Web Accessibility

When an architect designs a structure, accessibility to persons with physical impairments is always a consideration. Any public building must comply to the laws related to providing access to the physically impaired. Yet, when a Web designer creates a new site, Web accessibility is often not a consideration. In the U.S., the exceptions are Federal Government sites, which must comply with Section 508 guidelines, and some state sites.

I believe that it is imperative that every Web page designer treat Web accessibility with the same level of diligence as does an architect who designs a public building. For any Web site within The American Legion Family, Web accessibility is important for the following reasons:

• As us older veterans age, we suffer a natural loss in visual accuity. To many, small fonts are no longer readable, and the ability to detect fine differences in contrasts declines.
• There are many veterans who suffer some form of color blindness. While their color blindness may have limited the type of duty performed in the service, it did not prevent them from Serving Our Country.
• Service related injuries may have resulted in visual or auditory impairments.

So that our Web sites serve all veterans, we need to do the following:

• Design our sites using relative units, such as ems or percentages. The use of pixels as a measurement should be left to non-scalable elements, such as graphics.
• The user should be able to control the default font size and default font from their browser. If scaled with relative measurements, a Web page should adjust according to the default font. For most browser's the default font size is 16 pixels, and the default font should be sans-serif. Serif fonts are just to hard to read by anyone with a visual impairment.
• All images must use the alt tag, with a meaning full description of the image. If alt is not sufficient, use the longdesc tag.
• Links should use the rel tag to describe the link, when the bounded text does not provide an adequate description.
• Data tables must use headings and the heading need to include the scope tag to define the structure of the table to a screen reader.
• Tables should not be used to provide structure for the Web page. This is a habit from the days when there was no other option. Today, we need to use other tags and style sheets to define the structure of a page.
• A Web page must make navigational sense when the style sheet is not present. Screen readers read just the page, without the style sheet.

The above highlight the major considerations in designing a site to be accessible to the visually impaired. Giving control to the browser, allows the user to scale the font to the size that they can see. By using relative sizing, the page scales according to the font size.

Screen readers are used by the legally blind, and those with other severe visual impairments. A person who uses a screen reader may not even have a graphical terminal. The most common output of the screen reader is audio, while there is a smaller population that use braille devices. To understand the challenges these users face, just listen to a reader as it reads your Web page.

There are a number of on line tools for testing a Web Page. The Accessibility Guidelines page at mtlegion.org lists the tests I use in creating Web pages. If you want a quick test of your site, just change the default font size to 20 and see what happens to your site. Graphics do present an issue, so reducing the default size to less than 16 can render most sites unreadable.

Have I completed all the work on mtlegion.org to make it fully Web accessibile? The answer is no, but I keep working on it. My goal is to create a site that is accessible by every veteran that can use a computer to access the Internet.

ProCam (aka PlaceCam) review

Yesterday I sat in on The American Legion Department of Colorado’s regular Monday night ProCam (formally known as PlaceCam) meeting…
The meeting was hosted at 6:30 Mountain Time, 8:30 Eastern Standard Time.
Meeting was hosted by The American Legion Department of Colorado Commander, Gar Williams, from a remote location (hotel in KY). Participants included Past National Commander Tom Bock, Department Vice Commander Frank McCurdy, Department Adjutant Pat Smith, Robb Smith, Tony DuMosch, James Gates, James Park, Larry Decker…

Including myself, there are 10 users online for video conference… the meeting took off with some glitches, with this many users the video feeds acted funny… Larry wasn’t able to log on since he was located in a hotel with unstable internet connection, and when he is online, his video feed was frozen. Commander Gar also dialed-in from a hotel, but his connection seemed fine and he was able to conduct the meeting for the most part, until his video feed also crashed…
For those of us using a dedicated high speed connection, we had very little problems with the video… in fact, some of our videos were smooth and of solid quality…

Over all, it took us 30 minutes to just get set up for everyone to log on, and hold a steady connection… we eventually had to let Larry call from a cell phone, but he was able to relate his message…

It was refreshing to be able to attending a department meeting from the comfort of my home, however, observing many of the glitches and troubles with log-on, I believe ProCam (aka PlaceCam) still has a long way to go from being a solid product… I encourage you all to use it and give me feedback on how your experiences goes… you can download a copy of this and register for use at http://www.legion.networkcb.com/

To clarify the difference between the new VetCam and ProCam… VetCam is for every legionnaire to use and for all servicemembers and their families… it only allows (MAX) three users to interact at once… so you are only able to call two others… however, there is no download for VetCam and it has minimum user interface so there are no significant bugs at this moment we have noticed…

With ProCam, it is offered to post, district, and departments as a meeting tool… it is suppose to be able to carry more than 10 users all at once, but we have noticed that anything more than five or seven users, depending on your connection, things slow down quite a bit… also if everyone is not using a headphone, echo is a hug problem…

That’s it for now…

COMMUNICATION SURVEY

If you have a second, please take this survey... it's a communication audit conducted by the national headuqarters...

thank you

CLICK HERE

TroopTube

www.trooptube.tv

this is a new site from Military One Source. it allows servicememebrs upload videos to share with others... you can create a free account and upload department videos for these servicememebrs to see. it is a free marketing opportunity.

The American Legion Department of Colorado Social Network aimed to serve student veterans

Click here to find out more about Colorado's initiatives to build a social network connecting student veterans with legionnaires.

VetCam for Legionnaires and Servicemembers

The American Legion launches VetCam, a free one-on-one video conferencing – to enable you to talk face-to-face with friends and family across town or overseas; one-on-one; or with several people at a time.
Members of The American Legion, as well as members of the United States Armed Forces (active duty, Reserve and National Guard), their families and friends, are welcome to use this complimentary technology to remain connected with those people most important to you.
Visit http://vetcam.ncbintl.com/ for more information.