Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Just want to read the departmental newsletter at lunch


Who knew, RantWoman would wind up celebrating #IDPD2018, International Day Persons with Disabilities two ways, one with a find after an average #a11y usability exercise and one connected to RantWoman’s usual transportation fixations. Transportation gets its own post. #IDPD2018 also comes with thoughts in celebration of the #ADA and thoughts for the #RIP41 thread. Because of the ADA, because of lots of people contributing pieces to the design of both physical and technological infrastructure, RantWoman has tools and the website below incorporates may design elements so that RantWoman can “read” the content mostly with the tools she has, tools that enable #accessibility for LOTS of different content.

 

#ux designers note: those Move to main content links are incredibly helpful if one does not want to have to reread a bunch of things every time one switches to a new page.

 

This link is to the departmental newsletter for RantWoman’s graduate program.


 

Here is a link from one of the tabs found with a Form Field List (Ins F5 in JAWS.


 

Here is the topical disability-related content.
Sarah Phillips (Anthropology/REEI) spent three weeks in Ukraine and Russia in November participating in several conferences and promoting her book Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Post-Soviet Ukraine, which was just published in Russian by Karazin University Press. Phillips did a book presentation at America House in Kyiv, delivered a talk at the plenary session of the annual conference of the Ukrainian Sociological Association in Kharkiv, and did a book presentation and research talk at European University in Saint Petersburg. In Moscow she was a co-organizer of the conference Breaking Down Barriers 2.0: New Approaches to Disability Studies, at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. The conference was co-sponsored by IU’s Russian Studies Workshop and brought scholars and practitioners from all over Russia to discuss new trends in disability studies and advocacy.

 

RantWoman will at some point forward the link to a blind colleague in the program. RantWoman used to read for Blind colleague, back in the mists of prehistory when people wrote exams on bluebooks instead of on the computer. RantWoman also worked in academic tech support and sometimes paid attention to blind colleague’s tech support interests. Blind colleague just wanted it to work and that was more than enough. These days, RantWoman still tends to know more about the technology side of things, and RantWoman is happy to forward things to blind colleague. However, RantWoman only forwards things she knows will work and along with whatever tricks will make them work.

 

Tech details: Windows 10, IE 11 JAWS 2018  Also tried with Chrome

 

RantWoman is not even bothering to go back and find the link for the page this came from. Instead RantWoman is going to comment about the process of finding this article. RantWoman clicked on a link out of an email and opened the first link above. The Screen reader read her the whole page including the items on the Left. RantWoman did a links list and then a headings list and could not find the content on the left. So RantWoman resorted to clicking with the mouse. Then it occurred to RantWoman to do a Form Fields list (Ins + F5 in JAWS). There RantWoman found the different items listed and moved to one of the items and hit enter. Accessibility standards apparently are fine with the page changing and no audio notification. RantWoman could see visually that something changed but JAWS was not finding the content.

At that point, RantWoman went to lunch, came back decided to try with Chrome and then tried again. Same results as above though it occurred to RantWoman just to refresh the screen with F5. At that point JAWS found the content and RantWoman read this item. Yeah. Oh, and voila, the same refresh the screen thing also worked in Internet Explorer.

 

Woot. Now RantWoman can send on to Blind Colleague. Well, except for one more point common in the zone of area studies: the newsletter actually contains content in several languages. RantWoman has so far not nailed down any tricks that would read the content in the right languagesor in some cases at all. Stay tuned.

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