Social Accessibility Project
A service that enables accessibility through collaborative authoring of metadata.
Date Posted: July 7, 2008
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Please sign up with the service. During the sign-up process, please select your type of participation: If you want to join as a screen reader user, please click on "join as a user." If you want to join as a supporter who helps provide the supporting information, please click on "join as a supporter." | | |
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You can report your problems to the server during Internet surfing by pressing the Control and Semicolon keys. The report will be sent to supporters, who can try to fix your problem. After your problems are fixed, you can apply fixes to the page by pressing the Control and Period keys. Please refer to the key reference for further details. Before using these functions, you must install a client-side support program for the JAWS screen reader.
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After installing the browser extension, please check requests from users. You can reply to them by adding alternative text and/or heading tags to the page. Please refer to the Help page for detailed information.
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- Please make sure that your screen reader is supported.
- Register and sign in to the service.
- Download the installer.
- Run the installer.
- Follow the instructions in the wizard dialog box.
- Check your installation by pressing the Control and Period keys. If the extension is correctly installed, you will hear a "ping" sound and see the message user script loaded. If you hear a "dong" sound and see the message cannot connect to server, please check your network connectivity. If nothing at all happens, please restart both JAWS and Internet Explorer and try again.
If you have any problems with the installation, please e-mail us.
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From the Control Panel, open Add and Remove Programs. Select Social Accessibility and click on the Uninstall button. Follow the instructions in the wizard dialog box.
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The extension supports JAWS screen reader versions above 9 in English and versions above 8 in Japanese. Support of other screen readers is planned.
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- user name
- address (URL) of the page
- two screenshots of the Web page: a thumbnail and a small portion of the full-sized screen. Text on a thumbnail image is not legible because of size, and text in the full-sized image is filled with black; this means that no text is legible in either image. If a page is secure (an HTTPS page), the image is not sent.
- position of screen reading: Screen images are marked with the reading position by the screen reader.
- comments (if the user adds any)
- XPath notation for the reading position
- date and time.
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You can view comments and check the status of your requests by accessing the Social Accessibility Portal, as follows:
- Press the Alt, Control, and Period keys.
- Select My page and click on Enter.
- Jump to the header Recent Requests.
- If the request you are interested in is not listed here, please follow the link All Requests at the bottom of the Recent Requests section.
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No, you need not use any proxy settings; simply install the screen reader extensions.
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The system has a function for automatically supplying the missing alterative text for image links. A software agent on the server side will automatically recommend the page title of the destination page as the image link in these cases. This method is a well known and simple heuristic, but it is often effective.
However, the reliability of automatic alternative text is not as good as manually created alternative text. If you encounter inappropriate automatic metadata, you can edit it by pressing the Shift, Control, and Semicolon keys. Or you can use the reporting function (Control and Semicolon keys) or the evaluation function (Shift, Control, and Semicolon keys) for the metadata.
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A landmark is a sharable bookmark at a specific position on a page. For example, you can mark the Add Cart button on an online shopping page as a landmark by pressing the Control and 0 (zero) keys. You can jump between landmarks by pressing the 0 (zero) key. When a landmark is submitted to the server, other screen reader users can use the landmark. Please do try to try to submit landmarks because they are useful and informative for other people.
Headings are an important way to navigate around a page. In essence, they are an outline of the page, marking some titles in order of importance. Sometimes headings are misused. Headings should mark the structure of the sub-content within a page, not the content itself. For example, in a news page, "National News" would probably be a high-priority heading, whereas the starting position of today's top article is an important location in the page but should not be a heading. Landmarks are used to fill in the gaps between headings. Any item on a page that seems important can be marked as a landmark.
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Yes. We recommend that you first study the basic guidelines of alternative text for images. Then try to add alternative text, as follows:
- Open the Request View from the sidebar.
- Click on the Start fixing it button. The sidebar will be switched to an Editor view.
- If images on the page have basic alternative text errors, a dialog box for starting the Quick Fix function will appear.
- Select OK and follow the instructions in the sidebar.
- After you have completed the process, click on Finish. The mode will automatically be switched to Editor.
- Click on Page map at the top of the tool bar.
- Check to make sure that your alternative text has been appropriately assigned to the target images.
- In order to continue making other improvements, use the Editor function.
If you have any questions about metadata or requests, please use the discussion system. You can send questions to the screen reader user or to other supporters.
If you find automatic alternative text that needs improvement, please feel free to modify it. That text was automatically generated with a simple algorithm as a basic automatic repair. Most automatic text can be improved to be more appropriate. | | |
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Yes, you can:
- Open the page in Firefox.
- Select the Social Accessibility Sidebar from the Social Accessibility menu.
- If you see a pink blinking bar on top of the sidebar, please click on the bar. The Quick Fix Wizard starts.
- Follow the instructions in the sidebar in order to fix the page.
- Click on Finish when you have completed the process. The mode will automatically be switched to Editor.
- Click on Page map at the top of the tool bar.
- Check to make sure that your alternative text has been appropriately assigned to the target images.
- In order to continue making other improvements, use the Editor function.
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The current system has the following functions:
- adding alternative text to an image
- adding alternative text to an image map
- adding a label to a form element
- adding a title to an inline frame
- inserting an invisible comment (that is accessible with a screen reader) at a specified position in a page
- tagging some element in a page as a heading
- inserting an invisible heading (that is accessible with a screen reader) at a specified position in a page
- changing a heading element to non-heading content
- adding a landmark to a specified position in a page.
In addition, all the metadata can be edited.
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Yes. If page layouts are changed, the site will probably be regarded as a different site. Therefore new metadata will be needed for the new site. We are working to make the metadata as robust as possible for Web site changes.
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If you select target content while pressing the Control key, the system will attempt to automatically generate an appropriate address (using XPath) to cover all the repeating content. Please refer to the Help page for further details.
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If you use a wildcard with the target URL of the metadata, the service will attempt to match corresponding elements on other pages of the Web site. For example, imagine that you want to cover the following URLs with the same metadata:
- http://www.examples.com/blogs/20080708.html
- http://www.examples.com/blogs/20080712.html
If you change the URL string with an "*" (asterisk) so that it becomes http://www.examples.com/blogs/*.html, the service will attempt to apply the metadata to all pages. Please refer to the Help page for further details.
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User point and supporter point are intended to motivate users to participate actively. You can earn points in ways such as reporting a problem, submitting metadata, and so on.
You can check your current point and ranking on your page. Please refer to the point system page for further details.
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We suggest that you consider actively working to make your site accessible. Maximum usability for people with disabilities cannot be achieved by simply fixing problems as they are encountered. Using an optimized information architecture leads to a more accessible and usable Web site, not just for people with disabilities, but for all users.
Our system can help you with two kinds of reusable knowledge:
- The report process can be regarded as volunteer-based, global usability testing by real users. You can consider reported issues to represent the voices of real customers.
- The metadata, discussions, and site-specific rules for metadata will be informative for effective renovations. When you renovate your site, you can actually know exactly how the supporters fixed their pages and why they did so.
Please join our activity, and please refer to the reports and metadata about your site. We are also planning to provide a summary page for site owners.
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The screen reader extension supports only JAWS at present; therefore, Linux is not supported. The browser extension for supporters, however, runs on Firefox 2 or above, but currently has been tested only on Windows® XP. We will update the coverage information after testing on other platforms.
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Currently, the project pages and messages are available only in English. The client-side components (screen reader extension and browser extension) have been tested in English and Japanese environments.
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Yes. However, there are a few exceptions:
- Do not submit any request or metadata related to confidential information, such as pages that are inside a corporate intranet. Excerpt from Use Agreement:
"Any information that You submit to IBM and the results are considered non-confidential, and IBM will be free to disclose them for any purpose. IBM is not responsible for any third party seeing or obtaining information or results transmitted through the Service."
- Do not submit any request or metadata that falls under the clauses below (excerpted from the Use Agreement). Any information (request, metadata, comments, discussion, etc.) related to these items will be blocked or deleted without notification to the participants who submitted that information.
- "Anyone else's copyrightable material unless You obtain written permission of the copyright holder to license the copyrightable material to IBM, consistent with the terms of the Use Agreement (link to Use Agreement).
- "Violate privacy, publicity or moral right, or disclose personal, government, business or other information without permission.
- "Any material that: (a) is inaccurate, harmful, obscene, defamatory or otherwise offensive or objectionable to IBM or other users of the Service; or (b) violates laws of which you are aware.
- "Any Software"
Please see the Use Agreement for further details.
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both.
Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
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