Saturday, June 29, 2013

Notes from the Aloha Barcamp

Aloha offices, poster and life-size doll-man wearing Aloha shirt
A few weeks ago, I attended an Aloha editor barcamp in Vienna, Austria. I know you are feeling sorry for me, right now. It was actually during the recent floods in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Germany, but due to extensive flood control and regulation of the Danube, Vienna was completely spared and the weather was gorgeous for us.

I posted what I was planning to show earlier, and that is basically what transpired. I demonstrated the OERPUB editor built on Aloha. I demonstrated the new mathematics editing, as well as adaptations to the image, table, and link plugins. I also showed transformation tools that bring content from web pages, office documents, Google Docs etc, into the editor. Marvin Reimer and Tom Woodward showed more detail focusing on the way the original Aloha editor code was adapted.
(or see presentation in Google Drive)

I had never been to a barcamp, so I had no idea what to expect. I still don't know if this one was typical or atypical. There were about 30 participants, most from the Vienna area. Sourcefabric, Connexions, and OERPUB traveled to the event. Petro, of Aloha, was our MC of sorts and had everyone introduce themselves and pick something to present on. Phil Schatz of Connexions presented on github-book, which we will be using in South Africa later this summer. It uses github to store books written with the Aloha editor. Gentic's (Aloha's sponsor company) blog features it.

Only a few of the presentations were directly related to Aloha, because about half the participants were not yet using Aloha, but rather were evaluating and  learning. I was the only person with a presentation in hand, but then again, almost everyone was a developer. Actually, I was expecting more coding and less presenting. There were presentations on general purpose technologies like like AngularJS, Marionnette.js, d3.js and CSS3. Aloha presented about real-time collaboration for Aloha, developed by a partner company. Aloha also had hands-on workshops on creating an Aloha plugin and adding youtube videos using content change handlers that notice youtube links inserted into text.

My team and Connexions spent an extra day working with the Aloha team on 'undo' and handling 'cut-and-paste' of structured elements. Those are both really critical in a document editor. We needed some relatively simple ways to improve those so that textbook sprints will be successful. More on what we decided in another post.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Accessiblity Protototypes from the Sprint

This post points to the results of prototypes built at a sprint with educators, technologists, and accessibility specialists. Earlier posts describe the process we went through before working on prototypes.
After getting to know the tools we started with, describing problems that authors, readers, and learners face, and brainstorming solutions, we spent the next day organizing into small groups that would design interfaces and code prototypes to address these problems. We had people sign up in groups to work on prototypes (paper, code) that built on the brainstorming from day one. Additionally, we had lots of math and metadata experts and so groups formed to address mathematics authoring and accessibility and discovery of accessible content.

Below are links and brief descriptions of the artifacts that resulted from the prototyping:

Idiot proofing the authoring process for accessibility

  • Auto-creating a Table of Contents: (oerpub's github accessibilty-sprint branch) In addition to providing good navigation for screen readers, the live TOC shows the structure of the document as it is being created, encouraging authors to see their work structurally, and hopefully improve the structure. OERPUB and FLUID worked together to get a live demo working in the oerpub editor.
  • Learner controls: (oerpub's github accessibilty-sprint branch) Well structured web content can easily be controlled by learners on the fly to adjust text, color, speech options, button readability, etc. OERPUB and FLUID worked together to incorporate the FLUID Learner Options' into the OERPUB editor so that authors can see how their content looks when learners adjust those controls.
  • Authoring good image descriptions (link to design and paper prototype). This team of of two started with assumptions, created user stories, built a flow chart and then made detailed UI designs for a set of wizard-like steps that help authors create good image descriptions.

Making annotation accessible

  • Crowd sourcing speech for math using annotations (link to paper prototype pdf download from dropbox). The idea is to extend Hypothes.is for crowd sourcing math accessibility. It would provide a combo box with four choices - provide alternative, report issue, fix issue, or comment. Readers would rank alternatives by popularity, preference (visual, aural, braille, etc) and subject area. When reporting an issue, readers could select one of 'does not render', 'incorrect', 'confusing', or 'wrong context'. The team would like these to become github bugs using 'bugalizer' (which I think has to be created also.) To fix an issue, someone could 'choose a label', 'create an aural alternative', 'edit an aural alternative', or 'edit the equation' itself (for example, so that invisible operators could be voiced).
  • Creating annotations accessibly (link to github code). Making annotations accessible will benefit readers and learnes that use voice activation, keyboard only, and switch devices. At the demo, opening the annotation side bar with keyboard shortcuts was shown, as well as getting the annotations read aloud through shortcuts. It was the first start to making annotations accessible, by using ARIA annotations and keyboard event handlers to enable opening and navigating the annotation drawer.

Better support for mathematics

  • Server side mathematics rendering (link to github code, branch 'sprint'). MathJax renders mathematics in browsers on each reader's computer. However, it would be nice to have a server-side version of that also, so that content is pre-converted with the original mathematics, an svg for print and epub, and an aural representation for screen readers. They demo'd grabbing the math elements from HTML documents and handing each one to MathJax for converting to SVG and also handing to ChromeVox for generating a speech rendering.

Making accessible content discoverable 

Representatives from OERPUB, Bookshare, and Learning Registry worked together to figure out ways to make accessible content easier to find. OERPUB analyzed where metadata could be automatically generated while authoring. Bookshare is including similar fields in their description and the Learning Registry was augmented so that needs and preferences could be set before searching and then results that met or nearly met those needs could be returned.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Born Digital, Born Accessible Sprint - Brainstorming Solutions

Group voting wtih sticky notesIf you missed the earlier posts on the accessibility sprint that we had in Menlo Park in May, here they are:
Believe it or not, we are still on Day 1!

Choosing Challenges to Work On

After coming up with design challenges, we voted on the ones we would start to work on. We discussed voting criteria including the importance of the problem and the tractability of prototyping a solution in a short time. We voted with colored sticky notes and I tallied the top three vote getters. We chose three so that we could have two design teams for each problem and compare the results. The top three vote getters were ...
  1. Idiot proofing the authoring process for accessibility
  2. Making annotation accessible
  3. Supporting a STEM scholar that wants to submit articles that are also accessible.
We had five design teams total with two on the first two problems and one on the third challenge. The teams brainstormed and came up with quick sketches and then presented their findings at the end of the day. Here are my notes from those sessions.

Idiot proofing the authoring process for accessibility 

Poster of groups findings summarized in text
For simplicity, I am combining ideas from both teams.
  • Have a description bank for images.
  • Create table of contents automatically so screen readers have good navigation and so that authors see a representation of the structure of their content which might encourage better structure.
  • Make footnotes smart and easy to create. (I didn't fully catch this one, but I think the suggestion is to make footnotes easily to create in ways that link them to the content they are footnoting so that screen readers can find them in context).
  • Have smart defaults. Include header rows by default in tables and suggest authors use headings.
  • Mimic Wordpress' image insertion which shows you caption, alt text, and description in a side panel. These create good habits and expectations in authors.
  • Have a preview mode that reads your content back to you so you can experience what someone listening to it experiences.
  • Have an "accessibility check" mode like spellchecking. 
  • If images are described, make sure to add that to the metadata for discoverability of the resource.

Making annotation accessible

An image being captioned through an annotation and using a templateThe two design teams took two very different angles at this problem. One team brainstormed ways to use annotations as a new way to crowd source descriptions of images and alternatives for inaccessible content. The other looked specifically at Hypothes.is' interface, to figure out how to make reading annotations and creating annotations accessible. In order to crowd source annotations, that team envisioned a specific annotation layer for accessibility, with a user interface (UI) Notes on adding annotations and hearing the annotationsspecialized for adding accessibility information. The UI would have drop downs for images, graphs, math, etc. Readers would flag resources as inaccessible and request descriptions or alternatives. Responders would have templates for the accessibility information requested. Finally, there would be a way to vote on the best descriptions and/or alternatives. The team looking at making Hypothes.is accessible for authors found that it needed a keyboard shortcut for adding annotations. Additionally, so that readers know when an annotation is present, the team envisioned a configurable tone that would indicated the presence of annotations.

Accessible Scholarly Authoring

Flow chart for authoring math
The team started by discussing the most likely pathways for creating scholarly content in the first place, using Word with MathType for math, or using LaTeX. Both have some benefits for accessible authoring and can produce mathematics in MathML. Any work that authors do to make content accessible should be reusable and should fit within the normal flow writing an article. A library of common descriptions for particular common graphs and statistics would be useful.  One option for math would be having authors actually voice the math and include an audio annotation, but human produced audio can't be explored the way that machine generated audio could. For instance, a reader cannot ask to hear just the first term in an equation. So the team wasn't sure whether that option should be produced.

The next post will include the results of prototypes created the next day.





Tuesday, June 4, 2013

On my way to the Aloha Barcamp, June 6,7 in Vienna


Here is what I am proposing to talk about at the Aloha state of the art HTML5 editing barcamp.

The OERPUB editor: Aloha for Authoring Textbooks!
We are using a customized version of Aloha to create open textbooks and remix and share them. Several different organizations will use Aloha for authoring books and textbooks. It is being embedded at Connexions (cnx.org), the oerpub suite of tools (oerpub.org), Siyavula (siyavula.com), and in a lightweight ebook editor that uses github to store all versions (github-book) and more. We are customizing Aloha (forked here) to be really easy for textbook authors and educators to use. We are also making sure that it is easy to create accessible content, so we have customized image, table, and math plugins. In addition, we have special draggable semantic elements for common things in textbooks like exercises, examples, and notes. I will be demoing these customizations.
 
screen shot of the editor with sidebar toolbox, document page, and toolbar

Find out more



Monday, June 3, 2013

Learning Born Accessible - Sprint Design Challenges

With a bit of delay, I am back to documenting the "Born Digital, Born Accessible Learning Sprint". The first thing we did was show off tools and software that the groups brought to the sprint. See my previous blog post for the goals and tools we brought.

subgroup of sprint participants around a round tableNext, we broke into groups of 5 or 6 to discuss the biggest challenges that teachers and learners face with respect to accessible learning. In subsequent posts, I will show the brainstorming results and the prototypes that resulted.

Design Challenges

Customize a lesson for a class with several students using assistive technology or learning supports: This scenario is based on an actual class. A fourth grade, US geography teacher, following the common core, is preparing a lesson. In this class, one student is blind and uses a braille keyboard, one has a physical challenge and can only use a single motion to communicate and uses a switch controlled keyboard. Several have dyslexia and/or speak english as a second language. The class has a student aide who is assigned to the child who uses the switch device, but the aide helps other children as well by necessity. The classroom teacher gets regular classroom material and must figure out how to make it work for everyone. The teacher wants to
  • Customize a lesson and
  • Use a PHET simulation 
Teaching long division to visually impaired students: Long division usually can't be read by screen readers because it is just an image. A teacher wants to create good text that describes the process in the image and then share that with other teachers.

Using annotations accessibly (taking notes, participating in discussions, providing help for others). A blind learner would like to annotate text, math, and images in an educational resource and wants to be able to accessibly navigate annotations and filter them by who created them and whether the learner favorited them.
Use cases for annotation:
  • Letting people know that this image needs a description.
  • Providing a description or better description for an image or math.
  • Participating in a discussion with peers about the text
  • Taking notes for studying 
  • Parents sharing the audio descriptions they create for their own children
Making accessible authoring "idiot-proof". An author wants to create and share learning materials accessibly, but it is hard to know how to do a good job and what tools to use.

Submit research accessibly: Margaret is a STEM professor and she has a younger brother that is visually impaired. She wants her next publication to be accessible, but her time is limited. She wants good authoring tools and ways to keep track of her materials. She wants to reuse things that she has already made accessible like figures and equations in subsequent publications.
She wants to make her colleagues more aware and encourage them to do the same. Her time is limited -- if she can get others to help she would really like this. Who might benefit? Publishers and libraries (material is more searchable), researchers and students with print disabilities.

Accessible Chemistry: ChemML is a representation for chemistry that can be explored and read, but you need authoring tools that can let you produce it. Two potential users: I am a publisher and I am in charge of scientific journals and want to support ChemML. I am a student in post-secondary school and I can't draw the chemistry equations and I need authoring tools for doing my work.

Finding my own resources quickly and sharing them with others that need them: Jose is in 6th grade and has a print disability. His parents don't speak English and don't have free time. He wants to find resources to help on his homework. He wants to be able to control the process -- not wait for someone to read to him. Immediacy is important -- taking a test can't wait, doing a group project in class can't wait. Schools will benefit from any solutions that can be shared and discovered -- lowers costs.

Lack of Unicode support makes material inaccessible: Screen readers say "unidentified symbol", graduate papers often have them, close captioned television uses unicode for music symbols. The use of these symbols are context-dependent and lists of them are incomplete.

Making accessibility high priority: I am a product manager and want to include accessible authoring. How do I communicate to higher ups that you need to add accessiblity? What are the business use cases? Where are simple guidelines? As a content provider I want to retrofit existing content with A11y Metadata, but need help convincing others.