Microsoft Accessibility

Using Kinect and HealthVault to Enhance Seniors’ Well-being

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:27:00 GMT

Since May 2011, seniors in Los Angeles have been getting fit, increasing social interaction, and enhancing their quality of life, thanks to a public-private partnership developed by Microsoft, the Los Angeles Department of Aging, Partners in Care Foundation...(read more)

Episode 10 - Road to CSUN - Reflecting on our Trip

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:36:42 GMT

Dan and Gary refelect on their nine day adventure....(read more)

Episode 9 - Road to CSUN - Helping Students Reintegrate

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:29:00 GMT

At the final stop on the Road to CSUN, Dan and Gary visit TERI Inc. in Oceanside, CA....(read more)

Episode 8 - Road to CSUN - The Word on the Street

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:13:00 GMT

Dan and Gary spend Sunday afternoon at Santa Monica Pier talking to passers-by about accessibility....(read more)

Episode 7 - Road to CSUN - Games for Rehabilitation

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 15:35:00 GMT

In this episode, Dan and Gary visit Blue Marble Games in Los Angeles, CA....(read more)

Episode 6 - Road to CSUN - Educating People about Accessibility

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:31:00 GMT

Gary and Dan visit the Santa Clara County Office of Education and Yahoo, to discuss how both organizations educate staff on accessibility....(read more)

Episode 5 - Road to CSUN - Guide Dogs for the Blind

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:18:00 GMT

Dan and Gary arrive in the Bay Area for a visit to Guide Dogs for the Blind....(read more)

Episode 4 - Road to CSUN - Technology in a Rural Community

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:23:00 GMT

Today, Gary and Dan visit Tri-county Independent Living in Eureka, CA....(read more)

Episode 3 - The Road to CSUN - The Assistive Technology Ecosystem

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:07:00 GMT

Dan and Gary visit Boundless Technology and ViewPlus Technologies on day two of the Road to CSUN....(read more)

Road to CSUN - Day 2 Recap - A World of Assitive Technology

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 04:10:00 GMT

After a successful first day, Gary and I started the second day energized. Much of this could be attributed to the absolutely comfortable pillows at the hotel. It seems like such a small thing, but for people like us who travel frequently, a comfortable...(read more)

Episode 2 - The Road to CSUN - Focus on Seniors

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:00:00 GMT

The first day of our trip to CSUN included stops at SeniorNet Puget Sound in Bellevue, WA and at Tacoma Lutheran Retirement Community in Tacoma, WA....(read more)

Road to CSUN - Day 1 Recap - A Focus on Seniors

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:02:00 GMT

Gary and I had a great first day on the Road to CSUN with two stops focusing on seniors. Our first was just down the street from the Microsoft headquarters in Bellevue, WA where we demoed the accessibility features in Windows for a group from SeniorNet...(read more)

Episode 1 - The Road to CSUN Has Begun

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:00:00 GMT

The car is packed and we are on our way. Enjoy the first teaser episode of "The Road to CSUN". Every evening Gary and I will be posting a recap of our day along with a new episode of "The Road to CSUN". If you would like to stay current on our daily...(read more)

The Road to CSUN Starts Monday

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:37:00 GMT

On Monday, my colleague Gary Moulton and I will begin our adventure on the "Road to CSUN". The 9 day tour down the west coast will be a chance for us to tell stories about technology that don’t normally get shared. We are fortunate, in that our...(read more)

Top 7 Accessibility Tips

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:12:00 GMT

Are you looking for a quick primer on accessibility in Windows 7, Office 2010, and Internet Explorer? Is so, this recent video covers the top 7 accessibility tips to help you make your computer easier to see, hear and use. VIDEO: Microsoft Top 7 Accessibility...(read more)

CSUN Session Preview #3: Accessible ICTs and Personalized Learning for Students with Disabilities

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:10:00 GMT

James Thurston, Senior Policy Manager with the accessibility team at Microsoft will be hosting the following panel at 8:00am on Thursday March 1st at the International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference. Accessible ICTs and Personalized...(read more)

CSUN Session Preview #2: Assistive Technologies: Progress on Implementing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:00:00 GMT

James Thurston, Senior Policy Manager with the accessibility team at Microsoft will be hosting the following panel at 9:20am on Thursday March 1st at the International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference. Assistive Technologies: Progress...(read more)

The Road to CSUN!

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Where is accessibility at Microsoft headed? We are headed south, that's where! On February 20th Gary Moulton and I will begin an 9 day journey from Seattle to San Diego. Our road trip will take us down the length of the west coast where we will be visiting...(read more)

CSUN Session Preview #1- Accessibility is the New Black: Digital Inclusion as the Next Big Thing

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:07:06 GMT

Yesterday we posted the lineup of sessions Microsoft will be presenting at the CSUN conference in SanDiego later this month. Today we wanted to bring you some details about one of those sessions being co-presented by Microsoft Senior Accessibility Strategist...(read more)

Educational Sessions at CSUN 2012

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:00:00 GMT

At the annual CSUN Conference , Microsoft is presenting ten educational sessions and panels related to accessibility. Here is a look at the session lineup: Wednesday 2/29 * 1:50pm - Introduction to Windows 8 An overview of Windows 8, the new Metro...(read more)

Microsoft Accessibility at the 27th Annual CSUN Conference

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Once again Micorosft is proud to sponsor and participate in the 27th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference (CSUN) in San Diego, California, held this year between February 29 and March 3. Microsoft will present nine...(read more)

Developing Accessible apps for Windows 8

Daniel Hubbell - MSFT — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:58:00 GMT

Greetings! As many of you know Microsoft has kicked off the developer preview of Windows 8 at the BUILD conference in Anaheim just a few short weeks ago. Although you may not have been able to make it to the conference, there is still an opportunity to experience the keynote, sessions, and Windows 8 itself. If you are interested in Accessibility there are many great sessions from BUILD that will help you understand how to create more accessible apps.

Visit the BUILD Conference Website to find the find the following sessions we think are of interest:

Sessions of interest Under Apps

Prepare your apps for Windows 8 and beyond
Make great Metro style apps that are touch-optimized using HTML5
**Build assistive technologies for Windows 8
Designing Metro style apps that are touch-optimized
Designing Metro style: principles and personality
Using tiles and notifications
**Reaching more customers with accessible Metro style apps in HTML5

Sessions of interest Under Hardware

Advanced app and driver debugging
Understanding the Windows 8 graphics driver model.
Windows certification: improvements to the logo program
Understanding Connected Standby
Improving code quality with Windows Error Reporting
Certifying hardware with the Windows Hardware Certification Kit

** - Sessions presented by the Windows Accessibility team

Configuring Internet Explorer to handle longdesc

Sean_Hayes — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:04:00 GMT

What is longdesc and why is it important

Users with visual impairments are often not able to access images on web sites, now this is probably not news to anyone reading this blog; and you are also probably aware of the technique of using an alt attribute in the html markup on images to provide a pithy summary of the content of the image. However it is often the case that an image is too complicated to be described completely in a single short sentence, but adding any more than that to the alt attribute results in a far too verbose experience for users that rely on screen readers or other assitive technologies.

longdesc is another attribute, introduced originally in 1997, and adopted by the W3C as a recommendation in HTML4, that provides a method of linking to detailed alternate text for complex images primarily to aid web users with visual impairments. A newer related attribute aria-describedby does a similar thing; the main difference being that longdesc ponts to an external resource, and aria-describedby points to a resource elswhere in the same page. If all of this is unfamiliar to you, or you would like some specific guidance on what attribute to use where, and how to create usable alternative text, the W3C is developing a comprehensive guide.

Both the longdesc attribute and its modern cousin aria-describedby, are attached to an image and essentially turn it into a hyperlink, or at least that's the theory; although longdesc is used by modern screen readers like JAWS, WindowEyes, SuperNova/Hal and so on, in fact for the most part the browsers themselves ignore it. Hence in the next major revision of HTML which is being drafted now it has been declared non-conforming.

So, just recently I met John Foliot at dinner at the CSUN 11 conference, I've known John online for a while now, and it was good to finally meet up in person. John is a very interesting and outspoken individual and one of a few passionate accessibility advocates who are seeking to have the longdesc attribute re-instated as a full part of the HTML5 specification, and so of course the subject came up during our conversation. I mentioned that I thought it should be fairly straightforward to get IE to actually do something useful with longdesc, and so having a spare couple of hours one afternoon this week, I actually got down to trying it. This should work in most versions of IE.

My thought was that it should be easy to add a context menu entry to extract the longdesc attribute value and have the page navigate to its content. Well as it turns out, it is fairly easy if you know how. Unfortunately that know-how is a little hidden, so I thought I'd write up the technique here, so this is dedicated to John, but also here for anyone interested.

Custom context menu's in Internet Explorer

Context menus are made available when you use the right mouse button to click on something in the web page. IE comes with a few built in, but it is also possible to add more, and products like Adobe Acrobat reader and Microsoft Office for example do just that. Custom context menus are a fairly old feature, dating back to IE4, and what most people don't realize is that if you have a little javascript programming skill (essential for any web developer these days), and are prepared to take on the Windows registry, it is pefectly possible for you to add your own

Adding a context menu

To add a context menu entry you need to create a registry key with the label of the new entry within the set of keys defined for IE. This registry key will have a value in it that points to an html file containing javascript. That script will get executed when the new context entry is clicked.

Now if that sounds a little daunting, dont worry I'm going to break it down into nice small chunks for you. And show you how you can add a context menu labelled "Long Description" which will send the browser off to the linked resource

The script

So what does the script look like that we will be calling? well have a look at the complete text, and we'll break down a little in the next section:


  <script>
       // Get the window object where the context menu was opened.

     var win = external.menuArguments;

     var doc = win.document;

     var url = win.event.srcElement.getAttribute('longDesc');

     if (url != null && url.indexOf("http://") == 0) {

         win.navigate(url);

     } else if (url != null && url != undefined && url != "") {

         var path = doc.URL.split('/');

         var newurl = doc.URL.replace(path[path.length - 1], url);

         win.navigate(newurl);

     } else {

         alert("No suitable long description provided");

     }
</script>

The main difference here to standard page scripting, is that to get access to the window; we can't use the window object directly, but need to dereference is through a special variable external.menuArguments, after that we can access the object clicked on (which we will restrict to being an image in the setup described below), using the event property in the window. This includes a property srcElement which is our element, so we can grab the longdesc attribute value from there.

If the longdesc is a full uri we can just navigate directly, but if not then we need to do a bit more work. For some reason it doesn't seem possible to get access to the window.location property which would make constructing the full link a great deal easier, but fortunately we can use some standard javascript trickery to deconstruct the document URL, and then create a new one with the attribute value substituted in.

As you can see the code itself isn't that hard. If you want to go ahead and make it fancy, for example to support aria-describedby, pull up the data in a spearate window or iframe, go ahead and knock yourself out. Its all just scripting, but for the purposes of this demo we'll just treat it as a standard hyperlink.

OK, so put this text in a file somewhere on your computer, for this example I'm going to put it at C:\longdesc.htm; however it can go anywhere, even on the open web if you want although that could be a security issue.

Installing

The next thing you will need to do is fire up regedit. This is a standard tool that ships with Windows and allows you to tinker with all the internal settings that programs running on the platform needs. You need to be somewhat careful with this tool, as it can seriously mess up your computer if you touch the wrong stuff. But use it with care, backup the registry and follow the instructions carefully and you should have no problem.

For those of you who have seen regedit before, we need to create the following: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Internet Explorer \MenuExt \&Long Description] (Default) = "C:\longdesc.html" Contexts = 02

The Contexts value restricts the context in which the menu item will show up. 0x02 will restrict it to just images. Other possible contexts are:

Default = 0x1
Images = 0x2
Controls = 0x4
Tables = 0x8
Text selection = 0x10
Anchor/Link = 0x20

And these can be added together, so for example if you wanted images and tables it would be 0x10.

If you need a little more guidance than that, then we'll will walk you through it in detail now.

First up we need to cal up the run dialog in the start menu, type regedit here:

Then Windows will find the tool:

Click on this and the tool will start up. It will ask if you want it to be able to change Windows, click on yes. When regedit comes up, expand the tree items on the left hand side, starting at HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

Then navigate down to the Software tab and expand that.

Then to Microsoft

Internet Explorer

MenuExt

Right click on the MenuExt item and select New > Key

Then type in the name you want to appear in the menu. I used "Long Description"

Then on the right hand side, right click on the Name "Default" and select Modify...

For the value, use the pathname of the file you saved earlier. Then right click on the name "Long Description" to add a new DWORD (32 bit) Value

Name the new DWORD "Contexts", and set the value to 2 (Hexadecimal).

Your final setup should look like this:

Then close Regedit, the values are automatically saved. It is possible actually to create an installer which will handle the all the registry settings for you, but that's more work than I really had time to get into here, and besides i think its instructive to see how these things work.

So, now you should be set up. At this point you need to shut down all your IE windows and restart it, as the context menus are loaded at startup.

Testing

To test your install, once you have shut down all your internet Explorer pages and come back to this page. If you then right click on the image below you should see the menu entry for long description, select this and the page should navigate to it's description. Note, that due to the way this blog is set up it may appear in a different window or tab.

For another example check out this CSS Squirrel comic.

Notes

One of the downsides of the context menu is that there is no visible indication that there is any longdesc link, to get round this, you could use CSS in a user stylesheet to highlight the image.

img[longdesc] 
{
    border:solid 2px blue !important 
}

You can set a user stylesheet using the accessibility settings in IE. I freely admit that a blue border isn't exactly the Height of CSS sophistication, but I'm sure some of you CSS guru's out there can come up with something a little more compelling than this. Remember you have to restart IE after you set the settings, otherwise it won't show up.

For keyboard users. Usually images are not in the tab order, and although adding longdesc really ought to make them so, it doesnt. The example here has the tabindex attribute set to 0, so that if youare using IE9 (as I hope you are, since it incldes lots of HTML5 goodness), then you should be able to tab to the image and call up the context menu using SHIFT-F10

OK, so there we go. longdesc support in Internet Explorer.

Regards,

Sean

Microsoft Accessibility Perspective on Federal Communications Commission Issues

AnnuskaP-Microsoft — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:12:00 GMT

Recently, Microsoft participated in a field hearing held by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. There are critical issues for people with disabilities relating to broadband access. For a description of Microsoft's technology solutions and collaborative approach, please read the blog article, Promoting An Accessibility Ecosystem of Choice and Opportunity.

Invitation to participate in Microsoft online survey of computer users who have low vision

AnnuskaP-Microsoft — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:12:00 GMT

Hi. I am working on a research project to understand how people optimize their computer to make it easier to see. We just kicked off an online survey and are recruiting people who have vision impairments. So, if you have low vision or color blindness, we’d really appreciate your feedback. And if there’s someone you know who does, please pass this information to them.

Microsoft product teams will use the survey findings to guide them as they strive to improve our display features. Your responses are completely anonymous. The survey will take approximately 30 minutes to complete. To participate, please fill out our Microsoft survey for making the computer easier to see.

Thanks!