The visually-impaired population faces many barriers to accessing Web resources. Assistive and adaptive technology has been created to aid this population, but accessing these technologies and learning to use them can be difficult. Assistive and adaptive technologies can be prohibitively expensive and often requires significant technical knowledge to operate. Compounding these problems, people with disabilities experience disproportionately higher rates of poverty than the rest of the population. This puts technologies even further out of reach because not only is the cost of the technology itself an issue, but the cost of learning can also be prohibitive if institutions like public libraries do not offer training or like assistance. The most fundamental goal of this project is to provide District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) with a framework to better serve its visually impaired patrons. To accomplish this, it was crucial that the project group accurately identified the needs of the group of participants. Equally essential to this end, the project group had to determine participants' current level of satisfaction. The success of this program lies in its usefulness to the visually impaired patron, and, therefore, the project group memberfs decided that a series of first hand interviews would provide us with the most relevant data. Two interviews were conducted; at the beginning and end of the course. After synthesizing the interview data, a report was packaged and given the DCPL detailing recommendations and suggestions geared towards improving the program.
Students:
Peter Miller
Lakendra Kea
Carrie LeBaron
Sophie Reverdy
Lynn Nashorn
Ceclia Hayford
E-Books for Kids with Print Disabilities: the Mobile Book Generator Project
Back to topThis project is designed to provide materials to help the District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) decide on a direction to take the mobile books project as it relates to blind children and the legal and policy decisions that allow the DCPL to produce digitized copies of children's books. The focus community is that of the blind, or severely visually impaired, especially visually impaired children. The group created a short report on both the literature on and the legal issues surrounding copyright associated with providing e-books to children who are visually impaired and made a recommendation based on the findings. The group presented a series of questions to consider on the topic and compiled the annotated bibliography of resources for the library, detailing for their use the law as it applies to digitizing and captioning children's books for those children with print disabilities. The group identified literature on the benefits of speech synthesis vs. human voices in e-books for children and provided DCPL with an annotated bibliography and a summary of their findings. Additionally, six children's picture books were captioned in three different ways (each) to identify the best manner of captioning. The group generated a position paper indicating the best captioning style, the appropriate way to provide captions for pages in children's books, and presented a defensible position for the library to maintain relating to the preferred method of captioning. Finally, the group provided a report of the findings for DCPL to use in their future project decisions.
Authors:
Kelly Buchanan
James Donaldson
Natalie Greene
Chang Hsiao
Rachel Pleatman
Meg Ryan
Saturday Technology Training Sessions UStream Broadcast Archives
Back to topSince October 2006, the District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) has hosted Saturday Technology Training Sessions. These sessions are group meetings that introduce and provide training for adaptive technologies to interested users. All of these "Saturday Sessions" have been recorded and uploaded to the video sharing service UStream. The video archive is difficult to explore as the videos are raw, unedited, and without metadata. The goal of this project was to make this video content useful, usable, and accessible by following the basic principles of universal usability and design. The project group members chose to focus on a self-contained series of videos, informally referred to as the “iPhone Sessions," which have the potential to be useful to a wide audience. These videos focus on the accessibility features of the iPhone and highlight apps that are particularly useful to persons with disabilities. The group delivered a variety of products to DCPL including; video archives with content that is searchable and both physically and intellectually accessible to the widest number of potential users, an evaluation of potential hosting platforms and video editing software for the future expansion of the video archive, protocol for adding to the archives to ensure the uniformity and consistency of the content and an index of the terms and tags used in the project and a list of suggestions to improve the quality of the webcasting of the Saturday Sessions.
Authors:
Angela Forest
Bridgette Hendrix
Matthew Jones
Margaret Leist
Qing Qu
Kt Zawodny
Improving Accessibility for the Deaf Community: A Partnership between DCPL Adaptive Services and University of Maryland
Back to topThe project members partnered with the Adaptive Services Department of the D.C. Public Libraries (DCPL) to caption a video from the conference entitled “Libraries, Access and ASL Literature: The Deaf Share Our Not-So-Silent Stories.” Prior to captioning, the videos needed to be cut into reasonable lengths that made sense contextually. The videos were divided into six equal segments, with each group member examining a section. Using timestamps, group members indicated where logical breaks and obvious edits could be made (long pauses, video titles, etc.), along with comments on the general actions and content of the video to help further polish the videos. Additionally, the group elected to create a WordPress site to provide a centralized location online for greater access.
Authors:
Carol Ido
Amelia Davis
Jean Lee
Shannon Kraushaar
Barbara Dickey Davis
Lynn Olson
ADA 508 Technical Guideline Organization
Back to topCurated by Mr. Jamal Mazrui (FCC), a collection of over 1600 documents exists relative to the American Disability Act Section 508 Technical Accessibility Guidelines. These documents, ranging in type from legislation to internal office memos and corporate best practices, make up the most extensive collection of reference materials on this subject. In partnership with Mr. Mazrui and DCPL, this group focused on indexing and abstracting a sample collection that will serve as a foundation for the continued categorization of the documents, all leading towards a future public online repository. The goals for this project were to develop a thorough record of each of the sample documents that included the following data fields: Suggested Title, Document Type, Source URL, Publication Year, Creating Agency, General Topic, Indexed Category, Audience, Keywords, Abstract, and Tags. Using the current government classification structure, the group worked to develop a more intuitive, common sense model that would allow for easier access to information for non-government and non-expert use. The group aimed to assign each document to a category(-ies), generate obvious keywords, note the potential audience, and attach tags that could be used as a way for users to create their own reference folksonomy.
Authors:
Hannah Erickson
Eun Ji
James Neal
Rebecca Oxley
Claire Valdivia
Kimberly White