Cyndi: Welcome to another in a series of webcasts sponsored by the National Center on Disability and Access to Education. I'm Cyndi Rowland, the technology director for NCDAE and I'll moderate today's webcast. And the webcast is on designing web content that is accessible to users with cognitive disabilities. I'm very excited for our next hour together. And I hope everyone is comfortable with either a lunchtime beverage or snack or something for their afternoon break. I'm excited in part because the national center is in the midst of a grant funded by the u.s. Department of education. Actually it's an OSERS steppingstones project on cognitive disabilities and web design. The other reason that I'm excited about this is our amazing panel today.
And let me just very quickly introduce Gregg Vanderheiden from the TRACE Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Clayton Lewis from the Coleman Institute at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Jared Smith from WebAIM right here at Utah State University. I could spend at least 15 minutes or so introducing the credentials of all our panelists. Suffice it to say they're all well-regarded in web accessible field and in the specific and more narrow area of cognitive and learning disabilities and web design. But I do hope folks have an opportunity to visit the NCDAE webcast page to read their bios and learn more about them if that's of interest.
One quick note before we get started, of course I'd like to just sort of jump, you know, feet first into this content. But it's important for you as listeners to know that we're going to reserve a portion of our time together to respond to questions that come in from you. So please do submit -- there's an e-mail form on the webcast page. And in the midst of our conversation if you have a comment you'd like to make, or if you have question you'd like to pose, submit that in and we'll be gathering those as we move along and then have the panel either respond to the questions or comment on your comments. So please do use that as a nice little interactive feature that we've got.
Okay. Well, I'm just going to kind of jump in here and get started. You know, one of the things that strikes me is that we've got users with cognitive and learning disabilities that represent a group that has widely different functional characteristics. So for example, we've got some users that have low literacy level. We have some that have attention difficulties or problems with distractions. Others have very specific difficulties or challenges with visual processing that are different from a literacy problem. Let me start by just asking each of the panelists, do you think it's possible for web developers to address the array of challenges that these users encounter? Or is this the catalys and we're never -- we'll always be striving and never quite reach it? So I'm going to start first -- Gregg, what are your thoughts? Do you think we can actually ever attain something that's going to help people with so many different functional need?
Gregg: No.
Cyndi: Okay.
Gregg: But it's not just cognitive. You also can't help everyone with any disability. If you think of the range and the scope of disabilities in terms of types and degree and onset and combination, you can't create something which is going to be on the web which can address all of these levels completely. But we can come very close, I think, in a number of ways. When we talk about this we need to think about and separate what I would call direct access, that is can a person using just an off the shelf browser access the web content and have it be usable to them. And of course, nobody who is blind is going to be able to do that on almost any site. And nobody who is deaf is going to be able to handle most things. Although they are probably the closest because of the fact that the way you make things accessible is to provide captions, et cetera, and that usually is built into the main browsers. So they're the closest. But as soon as you get into other kinds of disabilities, the range gets you in trouble.
Then we have access via assistive technology or special browsers. And here's where we have the real potential. And we will talk about this more and we go through so I don't want to go into too much detail now. But if we can create pages that can be understood and accurately interpreted, if you will, by technology, by a special browser, they can then be represented in a very wide variety of forums so that the different needs of different individuals can be addressed by having the browser, if you will, the user agent, present it to them in different ways or with different amounts of support.
Cyndi: So what you're really talking about is maybe a future where web developers create different tiers of content that is served out to a user differentially based on their preferences or user styles, what have you? Is that what you're talking about here?
Gregg: Or they present information out in a way that can be understood by the user agent and the user agent, the thing that they have, will represent it. So in the same way for people who are blind, they can't perceive the page. But if the page is presented in a fashion that their user agent can understand it, it can present it to them in auditory fashion.
Cyndi: There's a whole other question I'd to follow up on this. But before I get ahead of the rest of the panel, let me just throw out, Clayton or Jared, do you concur with what Gregg is saying or do you have a different opinion on whether this is possible? Jared, let's just start with you.
Jared: Well, this is Jared. I would certainly agree with Gregg's assessment. I think that technology that we have today and probably in the immediate future isn't yet capable of addressing all of these issues. And maybe to some extent we don't really know exactly what those issues are. But we're working on that. So I think Gregg's assessment was great. I think there's potential. There are things that we certainly should be doing, that we can be doing, that will make generally our content more accessible to general users with regard to disabilities, but there always are going to be some that are going to be difficult to meet their needs or by meeting the needs of some type of user we may actually be disadvantaging others. And that's really the places where we need technology to come into play to help us address what those individual issues are going to be.
Cyndi: Okay. Clayton, your thoughts.
Clayton: Yeah. I would really just want to spin this a little differently. I wouldn't want to -- I wouldn't want people listening to us to hear us saying that -- to hear us upsizing the negative too much here. So I don't disagree with Gregg or Jared. I mean, there are people who say it's really huge challenges that are beyond what we can do. So I might mention as an example, because it's less familiar and it's not common, but there are people who not only have trouble reading, that's relatively common for all kinds of reasons, but there are people who have trouble really with language. And if you have someone in that situation, that's a real big challenge of how to communicate effectively. Even there, there's technology -- there's been some really good work in Europe taking advantage of creative uses of imagery and so on to do that. I think we could all agree and do all agree that someone in that kind of situation, as an example, poses a real big challenge.
But I don't think any of us would want to say that because those problems exist that we can't do a tremendous amount for a huge number of people that have all kinds of different cognitive disabilities, and that the technology -- the technology is already here offers us really big opportunity there, and some of the new technology, some of the stuff that Gregg alluded to and he and others are working on, I think they're really exciting prospects there. So I'd want the listeners really to be looking at the positive side of this. It's not to say there's no negative side there, but I think the positives really outweigh the negatives.
Cyndi: What I'm really hearing you say, Clayton -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- is that first and foremost there's a lot that folks can do now. And in fact, that's what we're going to be talking about the rest of our time together. But that we -- and maybe both Jared and Gregg were wanting to start out setting the context that we shouldn't be cavalier about what a complex issue this is, and that it isn't going to be a simple solution. But as Gregg indicated, maybe over time with a variety of technology solutions, includes user agents -- so including both browsers and assistive technologies, that perhaps are yet to be even developed, we can get closer and closer. But I do -- I hear your optimism, which is there are some things that folks can be doing now, and maybe that's where we need to focus.
Gregg: This is Gregg. One of the key points here, is that cognitive in particular is different than many other disabilities. If you have low vision we can do something, if you have no vision you can provide access. If people have -- are hard of hearing, there are things you can do. If they have no hearing there are things you can do. We even have gotten to the point now where if you have no physical movement we can by just putting like a bathing cap like thing on your head, we can allow you to control and we have people spelling things out and now with -- moving nothing, just sitting there with this bathing hat on. But in cognition, you can't make pages that are accessible to someone with no cognition.
Cyndi: Yes.
Gregg: Okay? And so there is -- this area of disability differs from the other in that in most of the others you'd find a different modality to pass information in. If they can't see, do it auditorily, et cetera. But if you have a cognitive barrier you can't say, well, is there a different way of getting the information in besides their cognition. And so in this one, when you -- we need to do a lot more of figuring out if they have specific learning disabilities you can try and work around. But around the pure cognition areas we need to go looking at ways of providing structure, scaffolding, other kinds of orthotic, things that can help to support the processes that they do have or to present the information at the level they can handle.
And we are on the verge -- and this is the optimism -- there has been so long -- in 1991 I wrote one on technology and mental retardation in the 21st century and tried to talk about what might be coming in the next. But we were just talking about stuff. We are now to the point where the processing power that people can actually buy is enough that we can -- and this is where I'd really like to see a lot more money devoted to research and development on this area -- we can begin to create assistive technology for people who have cognitive disabilities that can really help to interpret information. There's a project now that is working on translating english into english. We have things that will translate from english to other languages. But what about translating from english back into a simpler form of english?
Cyndi: Right.
Gregg: And so there's a project now looking at that. And so I think that we are at the beginning of an overflow or outflow, if you would, of different advances in this area. And I want to come back to something that Jared said. And this is what's really important about everybody who's listening. And that is that there are many things that can be done, but do we know what it is that we should actually be doing? If we have the technology and it now has the potential to do all these marvelous things, are we going to waste all of that time and effort having technology do things which really aren't helpful?
And so I come back to Jared's comment about this, but do we yet know what it is exactly that we should be doing. And I think that that's one of the toughest questions to answer.
Cyndi: Well, you know, I'm going to use that as a perfect jumping off spot to ask each of you to kind of talk about recommendations that you would have for developers. But do, you know, indicate whether this information is coming from a known research base or if this is common wisdom. I think because this group of users is so diverse, I mean, really we're talking about folks that have mild learning disabilities and struggle and could really, really use the help of developers that do just a couple things differently, all the way on the range to folks that have complex and complicated, significant disabilities. So in a way, we're trying to make lots of changes in lots of different functional categories at lots of levels. But let's focus a little now on a few things that you guys are experts at. That's why we got you on this panel. But that you think would be important for web developers to know and to do. And I'm going to start right off with the person I'm look at, which is Jared. So Jared, why don't you share a little bit about the recommendations and ask each person to give five recommendations that they would have for developers.
Jared: Well, this was a little bit of a difficult list. Because there are a lot of things out there. So I'll at least touch a few of the items on my list.
Cyndi: So this is your top five, although you would have like a top 20?
Jared: Well, I think part of it is as I think about my list -- part of it went back to what I had mentioned before and what Gregg had just mentioned that we have -- we have ideas about what it is we should be doing. We're pretty sure on some things - that we can make recommendations that will generally make things easier to users. But by making a statement that by doing this your page is now accessible to all people with disabilities, there's no way we can make that statement. So I think most of what we're going to say probably are generalizations or things that we know will help. Now, a lot of the things that I'm going to list, and I think that others will list, are things that do have some backing in research. Here at WebAIM we have just conducted a very lengthy literature review just to find out what is it that people are talking about in the field in relation to technology and the web and cognitive disabilities. So what is it? What's in the literature? What types of things are being recommended or talked about? We did a survey to kind of help us determine whether we were on the right track. We pulled these out and got some feedback from users on the web, from developers, as to whether they felt these types of things had an impact on individuals with cognitive disabilities and whether these things would be useful to them as developers. So I kind of derived from all of these my list. I don't know for sure I would say these are my top five or the most important things, but they are five things at least.
Cyndi: But these are five things that you would recommend to a developer that's listening, start doing these things now.
Jared: Right. Right. Exactly. The first would really -- and this is going to sound maybe like a copout, but it would be just make it accessible. What we already know about accessibility for individuals that have visual disabilities, hearing disabilities, motor disabilities, are going to help generally those with cognitive disabilities.
Cyndi: Why would that be?
Jared: Well, if we talk about visual or hearing disabilities, the general solution is to provide content in another mode, in another medium that would be accessible to them. If I cannot hear the content, I need a mechanism to see or read the content. So we know that if there were cognitive disability that makes visual content a little more difficult to understand or hearing, then providing the other mode is going to help. So that's a very general statement. To be a little more specific, we know that many users with cognitive disabilities are using screen readers to help them gain access to web content. It allows them to hear the content being read rather than only seeing the content. So ensuring screen reader accessibility is helpful to those users.
Another very specific thing is providing document structure. And by that I mean using true headings. So instead of big bold text to identify page or section headings, that we're actually using true headings. We know that this facilitates keyboard accessibility, screen reader accessibility, but it also provides a very visual, a very cognitive, semantic or meaningful way of structuring content. Also lists, bulleted lists, numbered lists. There's some meaning or semantics that are associated with that. When I see a bunch of items that have bullets next to them, I have -- it provides a cognitive meaning, a semantic meaning to that - that these items are parallel. If I see numbers they're in a hierarchy. So most things it's not just content but it's providing some structure or meaning to that content.
Cyndi: And of course it's also just indicating that that content is chunked together, which is helpful.
Jared: Right. So those are structures, meaningful headings, lists, data tables that are created appropriately are very important.
Also providing multiple mechanisms for users to find or access content. So we can do that by providing navigation - a structure by which an user could come through and navigate into a website and find content that they're looking for. We can provide a search mechanism which is very useful. So if maybe the complexity of browsing through a site is maybe a little too much, the ability to search by a key term would provide that. Also a site index or glossary, things like that that putt pretty much the majority of the content or ways of accessing the content in one place. So I think those types of things are helpful. But at the same time, I think we also need to be a little bit careful with maybe going overboard. If we provide so many mechanisms of accessing the same content, that alone is going to introduce some sort of cognitive load. So if we have multiple search features, if we have an index, we have a glossary, we have a table of contents, you know, we have different ways of navigating through the content, that alone is going to make things difficult. We have to find a nice balance there.
Simplicity, not going overboard, focusing on content. Content really is key. We see advertisements, we see things that would draw focus away from the content. I think being more simple and focusing primarily on the content. And then instructions, error prevention, error recovery mechanisms.
Cyndi: Or bullet proof.
Jared: That's probably a good way to put it. What happens if the user isn't familiar with maybe even using the web. What if there are memory issues? Is the user still going to be able to come in and accomplish the tasks or access the content in your website. So that's just a few things at least what I put on the top of my list.
Cyndi: And when I listen to those, and I really like an opportunity for each panelist to comment as well, as I listen to those I am struck though, Jared, by my thought that most of your five recommendations would benefit individual users that may be at the milder end of that range. Any thoughts on that?
Jared: No. I think that's a very fair assessment. And this is where things I think get a little more difficult. If we safely make the assumption that we do not have the technology to do this -- this remolding or restructuring of content to make it more accessible, as Gregg mentioned translating english into a simpler version of english. Barring those types of technologies, there is going to be some sort of threshold that we can reach. But it becomes very difficult to go beyond that threshold of cognitive accessibility without either the burden becoming very high or just generally that difficulty of making the content accessible. For instance, I can make it generally pretty accessible to those with, as Cyndi mentioned, this moderate level of cognitive accessibility, but then how do I go beyond that? Do I now have to start creating multiple versions of my website? And if that is the case, you know, that becomes burdensome. And we need to really understand what we're doing when we start to take that step. And then as I mentioned before, as soon as you begin offering users multiple versions of your site to enhance cognitive accessibility, by doing so you have made your website more difficult. Now the user has more --
Cyndi: A higher cognitive load.
Jared: Yes. There's a higher cognitive load. Now the user has to determine which version of the site is most appropriate to them. So moving beyond that threshold becomes very difficult.
Cyndi: Clayton, your thoughts on Jared's list.
Clayton: Well, there's a lot of overlap with mine.
Cyndi: Well, that's actually kind of good.
Clayton: Yeah. Just so, I mean, when I give mine I'll give a little different take on some of these things. But broadly, I'd have a similar list. I might add a little different take on some of these last point about how far we can go with this. So one thing is that some kinds of accessibility problems are in a way self-limiting, okay? So people want access to information that's meaningful to them. And the fact is that because of people being in different situations, different things are meaningful to them.
And so, you know, I think sometimes we can make up a problem that isn't really there. If we imagine somebody and say, maybe there's an analogy I could make here, you know, how are we going to make information about constitutional law in the united states accessible to people in switzerland? Well, you know, there's a lot of issues there, right? So they've grown up in a different political tradition, you know, there's a different set of concept which perhaps they use to approach things. And it's not that nothing could be done to make u.s. Constitutional law accessible to them, but obviously it would be quite difficult to do. But it's not a big issue, because it's not something that they are interested in. So as I say, I guess I'd like to suggest that we could -- that there's a lot that we can do, and that worrying about certain limit cases can be kind of distracting, actually, and get us thinking not about what we can do but worrying about things that yeah, it's true, maybe we can't do them, but it's not clear if in some cases that there's a real occasion to do them.
Cyndi: That's right. Well, the other thing, too, that comes to my mind as I hear your response is that we don't really know today what it is that we won't be able to do tomorrow. So the things that might trouble some of us right now or present for some of us maybe a ceiling effect may not actually be present in another eight years. So I agree with what you're saying, you know, the best focus is on what can be done and move ahead and knowing that technology is going to be helping us as we make these changes. Who would imagine, for example, that web accessibility would be where it is now 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Okay. Gregg, I need comments or thoughts you have on Jared's list before we move on to yours.
Gregg: Well, I was going to say ibid. No, Jared did a very nice job. As a matter of fact, it makes it more challenging. As he's doing it I'm sitting here, okay, what do I say? I would say the following: first thing I would say is, make it usable. Forget people with disabilities. Just make the page usable and obvious. You can't make an unusable page accessible period to most any disability, but particularly for cognitive language and learning. If the page is unusable or confusing to the average user, then there's nothing you're going to do with markup and little twiddles that are going to make it comprehensible or usable.
Cyndi: So Gregg, one of the questions I had they wanted to get into -- and a segueway, -- but do you feel like all the usability research that we have could help us significantly in this problem?
Gregg: Yes, and flip side. This problem can help us in our use ability research. I think that as we kind and document those things that make pages usable by people with cognitive language and learning disabilities, and then go back and run them against just the average population, I think you're going to find that except if you get deep down where you're actually trying to remove content and things like this to simplify, you will find that the same method -- as a matter of fact, a lot of times when we try to talk about things for people with cognitive language and learning people say you can't include those. Those are usability issues. And you go, okay. So you're saying it's okay to have a requirement that pages be accessible but not usable?
That's correct. We don't want any requirements it be usable. You pretty much have taken all cognitive accessibility off the table if you're going to say the pages aren't usable. So first thing I would say is start off by having a page -- there was a study done where they did a bunch of pages and they found that accessibility guidelines were testing all the wrong things, that reason people with disabilities couldn't use these pages were not the reasons the accessibility but all of these other ones. And when you looked at them, they were all usability issues. They basically pad pages that were not very useable to start. With. And of course, the accessibility was killed.
Cydni: So Gregg, let me ask, do you have a couple usability thoughts or tips that you would share with weapon developers that are listening today, what might a couple of those be?
Gregg: Well, one of them is white space and grouping. You can simplify things and cause people to relax if you use your white space and grouping well. The other one is making sure you have really good sense. We don't have a lot of time to get into it if people don't know what that is. But if you're sitting on a web page and there's four links and you don't know if what you're thinking of going for could be under two or three of them. There's not good scent, okay? If you're trying to find a program at trace and the lists were, you know, about trace, programs at trace, research and development programs and contact us, you go, well, it's probably one of those two, but then you click and you've got to go down, come back up. That's not good scent.
Cyndi: There's a lot of cognitive load to figure it out.
Gregg: Oh, yeah. For somebody with a cognitive disability to think about walking a tree is just -- the rest of us think of well, you go down a page and if you don't find it you just keep going up and down through the page. You're talking about people walking a logic tree. This is so far beyond 50% of the population, much less individuals with cognitive language and learning. So that kind of thing. Simple as possible. Albert Einstein said everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler. And that's great. Now, some people say, well, he's saying that don't oversimplify. The answer, is that's right. But take the first part.
Don't oversimplify because you lose information. But there is so much that we could be doing to simplify without losing any information and everybody will love the page better.
Cyndi: You know, I've often wondered about that dilemma of writing content for the web or even design and structure when developers may be spending too much time asking the question, who is our audience? And they target everything for a very narrow little slip. I'm going to target everything for, you know, physics professors or -- I mean, I'm being silly here. But that may be in that design process of identifying your target audience, in a way that could be a kiss of death. Because then you're giving yourself license to not be simple. You're giving yourself license to have a complex logic tree. You're giving yourself license to do a lot of things because your target audience can figure it out.
Gregg: Yeah. Just because you're doing something for football players doesn't mean that you should make the door to the locker room have a 400-pound knob on it so that -- I mean, even physics professors, you know, like to be able to go to a site on physics and easily find rather than have to spend all their time decoding the website. They should be thinking about the content. And so again, we can try to make our pages a lot simpler. You reducer errors, you speed up, have less fatigue, all these things. The other one that I --
Jared: Sorry. I think that we're especially seeing that because a vast majority of web content is developed by very technical people.
Gregg: Yes.
Jared: And they're people that are very familiar with how to navigate these complex tree structures in a website. They're familiar with the technology and they can do it very quickly. And we -- and I'm pointing to myself here -- we as developers, we need to start thinking outside that box of developing it for me but developing it for a broader audience. I think that a lot of the cognitive issues that we're running into aren't necessarily derivatives of the content or structure itself, they're just kind of results of the very technical people that are creating them.
Gregg: It's also -- cognitive is the hardest disability to conceptualize. I mean, we can think of closing our eyes and trying to access. As a matter of fact, we can even close our eyes and try to access. We can also think of not being able to hear or take your mouse and drop it down behind your desk. Now use your computer. These are things we can do to give us some idea. But you can't think -- you can't think your way through not thinking.
You can't -- you can't conceptualize. Once you understand hierarchical structures it's hard to think that everybody doesn't think that way. And it shows all of our products are designed to be operated by -- and they're designed by people in the top few percent of the technology quotient, not just intelligence but technology quotient. They're familiar with technology. And it shows. We have terribly complex interfaces on even very simple devices.
Cyndi: And this is just a very quick aside and then I'll let you get back to your list, Gregg, but I just read today that microsoft is partnering with some groups in the U.K. and they're actually developing a laptop for seniors, for the elderly. That will have a much simplified interface and operations. And I think to myself, gosh, maybe as a field technologists are coming around to the fact that everything that is developed and designed can't be developed and designed for us, if that makes sense. Circular logic.
Gregg: Yes. And there have been attempts before. And one of the things that's notable about it is that they decided to try to have it be designed by something other than the Microsoft campus. Because quite frankly, it would be very hard for a simple interface to survive with people who have that much. It would be like requiring among people who are all very strong that things be really easy to do. And the answer is, it's just unnecessary. But your list -- any more on your list?
The last item I had was to do what you can to make your device machine-readable and understandable, your content and your systems. Because that will allow cognitive AT to be able to be created and to work on the web. And that is the kind of thing that web guidelines and stuff are full of. The half of the guidelines are all about making content so that it can be represented and simplified and a number of things. If the machine can get them in and can understand what the page is, can understand how the page is laid out, it can take a complex page and present it to a person as, do you want to navigate? Do you want to go to a section? Here are the sections on the page. A do you want to read the main body top to bottom? Then there's simple three choices. And you would say, well, what's on the page? So it only presents you the titles. That's all that's on the page. And what it's doing is it's giving what's laid out all in parallel on the page but it gives it to the person in a simpler form. And this can be done if the machine, if the user agent, can figure out what on earth is going on on the page.
Well, and almost in a way it's collapsing content down to its core and then expanding it as the user is needing it. Exactly. It's allowing them to -- somebody once said, you know, is it better on a questionnaire to put all the questions on a page and they answer it or one question on each page. And the answer is, well, if you're doing data entry all day it's nice to have them on one page because you go bing bing bing. But for people with cognitive language, if you can present one question and one answer and that's all that's on the screen it's a lot easier for them to focus and they can answer it. Then it will ask them the next question. Unless they need the context of their old answers, it's a lot easier to allow them to focus than have a whole screen they have to deal with.
Cyndi: Interesting. Okay. Clayton, we'll go to you now. But apparently we've just presented both Jared and Gregg have presented most of your list, huh?
Clayton: Yeah. I've got one that's not on either of their lists, though.
Cyndi: Okay.
Clayton: So if they're going to disagree I want to hear what it is. But I do want to go a little different slant or supplement on a few of the points that have been made. So top of my list, which certainly has been mentioned is, you got to start with making the presentation of the content as clear and simple as you can. And I had in my statement of that, make a conscious effort to do that. Because we've talked a little bit about how design processes go. And there are design processes where somehow that step gets skipped, you know, that people view the page as somehow a container and they worry about the characteristics of the container. It's not that those things aren't important but that somewhere there really needs to be somebody who's focusing on making things clear. And we just very often don't do that. People have correctly pointed out sometimes that's because the people dealing with the content aren't in a good position to judge it. But other cases I think that's really because that's a step that's left out, you know, it's just not something people have sort of thought about something that needs to be a focus. You know, audio presentation is really critical. It was number two on my list. That's been mentioned. Actually I realize there are a couple of things here that I think didn't come up or I missed one of them, perhaps if it did.
Cyndi: Let me ask though, Clayton, when you say audio presentation, you know, there's really two ways to go there. First is to make sure that everything that is on there could be detected or read by something, you know, ala a screen reader, may be something slightly different than something that may have audio files loaded.
Clayton: Yeah.
Cyndi: And you hit a button and you get, you know, use that audio.
Clayton: Yeah.
Cyndi: Which of those were --
Clayton: Well, those are really important. And it's something where we're dealing with what we can all hope is a moving target and I know that Gregg and colleagues are doing important strategic stuff on this. So not to get into all the complications of it. But today, we can't assume that all users have a tool that they can apply to get audio input from text that we've provided. And so some people I work with who have a special focus in this area do take the step of providing audio files. But there's a sense in which that's not strategic and in some sense we shouldn't have to do it. You know, in the here and now there are situations where that is what we have to do. But strategically we should all be working towards a time when everybody's user agent is going to have that capability. And not because somebody bought a special user agent but because you go to the public library or anywhere else and use the technology that is provided there. We all have to be pushing towards the day -- and I'm really echoing an argument that Gregg has made very clearly and forcefully -- we have to get to the point where wherever people are encounters technology it has this capability built into it. Not because they've bought something special or tailored something special but that's built into the fabric. So we're not there at the moment so that is why people are doing something that you're suggesting and providing audio content in a custom way.
Cyndi: But you're certainly saying that at some point, as just part of our every day ubiquitous technologies that you would hope to see a time when there is that audio output that isn't a very, very complex series of actions and commands, ala current screen readers.
Clayton: Yes, that's right.
Cyndi: Okay. Anyway, back to your list.
Gregg: Well, this is Gregg if I can just interject something. Right off of what you said. One of the things we did on voting, for example, is we introduced basically touch and read. And so with this what a person can do who has a cognitive language learning is that if they can read they just sort of read along. Whenever they see something they can't they just highlight it and it's read.
Cyndi: Yes.
Gregg: Even if they can read nothing on the page, the ability to highlight things and to randomly jump around the page and just touch on it rather than as you said of the screen reader, it all has to be done with key strokes and complex key strokes. Just pointing. If the person can see they can have this. And we now have synthesizers that read so well that they are indistinguishable from human beings in terms of text and speech. As a matter of fact, they sound a lot better than human beings over cell phones. So this kind of a capability is now coming. And I'll let Clayton finish his list. And then I know he wants to toss something back on the R.T.F. so since he's talking all around it I'll touch base on the end of it.
Cyndi: Okay, Clayton, back to you.
Clayton: Actually a little micro segue. Gregg mentioned highlighting something to get it read. So this is another point they get from the people they work with. It's really important to them that there's an easy way for them to get some definitional information about something that they see that they don't understand. So if there's an unusual word being used or an acronym that's being used, something of that kind, it can be a huge help to people if they can do the sort of thing Gregg was just talking about. Highlight it and have access to some kind of glossary information and sort of using this also to make one of the other themes, if people are looking at the guidelines as they are evolving for markup, you'll see that these kinds of things are in there. But I think people don't necessarily always know why they're there or what their value can be for different kinds of users. So the kind of thing where you might see something that says, you know, mark up uses of words that come from another language than the main language of the site, for example. Well, there are a bunch of things like that where the notion is, you know, there are going to be people coming to your site for whom if you're using unusual vocabulary or terms that are special to what you're talking about, it's really a big help if you make it easy for them to get access to those meanings. So actually I'm going to skip down my list and then back up to the one that's the most different. But anyway, I just want to underscore everything that Jared and Gregg have been saying about the importance of really paying attention to what's happening in markup. And there's huge progress being made to get it so that markup is not any longer, as people tended to think of it, a way of controlling the appearance of the site. It's almost the opposite. It's a way of giving up the appearance so that that can be conditioned by the user agent but emphasizing that it's really the meaning of the content that's being marked up.
Cyndi: Back to Jared's comment that content must be king.
Clayton: That's right. Okay. So going way back to one of Jared's first points, you know, just in case people maybe didn't get it completely I may be explaining something that doesn't need explaining. But the difference between marking something as a heading and saying, well, this should be a big tonight and it should be bold. I mean, there's really an enormous difference there that's extremely important. And Gregg has illustrated this also that if you have markup that makes clear what's the heading, then there's a tremendous amount that can be done to provide people with for them better presentations, which often means a more selective presentation of the page because you have now the capability of saying, look, somebody is asking to see really just the key point in this page. So if people are taking seriously and following what's coming or what's happening in the markup world, that's hugely advantageous. The one other thing which is kind of in another direction but something I would certainly want to convey to the audience here is the importance of testing your site with a broad range of users. Gregg and others were sort of bringing out and exploring the relationship between usability and accessibility which is a very tight one if by accessibility you mean can people really do what they need to be able to do, which in the end of the day is what we all want. You know, people in the usability community have long understand that absolute critical importance of user testing. You know, when you look at organizations that have serious use pressure from large, wide populations of consumers -- so for example companies that develop teller machines, they make a huge investment on user testing. And I think in the web world, it's insufficiently appreciated how important that is. And largely I'd say that's because it's insufficiently appreciated by people who are putting content on the web how seldom it actually works. You put a site up there and you know about the customers that succeed but you may not pay attention to the ones who don't. And if you do pay attention to that then you realize that it just to sort of imagine -- it just doesn't fly to sort of imagine what might work and put it up there and hope for the best. And this is true sort of extending that principle out even moreso, if people will recognize that they need to be testing their sites, and that they need to be testing their sites with people with disabilities. This is another point that's been made by others. A lot of these things, it's not about cognitive disabilities. It's about accessibility generally. If you want to make sure that your site can be used by somebody who's using a screen reader, there's no substitute for seeing whether they can use it.
Cyndi: Yes. Yes. Right.
You know, I know that you would like, Gregg, to be able to talk for a minute about a new project you've got going. But before we get to that, we do have some questions that have come in. Oh, you know what? Mind my manners here. Let me quickly give both Jared and Gregg an opportunity, if they'd like to respond to any of your comments, Clayton, and then we're going to go to questions that are coming in. And certainly for any listeners out there if you'd like to submit some feel free to do that. And then Gregg, we will make sure that we leave time for you to mention your project.
Gregg: Okay. Well, I just wanted to reinforce everything that Clayton said. Because it's absolutely right on. And let me just reduce my comment to one sentence so that we have lots of time for the questions from the listeners because I think that's more important. One of the big barriers that Clayton mentioned is the fact that we keep talking about a.t. For cognitive, and yet they say people with cognitive can't afford a.t., et cetera. And so we have a large collaborative international effort that we're just launching that's called raising the floor. And the purpose is to build accessibility directly into the internet, into the web, so that anyone would be able to sit down anywhere on any computer and invoke the assistive functions that they needed. And to have a basic level of those available free, like you have free public libraries, et cetera. So that we can now have -- and then also a common core so that there's something for people who want to work in this area to build on rather than to have to invent everything themselves. So --
Cyndi: And so Gregg, you are the contact for raising the floor?
Gregg: Sure. We're doing this -- trace center is doing this in conjunction with benetech, jim filterman in california and people all over the world. But yes, I would be a good contact, especially around the cognitive stuff.
Cyndi: Great. Great. That's wonderful. I bet you get a slew of e-mails.
Gregg: Yeah. And the goal is to actually really break open the cognitive aspect, because it isn't something where people are going to be able to go out and buy very expensive a.t. To do. This and if we can have it built right in, then that really opens things up.
Cyndi: Okay. I'm going to get now to some of the questions that have come in. And I'll just open it up to any of you. And let's try to be as complete as possible but also brief so we can get to more of these. The first one comes in from kathy hostad at minot state university. Kathy's question, what are some of the most exciting developments in simplifying content for users with functional, cognitive limitations.
Jared: This is Jared. I'll jump in because this is actually something I've been thinking about over the last 20 minutes as some of your comments have been made. And one of the things that really excites me is the idea of content aggregation. And this is something we've kind of hinted at. Gregg talked about having content be machine readable. And we've all talked about it being structured in a way that it can be manipulated and extracted and compiled in different ways. But the idea of content aggregation is that you can pull content from multiple places and put it into one interface that would allow you to do that. Those of you that subscribe to rss feeds or have an rss reader or aggregator understand this idea, that you're pulling information from a lot of different places into one central location. I use this very extensively. I read somewhere along the lines of 100 different news sites and blogs and information posts and websites a day through one interface, through one content aggregator. And if you think about accessibility, if we're really focusing on content, providing users the ability to pull all that into one interface is going to remove the accessibility barriers of all the other stuff, the packaging that comes along with a website, the navigation, the advertisements, the visual look and feel. You can focus just on the content. So that's one of the things that really excites me.
Cyndi: Clayton or Gregg? Any in your --
Clayton: I'll jump in.
Cyndi: Okay.
Clayton: So one thing is something that's a piece of the project that Gregg described that is going to be really strategically important, I think it's going to open up lots of really great possibilities. And that's the use of online user profiles. This is closely related to something in the world of commerce called the single system sign-on paradigm. So the notion is that I can establish a profile that describes my information presentation preferences. I can define that online in a way that that is seamlessly used whenever I am interacting with a particular website. So that I don't -- I don't have to sort of fuss to get the right presentation every time I go to a new site. But if, for instance, I've made a setting that I want to see the top level headings on the sites they visit, I could specify that once. Or equally important or more important for some people, that could be specified for me or with me so they don't face the overhead of trying to configure everything that I'm looking at. I can get smooth access without that. I'll mention one other thing, which is happening so far not really focusing on cognitive accessibility but I think it has enormous potential there.
There's a group at the university of washington that's developing a vision called Access Monkey. And in brief, this is a way that people could share accessibility adjustments and configurations that they develop. So suppose that I use amazon and I find that a different way of laying out, perhaps using more white space as Gregg suggested would be advantageous for me, there are technologies that allow me to specify that. Those exist today. The new idea is that the work of specifying that could be shared and it links in with the profile. Because I could potentially access through my profile accessibility improvements for people all over the world have contributed that are relevant to me. And I think that's a really exciting prospect.
Cyndi: Absolutely. Well, if you can believe it, we are out of time. This hour just flew by. And I apologize. We can't get -- didn't get to more of our questions. But what I will do for those of you that submitted questions, we'll make sure to get answers for you and send those back out to you. I want to thank all of our panelists for participating today. I want to remind everybody that we're going to have this entire webcast archived on the site and in its captioned version as well. So if there was information useful here or something you want to chew on a little bit longer, please come back and visit the archive. It will be up in just a few days. I believe that is it. Thank you, Gregg, thank you, Clayton, thanks, Jared. This has been a wonderful webcast. And we will be sending out announcements of our next National Center on Disability and Access to Education webcast which will be in just a few months from now. So sign up if you want notification of that. You can do so right on our site. And this is Cyndi signing off and hope you all have a wonderful day and evening. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.