[NLedu] Researching accessibility of Silverlight-based websites

[Guido Arnold]

Hello,

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 07:27:47AM +0100, Jan Stedehouder wrote:
> Good morning everyone,
> 
> I hope you don't mind sending out various messages now about
> 'things-to-do' for the 'Unlocking education'-campaign. It will make it
> easier for me to track what stills needs to be done and who is working
> on what ;-)

Not at all :) Smaller pieces are easier to swallow. 
 
> For our legal strategy we want to establish whether computerusers with
> visual impairments can work with Silverlight-based websites or not. If
> the answer is 'no' we might be able to include them as a group that is
> locked out of online school environments that use proprietary
> webtechnology and closed standards.
> 
> We would like to ask a few people to test Silverlight-based websites
> with various accessibility tools that are available for users with
> visual impairments: screen readers, braille readers, read aloud tools,
> et cetera. Yes, I am aware that this might necessitate working with
> Windows, Internet Explorer en Silverlight as well ;-)
> 
> I've been thinking about what might need to be included in the research:
> 
> 1. a decent list of Silverlight-based websites where you have a
> combination of text-based information and multi-media, but mostly
> text-based (as that would ensure the validity of the research for
> Magister);

How to we get such a list? I met a few people working on
accessibility at FSCONS, one of them visually impaired. It would be
good to have such a list before I contact her and ask for some
testing. But maybe she already knows that it is painful to use
Silverlight.
> 
> 2. a list of used accessibility tools
> 3. overview of the points tested
> 4. some kind of scorecard to test the various sites in combination
> with the tools
> 5. a brief report describing the research and the conclusions.
> 
> For completeness sake we would need to include a similar list of sites
> that are build in HTML/CSS/Javascript. Am I missing something? What
> would need to be added?

I am not sure if we really need to have such a scientific research to
proof that certain criteria are not met. Maybe, half of the work is
already done by people who have been dealing with this matter for
years. W3C might be an ally here:
http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility

Greetings,

Guido

-- 
Guido Arnold                       Free Software Foundation Europe   
http://blogs.fsfe.org/guido      []         Edu team & German team 
OpenPGP Key-ID:  0x82F6A8F2    [][][]                  Get active! 
XMPP: guido at jabber.fsfe.org      ||     http://fsfe.org/contribute

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