&T information and services technology group.
Bill runs the web application's unit for that group and provides
expert application support and leadership in a number of areas
including open source development. Not just on central or
enterprise-wide applications but also on departmental and locally
developed applications. And he again is an active participant in
many campus communities. Not the least of which is his current role
as chair of the ITAC or Architecture Committee for Information
Technology. He's also participated extensively in our security
committees in our road map work. So, welcome, Bill Allison. And I'm
here as a moderator today, not as an expert in web accessibility or
even, I'm sad to say, today an expert in application development as I
atrophy my skills by the day. But I was in a past life an
application developer as well as system administrator and I worked in
technology for many, many years. And one of the things that is
important about this subject to me is the challenge of change. We
often think in terms of solving a problem is an event; it's a
one-time thing. And if we could just get that website to be
accessible today, it would solve the problem. I think as
technologists one of the things that we are trained to realize is
that, you know, the half-life of a solution is getting shorter every
year. Whatever work you put in today, you should expect it will only
be around as long as that technology is prevalent. And, in fact, the
ability to decide what is going to be prevalent no longer rests with
the CIO or with the technology managers or the leaders. It actually
rests with every individual, an individual's choice. That presents
an enormous challenge for creating experiences that are accepting of
all communities. You can imagine if you solve a problem like
accessibility in a enterprise application, and you work very hard to
make that work for all communities, you can expect to live with that
for two, three, four, five years. Creating an application today you
may need to create an application that's only going to be around for
60 days or 30 days. And it's possible to do that by the nature of
the underlying infrastructure that exists today. Many companies
don't even have IT departments. They have people that are putting
solutions together from other technology organizations, cloud
computing, consulting firms, et cetera. So there's a very dynamic
environment going on. And a lot of that is being infused today with
an almost inexorable march towards technologies, full multimedia and
rich user experience that creates particular challenges for
accessibility. In many cases we have websites that are presenting
content that are not able to be converted into accessible formats and
profiles. It isn't just a visual, it's audio, it's color, it's all
kinds of aspects of those presentations that are particularly
challenging for us because the devices, the tools that are being
developed on a daily basis want to push the edge of what those
technologies can do. I think many of you would have heard or saw the
iPhone4 announcement yesterday. You know, not the least of which in
the myriad of Steve Jobs pontificating about waxing poetically about
his wonderful device, but he did in fact break ground on something
that we've been waiting for since the Jetsons and the ability to have
full video conferencing and video phone calls one-to-one and
potentially over time one-to-many in a personal device. I was moving
a machine at my home the other day out of the garage, and it occurred
to me that my little phone device here has more memory, ten times,
and a faster processor, more than ten times than that PC had that
needed wheels that weighed so much when I went to move it. What does
that do for application development for us? Everything is going
mobile and everything is going multimedia. So all of the work in web
accessibility from, say, five years ago when Lucy and team started
web access to create a policy, in many cases one of the challenges of
those policies outdated because they're written about specific
technologies. For those of you that don't know, we have a huge
problem with content today for educational content. Many of the
federal legislative statutes that are on the books assume that all
that content was in books. So what do they do to make them
accessible? They say, yes, for no cost cut the spine off the book
and feed it into a scanner. Is that the most arcane thing you've
heard of? The publishers will not give us the electronic text in all
cases, but they'll give us a book, which we can cut the spine off and
feed into a scanner to convert it into machine-readable format so
that then we can have it available for accessibility purposes. The
world is moving much faster than many business models, many laws and
many policies. So my role is to ensure that Berkeley is keeping up
with the world or in many cases leading it where we can. I do serve
on a committee for the system on accessibility and have done so on
and off for the last several years. And I'm happy to say that we are
reinvigorating that effort at the system-wide level because we still
believe, in spite of the perceived unfunded mandate of designing for
accessibility that it is really a requirement that we set standards
by which there are appropriate expectations for the delivery of our
content, our scholarly experience to the world needs to be made
accessible to all communities. And so we need to make sure that
we're keeping up with those policies. So that's a little bit of my
background and what I've been working on. I think it wouldn't happen
again, you know, without people with a passion for this. And I've
learned a lot from our web access group, and I hope I can learn a lot
today as well. So again, I'd encourage you to ask questions as we
go. We are going to give each of the panelists the opportunity to
speak about their areas of expertise, what they're working on, their
specific challenges that they're dealing with and what their focuses
are. And then we will also intersperse some questions throughout
that. So feel free to ask during the session. But we left time at
the end as well for anyone to take the discussion in a direction
that's most appropriate for you. So why don't we start with Jon.
I'll turn to Jon and ask him about really the history of your
organization, I think, the Center for Accessible Technologies has a
great name. What's its real mission and its focus and how did you
get involved with Berkeley?
>> Jon Mires: Sure. Well, first of all thank you for
inviting me here. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. A little
bit about CforAT, which is the acronym we go by. We've been around
for about 25 years. We're a nonprofit based in Berkeley. And we
were the first assistive technology center in the country. Assistive
technology center is basically a place or an organization that
connects people with assistive technology will help them do their
everyday tasks, whether it be for work or for home life or for that
sort of thing. And we think of assistive technology broadly, so not
necessarily high-tech devices. But if you think about someone who
has dexterity difficulties with their hand and holding a pencil is
challenging, then wrapping a bunch of rubber band around a pencil is
a form of assistive technology. So we serve, expand that to
everything we do. So we're looking for the best-fit clients. And
our clients tend to usually be, they range the whole gamut of age
ranges. So from little kids who are in preschool who haven't learned
to talk yet or something like that and are trying to communicate with
their parents totell them they're hungry to seniors who are aging
perfectly normally but are having vision problems and that sort of
thing. So we work a lot with schools and we work a lot with the
Department of Rehab on helping people find solutions to technology.
And the last five or six years we have we started getting requests to
look at the accessibility of people's websites. And for the past
five years we've been pretty heavily involved in that. I was asked
to talk today about our experience working with corporations and sort
of how you get them to think accessibility and work on it and keep
working on it after done working with them. But first I think it's
worth saying a little bit about our organizational philosophy around
web accessibility. We do this work because we're trying to help
people, not punish people. So we try to avoid the sort of being the
dentist of the web accessibility world. So you know you have a
problem or you think you might have a problem but you don't really
want to go talk to anyone about it because you're afraid of what the
dentist might say or how they might make you feel or in our case that
we might call lawyers on you or something. So, we try to avoid that
approach 100 percent. So, we look at this as a collaborative process
with organizations we work with. And some of them do come to us
because they are being sued by someone else or threatened to be sued
by someone else for not providing equal access. But our relationship
with them is more about how can we actually improve this so it's
working for people. Another piece of our philosophy is that we shared
the view that Shel articulated which is there is no such thing as a
100 percent accessible web page or web application. Because the
moment you get there, the technology changes or the way users
interact with it changes or there's always a user or a situation that
you didn't think of. So, we don't think of it as some sort of end
goal that you're striving for but a process that is always part of
your development and always part of your planning and design. The
other big piece is that we see accessibility as not something that is
an add-on or a separate set but a subset of usability. So one of the
comments we hear a lot is, "Well, we don't, our audience doesn't
include any people with disabilities." Or, "Well, you know, we
haven't gotten any complaints so we know it's fine." First of all,
that's probably not true that your audience doesn't include anyone
with disabilities, but more importantly or as importantly as making
your website more accessible tends to help all users. There are
certain instances where there are specific things you do maybe
technical aspects of your coding or something that are for a very
particular type of disability. But for the most part the things that
you do for making your website accessible apply to everyone. A good
example is video. So we always say you should caption your video and
provide a transcript because not everyone will be able to see the
video. So everyone always thinks of blind users and deaf users or
people who are hard-of-hearing. But the reality is that a lot of
people benefit from having closed captions or transcripts. Like I'm
sure all of you are going to watch the video of this panel over and
over and over again, and your co-workers in the cubes next to you or
in the desk next to you are going to get tired of hearing my voice
over and over again. And so you're going to want to have another way
to watch it. So, a lot of people are going to fit from that type of,
if you call it an accommodation, but really it's applicable to
everyone. And then the last piece of what we do is, and I mentioned
this when I was talk about the pencil analogy but is to try to expand
people's view of who the audience really is or who is benefiting from
the accessibility improvements that you might make. Depending on the
study or survey you read, you'll here that maybe between 10 and 20
percent of the population has some sort of disability. And if you
look at the 2000 census, I think it's 19.3 percent of allpeople have
a permanent or long-term disability that affects their daily life.
So that's a pretty high number and that's way less than the actual
number because there are lots of people who functionally are similar,
have similar functional limitations but would never classify
themselves as having a disability. Some of your parents might fall
into that category where they are aging perfectly normally but your
vision or your hearing or something else may be functionally
identical to someone who classifies himself as someone who has a
disability. The other great thing about disability is that it is one
of the few protected classes that anyone can enter. So you can
become disabled at any moment. And so when people say we don't have
any visitors to our site who are disabled, you could have a whole a
lot depending on what happens tonight. So this is sort of a morbid
kind of way of looking at it. But if you're riding your bike and you
break your arm and you are in a sling for a few weeks, all of a
sudden you can't press control-alt-delete at the same time and you
can't, and maybe it's your mouse hand and you can't use your mouse.
You have to use your mouse with your other hand and then type with
that hand. Well, you're probably, If that's a few weeks you're
probably not thinking of yourself as a person with a disability.
You're probably thinking, well, I'm hurt, this will get better and
it's a pain. But functionally it's identical to someone who doesn't
have a hand. So the point of all this is that this impacts a lot of
people, probably more than you can really even imagine. And so, a
lot of what we do is convincing people that this is actually true.
And what we've been doing for the last three years or so is we
partnered with the California Emerging Technology Fund, which is a
foundation set up by the merger of Pacbell and SBC, I think, who is
basically trying to spend down the money they were given as part of
that merger to improve broadband access for under served groups in
California. And so one of the under served groups is people with
disabilities. And so what we've been doing is through our
partnership we are able to provide no-cost technical assistance to
organizations interested in improving their accessibility. It's
actually a lot like your web access group. And it's is a pretty rare
thing that you can get free professional consulting on accessibility.
So that's a great resource that you have but we're trying to extend
that to other organizations. So the basic model is an organization
can come to us and we'll review their site and invite them in to see
people who are blind or can't use a mouse or deaf using their sight
so they can sort of see, wow, that's pretty serious. We need to make
some changes. And then we help them along with those changes. What
they get out of it is some free help and learning how to start and
how to think about this. And some help writing guidelines that will
extend after we're done working with them. What we get out of it is
a chance to spread it to large corporations that otherwise might not
have the time or inclination or money to get started on it. And we
can also give them recognition at an annual awards dinner which helps
us increase the whole issue of accessibility in general. For
instance, last year we worked Intel, BART, TechSoup, worked with Gap
in the past. By saying, look, these organizations are doing this,
they're small and large organizations. A lot of the arguments about
we don't have the money or the time are, don't have to be a block to
doing anything at all. So we try to show them how to get started and
continue that work. And so, what are the benefits? Well, I mentioned
a few of them already. Additional ones are, I think the biggest one
absolutely is you have a larger potential audience. If you've never
heard a complaint about your site being inaccessible, it may be
because no one knows how to contact you. And so if you said to most
people, well, there's potentially 10 to 20, maybe as high as 40 to 50
percent of people out there who can't use your site, they would say,
they would drop everything and say this is a totally untapped
resource for us whether it is customers or perspective students or
whatever your situation is. That technique does not tend to work very
well because it is so hard to quantify the size of that market. So
it's easy for me to say, well, the census is 19.3 percent and that's
our thing. But for some reason people have a hard time actually
saying, wow, that's really big. Because you tend to think, well,
things are fine and so this is a kind of a big issue. But the fact
is it is a much larger potential audience. The other thing is that
it doesn't do any harm and it doesn't have to cost a lot of money.
So, we hear all the time, I don't want to have just a plain text
site. We need Javascript and we need video on our site. Well,
accessibility has a hard time keeping up with the latest standards
and the latest technologies. But it's definitely possible and there
are lots of people all over the world working on this all the time.
So you can have a nice attractive site and you can use Ajax and all
sorts of things and still make it really accessible. And it's just a
matter of learning how to do it. Another thing is we often see that
sites have improved search engine rankings after they've made their
site accessible. This is another one that's very appealing to
companies but also hard to quantify because it sort of depends on how
bad it was when you started. So, it's not easy to say, well, you'll
move up four places on Google for your preferred key words or
something like that. But all of the things that tend to go along
with accessible coding like well structured documents and unique page
titles and all sorts of things, they overlap a lot with search engine
optimization. Another piece is that good accessibility relies on
using Javascript for progressive enhancement. So this is another one
that helps all users because there's still a nontrivial amount of
organizations that block Javascript for security purposes. And so
that type of Java intends to help a lot of users who otherwise might
see a blank page, or I can't tell you how many times we see pages
where all the menus disappear if you're not using Javascript.
There's no warning that you're not seeing something. Or everything
looks fine but you can't submit any forms, that kind of thing. So,
these types of things tend to help all people. Their thing is that,
well, if people can find information on your site better and it is
accessible for them, they're less likely to call your customer
support line or that sort of thing, which to me is not the purpose of
doing this. But it's an argument that speaks to the bottom line.
And a lot of the bottom-line metrics that decision makers and web
managers tend to look at, like how long are people staying on the
site? How many conversations are there? Are people signing up for
our e-mail list? Are they buying products? Are they requesting
information? A lot of those go up when after you've made your site
more accessible. So, that's an argument we use. And one I wouldn't
underestimate is the morale of developers. So developers tend to,
especially in large institutions, are sort of, I have to tread
carefully here because there's so many developers here. But they
tend to be viewed as the implementers and not so much the decision
makers or driving the process. And it's really a fulfilling, as a
developer, it's really fulfilling to say, well, we did this because
it was right and we figured it out. And it's -- it involves a lot of
problem solving. So I'm not going to pretend making a website or
especially a complex interactive website accessible is easy. It's
definitely doable. But it takes a lot of problem solving and
creative thinking. And that is really, as a developer, I find that
really fulfilling and sort of engaging. And that with some of the
corporations we worked with, we've heard from them that their
developers in general are a little bit happier now that they're,
they've sort of gotten together and accomplishedthis piece they
wanted to and they're excited about it and they want to keep working
on it. But it's also impacting their other work. Again, that's a
hard one to quantify. It depends a lot on the organizational
dynamics, but it shouldn't be underestimated. And then we can talk
more later about sort of the mechanics of how we do our work. But
the key thing for us is that to keep the benefits going,
organizations need a champion within the organization. So, hopefully
that's someone high up who can say, look, this is important and we're
going to do it. But it can also be someone who is just enthusiastic
about this and cares about it and sort of keeps bringing it up so
that it's almost certain that accessibility benefits will be lost
over time if there isn't a real champion with at least some decision
making ability in the organization. And the next is that you need
internal accessibility guidelines and a process for reviewing and
updating them. So, what this all means, basically, is that it's not
something that someone can do for you. Or they can do it for you,
but then in a few months or maybe as little as one month or a year or
something, all the benefits are going to be lost. So it's something
that needs to happen and then become part of the workflow and the
internal thinking. And our experience is that developers really love
working on accessibility because for most people, unless you're in
this field or you have a disability or a family member with a
disability and you've sat with them while they surfed the web or
tried to check their bank account balance or something, you've never
really thought about this. And that's perfectly normal and
understandable. But it's really sort of a fun thing to work on. And
so developers tend to be really into it and it's more a matter of how
do we institutionalize it? And for that, a champion is good and
updatable documents. So thanks.
>> Shel Waggener: Thank you very much, Jon. One of the
things I often hear from people who want to make this happen is they
equate this with the experience of the curb-cut phenomenon, right?
Where everybody argued against in the legislation for ADA, the
inclusion of universal curb cuts until they started getting put in
and they realized that they benefited everybody. And that everybody
wanted to see them in, and it didn't have anything to do with the
disabled community as much as it had to do with, you know, all of our
ability to get around easy. On the website it's a similar
phenomenon. When you do the work it makes it easier for people to
get around, it makes it easier for people to interact. But the
difference with the curb-cut is a one-time investment. It's done.
Here it's an ongoing investment. Have you developed in your work or
how do you consult with companies around how much additional
investment is it really to keep it involved? Is it more money from a
technical perspective? Is it more process time? What guidance do
you provide?
>> Jon Mires: It's absolutely true without a doubt that
building accessibility and from the start when you're making an
application is much less time and money than retrofitting it or
trying to fix it later. So, some of the organizations we work with
actually higher educational institutions are a good example. They
have tons and tons of pages. And a lot of them are put up by, you
know, a biology professor in 1998 who had a web space and now that's
the biology department website. And it was made with Frontpage or
something. And so we don't necessarily say, well, you should fix
every page. If you have 40,000 pages and they're all really bad,
it's not the best investment to fix every single page. It's just not
practical and it's not really going to provide the most benefits.
Our general view is to, okay, let's get to a point where things are
highly accessible where they need to be and as successful as possible
in other places, and then let's make sure everything that's new is
accessible. And that is actually not a big time or money commitment.
It's just a focus andcommitment. Sort of, you know, a mind
commitment.
>> Shel Waggener: I think I have 40,000 pages from my
department alone here. But Tom actually does have 40,000 pages with
L&S that he has to manage. And, Tom, you engage in a lot of people
in trying to ensure that content is accessible. And it's been an
ongoing challenge for you. Why don't you describe a little bit how
you engage the user community to make that possible.
>> Tom Holub: Sure. So as Shel mentioned, I've been working
with this group since 1995, and we've been doing, among other things,
web design and application design for that entire period with all the
implications of the different eras of web design that that implies.
And I'd like to say that I came to a understanding and interest in
web accessibility out of sort of deep-seated interest in social
justice issues and things like that. It was more accidental than
that. That we were transitioning from being a group of geeks who
also did web design to being more a professional web design shop and
hired our first application developer, web developer who was
seriously in that role. Melanie Archer was her name. Some of you
may have worked with her. And she happened to have a very strong
personal emphasis on accessibility and really accuracy of code and
adherence to standards. That's kind of where she came in from is
that we have to have valid HTML and it has to be accessible and meet
these guidelines and things. So, I as a manager of this group, I
think one of the things that's interesting about accessibility is
it's actually a topic that a lot of people can go from never having
thought about to being in full support of very quickly. And we see
that with our customers often. Often they haven't really considered
that there are issues around accessibility with their websites. But
when you bring it up with them, a good portion of them are
immediately, like, that makes total sense and we want you to do this.
So, I made that transition pretty early in this process once we
started real professional web development things. So that focus on
standards compliance, raised the awareness of the issue for me and
for our customers that, you know, and there are two aspects to it.
One is that we can say this is a federal requirement. You know, we
have Section 508 and you have to comply with this. The lawyers may
not a hundred percent agree with that. But we're able to sell that
at least to departments. And it's a -- and the moral obligation
piece that this is something that is just the right thing to do and,
you know we're Berkeley. We have a lot of people who are concerned
with their moral obligations and social justice and such. And in
that through that lens we've been able to have a lot of really
productive conversations with people we're developing for. A couple
of ways that it worked for us as an organization, so my group is
mostly a recharge unit. So we charge departments for our work. And
one of the ways that accessibility helped us is that it gave us some
business advantages in that we were differentiated from many of the
other options that departments had. Once we got them to understand
that accessibility was an issue then they were talking with -- so
there are basically three options for departments in L&S. They can
use us, they can go to a third-party vendor or they can hire the
Chair's nephew. And departments all choose those different options.
There are sites of examples of those all throughout L&S. We can say
once we've raised the awareness of the issues, well, the Chair's
nephew really doesn't know how to do this. We have this expertise
locally and we can say now that you think this is a moral obligation
for you, we can do it and the Chair's nephew probably can't. And
really a lot of the third party web designers are not very up on it
as well. When I've run job interviews for web developers, we've had
to explain what Section 508 means. You know, we'll ask the question:
What do you think about making websites compliant with Section 508.
And probably 80 percent of the developers who come in don't know what
that means, at all. And then you bring up accessibility and then
they'll know what that means as least to some extent, but they're
clearly not versed in it. So, from a business perspective it's
useful for us to be able to say this is something we think is really
important to do on campus, and we have the expertise to do it. And a
lot of your other options for doing this work will not be able to
meet that need. The only concern that people tend to have is what's
it going to cost me? And as Jon mentioned, that is something people
will push back on. But it's really not very expensive to do. It's
expensive to retrofit but to build it in is really not very
expensive. And part of the way we get around that push-back is we
don't ask them. It's just how we design sites. We design them with
accessibility in mind. And we don't charge you extra for the
accessibility testing. It's part of our overall testing. And so
partly people don't see it. But also it's really not an additional
large expense that we incur as developing our sites and our
applications because it's just part of our process. So, from the
actual products that we create, there are some advantages. So the
actual websites we're delivering, the applications we're delivering.
Clearly, there is the advantages of having it accessible to larger
groups of people and not being sued is a good advantage. But beyond
that I think that having concern for accessibility indicates a more
complete approach towards your development process. So, there are
three things that on campus are sadly lacking in most development
processes, except everybody in this room, of course. One is
consideration of the quality of the code. So, so much development
happens that you've got your browser and it seems to work in IE 7 and
Firefox 3.6. So it must be done, right? What percentage of the code
on campus is valid HTML? I don't know what that number is but it's
long. So the fact that you are paying attention to it brings you to
a place where you're having a higher, your code is going to be higher
quality. It's going to be more robust. It's going to work better in
the future on IE 8, IE 9, Firefox 4 when those things come up. It's
also putting you and your customers in a place where you're
considering the needs of the audience. So John also talked about
audiences, and we have heard the same comment that, well, our website
is mostly for our staff and faculty and nobody's disabled in that
population. And that's first of all, that can change. And the
broken arm had nothing to do with the unicycle. I fell down stairs
in Tahoe. I've had that experience of having several months where I
had my right arm broken and having to use our sites, which worked
just great and other sites, which were harder to work with. So your
audience can change, but it opens up the conversation to say, okay,
well, actually your audience isn't just the people on your staff and
your faculty. When we look at your web stats you're actually getting
80 percent of your hits from outside Berkeley. So your big portion
of your audience is potential students or general public, people who
are interested in your discipline or your subject or your faculty.
And that helps open up the conversation about what is the website for
and how do we need to make it work for those different user groups?
So having that accessibility helps open up that conversation and make
the process better. And the other thing that you need that is often
lacking in development is testing procedures. So if you're going to
be developing for accessibility, you're going to be going and looking
at that. And in the end is this thing successful? And what we're
also going to look at the code. Is it valid HTML? Does it work on
these different browsers? So it's one more piece of what's in your
acceptance procedures for your sites or for your applications. But
the fact that you are doing it indicates that you actually have
procedures and testing going on, which again brings that higher level
of being able to say we're, it's part of our professional development
process and it's a differentiator for how we're doing development
verses some of your other options, which may look cheaper on paper
because you're hiring a grad student to do it. You're not going to
get the same type of product at the end of that. And then the other
thing that has been a business advantage, I think for us, is that
once you've set accessibility as a goal, then you're going to hire
people like Caroline. I'm going to embarrass her for a minute. Who
has a very strong focus on, Caroline knew what Section 508 was in the
interview. But that's not specifically because she is advocate for
the disabled or anything. It's that she has a strong concern for
doing things in the proper way. And whether that's making the code
right, making it work on different browsers, different platforms. It
is almost a proxy for a whole different mindset in a developer that
I'm concerned about accessibility. And Caroline has been a great
asset to us. It so happened that we were getting into your
accessibility efforts at around the same time that Diane Walker was
starting the web accessibility group for the first time. So we've
been involved with that group since its inception and it's been a
very useful collaboration, I think. So that's been great. And then
we produced 20, 25, 30 some departmental sites and applications. So
we've had a pretty big impact across our college over the years. And
I think it's been hard to quantify yes. Can we say that how many
students avoided having to make a phone call to the office because
they were able to find information on a website that they wouldn't
have been able to find before we redesigned it. We don't have any
way to really measure those kinds of things but it's clearly in
aggregate. I think that's a real major benefit for us.
>> Shel Waggener: So, Tom, you pointed out the phenomenon
of the Chair's nephew and, in fact, the democratization of
technologies empowering everybody to create, everybody to generate
not just content but applications, environments using tools on the
web. How are you providing guidance to your communities that are
doing this on their own around accessibility issues? Because it
sounds like from a business perspective if they're buying your
services, you're bundling it in. They get the benefit of your
expertise in advance. But you don't want to suggest to them that
they shouldn't do anything on their own. So have you found that
accessibility is an issue for those individuals and leaving it out of
their designs in the beginning.
>> Tom Holub: Well, I think it's something that you can bring
up as a risk. So, it may be that if you cobble something together
using Google sites and various other Google apps, it might wind up
accessible. But if you're talking with a faculty member or chair,
whoever who's got this project do they have any way of assessing
that? Are they going to know at the end whether they've created
something that's going to be accessible? So, I'll bring it up as an
issue and it sometimes will change decisions. Sometimes again we'll
make that distinction between what my grad student can do versus what
I'm going to get if I engage in a more professional design process.
There are, it's not a hundred percent successful. I mean, there's
certainly particularly on smaller scales where you're talking about a
faculty lab or a particular academic project or research project that
is trying, very specifically trying to do things kind of on the
cheap. Some people still throw up their hands. But it's been pretty
successful, I think, getting people at the departmental level and up
to understand the issues. And whether or not they're contracting
with my group there, I think there's a lot more awareness of this is
something I think at least I should be looking at.
>> Shel Waggener: So, Bill, your challenge is a little bit
different. Instead of working with end users, you often work with
departments that have technologists in the department. Youprovide
application development for both large scale applications as well as
departmental applications. What challenges do you have in
representing this question of accessibility when working with
departments who often already bring you pre-built technology and ask
you to take it on or partner with them and developing something new.
>> Bill Allison: Right. And as Jon noted it's a lot more
expensive to retrofit when it's not built in up front. So really I
deal with the questions of accessibilities in two realms. One is as
the chair of the IT architecture committee. And that is thinking
about the problem on the really the more macro scale how's the
university with technology should we weigh in on this? And then the
other is my day job, which is managing the web applications group.
So I'll backup in just a mine minute. And I was just a lot of what
you guys were saying was really resonating with me. So in 2006 Diane
Walker rang me up. And I had heard of Section 508 because we argued
with PeopleSoft extensively and didn't seem to sway them very far on
it. So I was conversant with it. My level of awareness was, you
know, pretty superficial. And as Tom said, in a very short period of
time it's very easy for someone to make the case if the other
person's listening for making stuff accessible. So at the end of
that call it was really clear. And I talked to all of the managers
that work in the web applications group. We all agreed. We were
going to send someone to web access. A bunch of us signed up on the
e-mail list. It seemed like this is something we can do. You know,
like there's a lot in a large university in a complex environment.
We can't do to change the things we want to change, but this is
something where we could really get engaged. So, you know I think
the big challenge is just really organizationally you can make a
commitment, and a lot of people make a commitment and then the phone
rings again and, you know, 100 more e-mails come in that day. And
the challenge is this is a commitment that has to be renewed and it
has to be renewed constantly. And that's why Lucy has been so
valuable for us. Because, you know, frankly she e-mails Shel. Shel
says, "Hey, Bill, what are guys doing about this?" Or Lucy will
e-mail us and she's been very generous about making the lab
accessible. So we committed, we're sending every one of our
developers that are in the area because we're not able to hire people
that necessarily are conversant with a lot of this. But that part of
the expectation is on the job they've got to learn how to do it.
And then they're really psyched. And I think that the trend with
technology supports the thing. As Shel was saying, technology is
moving incredibly fast. I watched a video. You can Google
it on find on Ted Talk - The future of User Interface. Well, this is
scaring me. We were having discussions about mobile technology.
Well, this is about holographic 3-dimensional, you know, stuff where
your pen on the table can interact with the computer. That's going
to bring a whole new realm of challenges. And so going back to the
theme of constantly renewing this, if we're not constantly in
contact with people like Lucy and people in the community, we're
going to diverge. You know, we're going to be still in circa 1999.
Yeah, we were compliant in '99, but you know things have evolved.
First there was 508 and then there was WCAS, the Web Content
Accessibility Standards 10, which mapped the 508. And now there's
two and I think three is in draft. So as the technology changes, we
have to really, really stay engaged with that. And so, I mean, I'm
going to get back to Shel's question. But when we, for us it's the
question of costs. We'll get a customer who has a fixed budget.
They have some flaming systems problem they bring to us, and they
want our help and they want it to be for a predefined cost. And it
might not have been on their radar. And so it's interesting because
we take a very different approach than Tom's group. We'll put a line
item in. We'll say, hey, you know, accessibility it's going to cost
you and it's part of this. And it's kind of like, you know, the
University wasn't there with wheelchair ramps. Susie Castillo-Robson
told me some story about how the physical plant people a long, long
time ago didn't have ramps and all that stuff. And there was
this huge lawsuit. And guess what? We all have ramps. You know,
you can get into pretty much any building here. Well, web it's
a space. It is a way of interacting with the University that is
fundamental. And we're just in the infancy of the web and this
technology. We think, wow, how far it's come and my phone and
everything, but we're just at the beginning, which is slightly
terrifying. So we really, we have to be raising people's awareness.
And so part of it is we get accused of sticking the people with the
bills and stuff, but they need to know that this is an important
thing and relatively speaking it doesn't cost that much when
you consider that, I think John was looking and I Googled
all the census figures, too. And figuring like it's is tens of
millions of people who have visual and auditory impairment. And then
when you couple in the mouse aspect of that, it's affecting a huge
population. And then on campus then if I extrapolated them, just the student population that's a
couple thousand people that are impacted. And it can happen
to anybody. And I have a friend who is a VP at Lexis Nexis. And he
lives in Colorado and makes killer salsa. And he brewed up a batch
of this. He's crazy. And he brewed it up and opened up the top
of the blender and put his head at the top to smell it. And he was blind
for two days. And he re-experienced; he re-experienced the world.
[laughter] And so that is there for us.
>> Shel Waggener: Blinded by salsa, let me get that down. [laughter]
>> Bill Allison: So the truth is though is I think these guys
have said -
>> Shel Waggener: Is that covered in 508? [laughter]
>> Bill Allison: Salsa blindness. I don't know. But we can
do a lot. I think that as people with a lot of pressure on us, we
can feel overwhelmed and we can feel like not one more thing is
getting onto my plate. And the truth is, if we just take a look at
what's involved and walk a mile in those people's shoes, and that's
why going to Lucy's lab is great. You know, we may read a web page
or two and think we know what we're doing, but until you go and watch
someone use the technology, you really don't understand. You know, I
was laughing because initially I think people tried to make our stuff
accessible and they'd type in, you know there's every Berkeley web
page, Steve knows, has the little Campanile at the top and stuff.
And so on all of our systems we had that logo. And we helpfully put
Campanile. So anytime someone used the assistive technology, every
page Campanile, Campanile, Campanile. You know they were sick of the
Campanile. But until you really experience it from their perspective
and that doesn't take a lot of time.
>> Lucy Greco: Sometimes they say "Cam-pa-nile".
>> Bill Allison: Cam-pa-nile? Excellent. Excellent.
>> Shel Waggener: At least it wasn't saying Hoover Tower.
Bill Allison: And there's a real analogy between this issue and
security. So we've done a lot of work with security. It has the
same characteristics. There's policy and federal requirements, state
requirements and large lurking liabilities. And nobody wants to pay
for it because it doesn't bring a perceived value to the perceived
audience of the application. So we systematically looked at how to
make a commitment to security, which is an unfunded mandate. And we
created a program in IST's web application unit called "Secure by
Design". And we did that a year and a half ago and I've since seen
if you Google "Secure by Design", I'm not sure we were first. But
there's a lot of people doing that now. It's kind of a no brainer.
And we're doing the same thing today with accessibility. We have a
software development lifecycle that sort of specifies the steps that
we go through. And up front in the very beginning, we talk about how
threat models work with security. At the same time we talk about who
are the users of this application. What are the types of things they
are going to be doing and we profile that and look at the
accessibility. It's called "Accessible by Design". You know, we're
not that creative. It works. We'll keep using it. I guess I want
to leave it open for some time for questions, but I'll just say one
more thing in the hidden benefits side of this. As the technology
evolves so quickly and things are moving so, you know, dramatically,
the pace is increasing as well. And the fundamental nature of the
changes when you think about the UI that's going to be in place, the
user interface that's going to be around in 10 years. It's going to
be radically different. I mean they are talking about a device you
sit on a table that projects stuff around you. You don't really have
a screen. You interact with your hands and your body with it. We
have to be and we're in the middle of transitioning to do
standards-based development. So all of the development we're doing
today is based on open sourced generally, community sourced and sort
of multi-entity kind of collaborative-based standards. And as long
as we follow those, we're like 90 percent of the way towards
accessible design. It's when we kind of just do stuff in a vacuum
and don't try to adhere to those standards. When the standard comes
out there's a cost to learning it. But if we do that the payoff is
huge. So we've begun decoupling some of the way we present
information from the data that's underneath it from the logic.
That's sort fundamental to software design today. But the dividend
for that, that is when the new thing comes out, it's much easier to
switch from one to the other. So we have that modularity there.
Those are the things that also enable the people with the
accessibility technology to use our stuff. So that's my answer.
>> Shel Waggener: I think you've heard a lot of great input
today from our three panelists. We'd like to hear from the audience
any questions that you have. I was sincere in my stump-the-panelist
question. If you have a question for any of us on any topic related
to accessibility, we have a mic we can pass around. But I'll start
with something I didn't mention before which I think is really
relevant to this community is for many years we designed things based
on paper processes. And then we moved from those paper processes to
basically being automated paper processes, right? We took the paper
processes and we put them into technology and we said, hey, we
automated them. But the current generation of students don't think
in paper. They don't think in linear processes. They think in
parallel terms. Everything is supposed to happen realtime. It's
supposed to happen all the time, 7 by 24. And it's supposed to
happen concurrently. I mean, you know If people are twittering what
they had for lunch instead of telling you later when they see you
what they had for lunch, it's a different world, right? Well, one of
the things that we need to be considering is that's the up and coming
generation. But one of our largest communities and largest audiences
for our information is actually going to be in the elderly community
as we see more and more people coming back for education later in
life. And that's the largest growth segment of the population. Many
of the tools that the students may be designing today may not be
applicable without accessibility built in for that same community for
the elderly community when we want the same content to be available
to both. This isn't just a question of wanting to do the right
thing. This is also a question of needing to do what our mission is
about in dissemination of information. We've got to get to all of
those audiences. And that's a real problem for us right now that we
haven't taken all of those communities into consideration andmany of
our designs. I would like to have you to think about in your own
jobs and your own world where you're making decisions that may be
really tuned to a current generation or the up-and-coming generation,
trying to be this leading edge or bleeding edge as it's comes out in
the holographic projectors. When we have these broad diversities of
communities, we still have to meet and then your savings you may gain
by trying to make something the latest and greatest. Then the latest
and greatest is immediately lost when you then have to convert that
into, you know, other things. You have other challenges. So open
that up for questions? Anybody?
>> Lynn Zummo: Raise your hand and I will bring the microphone over.
>> Audience Member: Bill, you know you talk about developing
new interfaces and systems as opposed to renovating old ones. Have
you ever found that you've been discussing with departments the costs
of propping up their old system versus creating a new one that has
accessibility been shown to save? I mean the fact that they want you
and they both want accessibility and this version is much cheaper.
Have you seen that kind of discussion and decision point?
>> Bill Allison: So, that the question is that have we
encountered departments where the older technology that they had was
a lot cheaper to maintain but it perhaps wasn't accessible and then
the cost of retrofitting that being an issue. Usually by the time
we're seeing a technology look central IT we're pretty expensive.
The number of really small departmental solutions we can provide has
really dropped as we've been held to the standards of financial
accountability for recharge. We break even today and it's an
expense. We're cheap compared to industry. But what I'm saying is
by the time they're coming to us they have a big, they usually have a
pretty sizable problem. And usually we're talking about a large
project. So, as a percentage of the overall effort in our area we're
not seeing that as a big problem. Where I think the issue is for
that and the sweet spot that we can get to is that many people built
an application where a grad student or the nephew or someone built a
system using some of the technologies that were available that have a
very low barrier of entry. So many of the scripting languages you
can start learning a little HTML. And I guarantee you that any one
of you can go to the web and you can learn if you don't already know
a little HTML, you can learn enough in an afternoon to put a good,
probably ugly, but okay looking web page that will get across what
you want to convey. It's another afternoon to begin writing code,
you know, using some of those frameworks? So a lot of people had
jumped in and their department needed something. You know, a
legitimate need that wasn't met in the center of the organization
that they were able to build rapidly. And then now they have 40,000
of those things. But they're not truly an application in the way we
think of them today. And meanwhile in the rest of the world
technology has caught up and we have things like Sharepoint, like
Drupal, like Google docs, like Office Live type things. So there's a
lot of tools that are available either that we can run locally like
Drupal and Sharepoint or things that are run out in the Cloud. And
most departments will be looking to move those little tactical
applications that they had or aggregate into something like
Sharepoint, which is a perfectly good way of dealing with it because
they don't really need to get into an expensive software development
project. So the answer to really the question of how these people
encounter accessibility is those platforms must be accessible. So,
you know, there's a lot of activity in the open source community
among Berkeley people. There's a large vocal. Those people have to
be involved in the Drupal discussions at the national level, and they
are. And that's leading towards the platform being designed for
accessibility. Microsoft is deeply aware of the issue and we
negotiate campus level agreements. And I'm sure Shel can speak to
strategic sourcing. You know accessibility is part of what we put on
the table. In fact, ITAC is working and has been working for a while
on accessibility standards to be built into every RFP where we're
seeking some kind of agreement with a vendor and it's the VPAT. So
it's about scoring the RFP and making the vendor actually put their
true position on the line and holding them accountable if they're
bending the truth. And we're holding them; we will hold them to that.
>> Shel Waggener: Virtually every vendor will respond with a
check mark "yes" their software is accessible because they don't know
what you're asking. And if they know they put a "yes" in that column
it's better for them. But, in fact, we're getting far more
sophisticated and nuanced in the way we're asking what we're asking.
We're evaluating a product right now that we would be interested in
providing a site license for to the whole campus community. Not
passing accessibility, not going to be given the opportunity. Right?
So they're going to lose the business opportunity if they can't
modify their product and they can't guarantee in contractual language
that they will make their product a VPAT standard or otherwise
accessible. And this is not an exceptionally sophisticated problem.
It's something that if particularly for smaller vendors they're
unaware of the business opportunity. And so you need one of our
obligations as a public institution and an educational institution is
to raise that visibility, not just for our own community but for the
market as a whole. Lucy?
>> Lucy Greco: I just wanted to respond to that a little bit
by saying once we've done that work for that vendor and they've come
back and made an accessible product, we're not holding that
accessible product hostage. It's going out into that marketplace and
everybody else is getting that accessible product. The more we take
that effort here, I mean, as a public institution it's our
obligation. Berkeley's taken the lead for many, many years on
accessibility. I mean a lot of people say that Berkeley is the home
of the accessible world, and it's because we here at Berkeley do
things like that. You know, the more we work with vendors to make
things accessible and the more we say we won't buy your product if it
is not accessible, the more everybody, not only here but all over the
world, will benefit from our work.
>> Shel Waggener: So, Jon, I wanted to follow-up on the
previous question around retrofit. When you're providing consulting,
how often do your clients choose to retrofit verses understand the
learnings from the experience and then just go into a rewrite process?
>> Jon Mires: I'd say depends on the size of the application
or site in question. So, for instance, on one extreme if you have
100,000 pages and they're all static HTML, well they're probably not
going to retrofit the whole thing. So it really depends on both.
Part of it is the scope of our consulting agreement, too. Generally
we're not, if you have 100,000 pages we can't review all of them
because by the time we finished it would be obsolete anyway and it
would cost you a fortune. So, we tend to focus on percentages of
sites based on most used features, most important features, most
hitting every template, that kind of thing. And so what, for most
clients it's usually an in-between path where we prioritize things
for them and say, look, this is really important. This is, if you
don't do this you're totally inaccessible. You're losing lots of
visitors. And so, and then we try to set them on a path of
retrofitting older stuff or possible and then making sure everything
new is accessible. And like I said before, the real, the real, when
we feel we've been really successful is the development team is on
board, the marketing an executive teams are on board and so
accessibility becomes a part of the institutional culture. And then
enforcement is, we're not an enforcement agency, but enforcement is
really a nonissue because some of the groups we work with in our
grant funded program they still call us from two or three years ago.
And they say, well, you know, we got this video player, we're trying
to do HTML 5 and get ready for that, but we have these flash
problems. And so what's the best way to do this now? And what's the
best way to plan for the future? And so that's when we say, okay,
they're really getting it. They're thinking about it. They're
getting new technologies and thinking about how it will work with
that. And that's about as much as we can ask for. Because you can't
just say, well, it's accessible and now we're done or we'll just do
this forever every time we post a video. We'll do this because then
you are sort of missing the whole point.
>> Shel Wagggener: Other questions? Here in the middle and up front.
>> Audience Member: Another contributor I think to the
phenomenon of the dean's uncle is the distributed nature at UC
Berkeley where every department, every unit has their own ivory tower
carefully defended against all borders. And there's not for many of
these things, any kind of central support system, any central
knowledge base central tools. Within L&S has the great services of
Tom and Caroline and company, and even there you get a few deans'
uncles building things. How can or is the University making
information, making tools and technologies and assistance available
to these many small places where we've got accidental webmasters
building things based on Frontpage and other great stuff of ten years
ago?
>> Shel Waggener: I think the problem, the heart of that
problem is a combination of the lethargy of change within higher
education matched against the extraordinarily evolving pace of change
and technology, right? So even 15 years ago when some of these
comments we were talking about the age of technology then you were
designing in a client server world, you were dealing with change
being a function of a major dot releases of Windows essentially
things that did get measured in months or even potentially years. In
a world we're looking at if you had said to somebody 15 weeks ago
that Flash was going to maintain its dominance, that HTML 5 was an
emerging standard and you have that same conversation today, you'd
have two entirely different conversations, right? In 15 weeks not to
mention competing ads and fighting marketing pitches between Adobe
and Apple and Google. The evolution is so fast. Then you apply that
to the campus, and you say, okay, we're going to offer a common
solution, a standard solution for the entire campus. In order to do
that, that solution has to evolve at the fastest rate that the
slowest mover can handle. Well, the slowest mover in higher ed, let
me tell you, I've got some emerita faculty who I think we still print
out their e-mails on memo format and give them the 3-part carbon
paper because that's what they're comfortable with and that's what
they want to work with. I haven't seen a mimeograph machine running
lately. I missed the purpling smell. I'm sure somewhere in this
institution we have them. It's important to recognize that because
that does limit the ability of the leading edge to continue to
leverage a common solution. They basically end up having to break
free from the anchor of the common solution that's tied to the
slowest mover. So we have to basically parse our solutions up into
slow mover, medium tier and early adopter rather than a common
solution. Well, to do that it's more expensive. If you're going to
have three tiers, it's more expensive than offering one option.
Corporations and enterprises don't do that. Do you want black or
black as your color? Right? You get one option usually because it's
the cheapest thing to do. They can give you one thing, they can put
all the investment into that and they can make it work very well at a
relatively low cost and sometimes at an extremely low cost. In our
case if we attempted to do that we would not get enough of the
community. So what we have to decide, as an organization, is how
much is the benefit of that lower cost and how much can we get
adoption in principally the middle tier? How much can we expand the
middle tier and recognize that we're going to have to orphan the
slowest mover sooner than we ever would have before. And we're going
to have embrace, allowing the leading edge to churn faster without
impacting the middle. It's a different mindset and a different
financial model and a different approach. But one I believe we're
going to have to embrace if we want to get more cost effective. And
within that cost effective you can then offer things like
Accessibility by Design and Secure by Design because it's part of the
platform, it's part of the framework. If you don't do that, we're
leaving it to every individual to choose their own which inevitably
means their path to solution will often not include accessibility
because they're just trying to get the job done. So unless we can
get everybody trained and keep up with the skills. I think it's a
very complex and challenging question. We have time for one more.
There was one up here in the front. Can we pass the microphone
forward?
>> Audience Member: This is a practical question. I would
like to know a brief answer to the hopefully there is accessibility
built into these products that I'm going to mention. Drupal is
number one, do you feel basically -
>> Jon Mires: Yes, so, the long answer is depends on how you
use it and depends how you present it.
>> Bill Allison: I can give you a short answer within the
Berkeley context which is right before I came over here because I
knew this was just going to come up. I ran the tester, one of the
testers that's recommended against ist.berkeley.edu and we passed.
Now, is that, that's sort of anecdotal? Like it's not as systematic.
>> Audience Member: So it is possible?
>> Bill Allison: It is possible, yeah .
>> Shel Waggener: But it's possible to make it inaccessible
as well. The product won't drive you to accessibility.
>> Tom Holub: The thing about Drupal is it's so modularized.
So you're going to install if you have a complicated site you may
have 10, 15, 20 different custom modules that you're putting in
there. And those may or may not be accessible. I think the core
trunk is fine.
>> Bill Allison: So right now the platform support for Drupal
is in my team and so one of the things that is our responsibility for
running the campus Drupal platform, which will be re leased this
fiscal year, is that the modules that we review and approve must be
accessible. And there's a list of those somewhere.
>> Audience Member: So there's also within Drupal an
accessibility group that I'm a member of. And Drupal as a, you know
the Drupal community has been very responsive to accessibility
questions and so there is four modules, a new thing in accessibility
pledge. I don't know if you're a Drupal user you've probably seen
the Drupal 7 pledge because upgrading to Drupal 6 was such a
nightmare because the modules weren't ready. Module developers are
now pledging that they will be ready for Drupal 7. We are also now
rolling out an accessibility pledge so that if you see that badge on
a module you will know that the developer is committed to making that
module accessible. And this will also be for themes, et cetera.
>> Audience Member: Great.
>> Audience Member: One more product, one more type of
product. Because I try to get people away from these things,
Frontpage and Word converted to HTML.
>> Tom Holub: Oh, oh. Caroline is screaming. Certainly you
can create accessible sites with those products but it takes more
work than the people who are using those products are likely to be
able or willing to do.
>> Audience Member: Thank you.
>> Shel Waggener: Okay. With that I'll turn it back over to Lynn.
>> Lynn Zummo: Okay. Great, thank you. I want to thank the
panel, Shell, Jon, Bill and Tom for coming and speaking with us today.
Give them a hand. [applause] I'd also like to thank all of you for
coming and attending, listening to this very, very important issue
that affects really all of us. So with that I'm calling the meeting
to a close and see you in September. Look for e-mail. Oh, oh, oh.
Wait. Video for this, I've been told, may take a week, week and a
half to go through final production and getting it ready for the web.
So I will send out e-mail to all of the lists saying when it is
available. And it will be on the Webnet site in probably forever in
some location, and I will give you the URL for that. Thank you
very much.