Section 508 Explanation
Section 508 Audio ExplanationTranscript of Section 508 Audio Explanation
Captioned Video
Having trouble viewing the above video?
Go to the Camtasia Studio Download Center to download the necessary codecs.
Captioning Tools
To make the above captioned video we used two tools, a website called screencast-o-matic.com, and Camtasia Studio. We used screencast-o-matic.com to create a video of us demonstrating a CAPTCHA on ticketmaster.com. Screencast-o-matic.com uses a Java applet that allows the user to capture videos of their desktop, and then export the videos in Quicktime format to their computer. We then used Camtasia Studio to actually place the captions in the video. Unfortunately, Camtasia Studio does not allow the user to import a Quicktime movie into a Camtasia Studio project. To get around this we used a tool called SUPER, which is a freeware tool that allows the user to convert to and from many different video and audio formats. We used SUPER to convert our Quicktime movie to an AVI movie, which Camtasia Studio supports. After importing the video into a Camtasia Studio project, we then use the captioning tools in Camtasia Studio to sync a transcript of the video, and the video itself together. Camtasia Studio retails for about $299, but you can download a free 30-day trial from their website. You can also create videos of your desktop with Camtasia Studio, but this continuously made the computer we were using crash.
Accessible Captchas
Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Captchas are implemented to prevent automated applications from signing up for newsgroups, forums, creating user accounts, or from buying concert tickets. They are implemented to hamper automated activities which may degrade the experience for other members or a site's affiliates. Captchas take the form of a challenge and answer. Most captchas are obfuscated images of letters and numbers which require the user to submit a matching string of what they see. This is obviously a problem for people with a disability relating to vision. To get around this, most captchas also have an alternate link, pointing to an audio clip or a text equivalent of the image (but which is also obfuscated in some manner, such as putting the letters in a sentence so that they are not easily interpreted directly by a computer).
Captcha Example
Accessibility Of Tools
When developing an accessible web site for the disabled, one must also be conscious of the accessibility of the tools used to develop that web site. One problem our group ran into was the use of a template for our web site. Templates are a great resource that many web developers, who lack the skills to design visually attractive web sites, use to make their web site look nice. The problem is that the people who design these templates often do not design them with accessibility for the disabled in mind. They are more concerned about the presentation of the material, and are very particular about every aspect of the look and feel of the site. This means that most template designers often use specific font sizes and line widths in their style sheets to get their material to look perfect, which was the case with the template we used. When designing with accessibility in mind it is better to specify font sizes and line widths in the form of percentages. This often allows the text on the page to scale better when users change font sizes. If the template is not very complicated, as in our case, a developer can easily alter the style sheet with little effort in order to use percentages for font sizes and line widths. If it is not a simple template than it may be worth the developers time to investigate other means for coming up with an accessible look and feel.
The second problem we encountered when designing our web site had to do with converting our video to a format which Camtasia Studio could import. As mentioned above we used the SUPER converter, to accomplish this. It wasn't actually using the program that posed the problem, but downloading it. The web site is poorly designed and involved us going to three different pages, and scanning several hundred lines of text before we found a small download link at the bottom of the third page. This in itself was an issue regarding accessibility. The designers of the site made it very difficult to download the program they were promoting.
The final problem we encountered with our accessibility web site was the creation of our captioned video. We used a tool called Camtasia Studio which makes it very easy to add captions to videos. However when you produce the video, Camtasia Studio uses its own codec to encode the video. Although the codec is free to download from their web site, users who do not have the codec installed would have difficulty watching the video. This is not only a problem for the disabled trying to view the video, but also for non-disabled users. Video formats are an ever changing technology and it is hard find a format that everyone can use without issues. One solution to this is to have a link to a web site which hosts the codecs used to encode any videos on the web site, so the user can easily download them.