[Capacity-Building-WG] Online Collaborative Platform

[William Tibben]

Hi everyone,

In relation to choosing a collaborative platform I thought that it would be good to raise the issue of accessibility for people with disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities website contains a really informative webinar and other information.

 http://www.accessibilityonline.org/Archives/index.php?app=4&type=transcript&id=2012-09-06

After reading through this information the following questions are useful when assessing the accessibility of collaborative platforms.

1.Is the white board application displaying text based lectures slides (e.g. power point) accessible to screen readers?

2. Can text window for chat, asking questions and the like be ballooned for people with low vision?

3. Do point and click operations using a mouse have a keyboard equivalent for people for low motor skills?

 Ideally, all spoken text should be captioned  

None of these questions are meant to be vetos - just a way of assessing how well the systems can be used by our brothers and sisters who have differing abilities. Also the questions are mine - you may think of some others if you go to the ADA website. You will need about an hour to fully go through the webinar but its probably an hour well spent if you are not familiar with accessibility issues (like I was)

Cheers

Will Tibben