Accessibility Simulations: In-Class Exercise (28 September 2004)
If you have headphones with you, complete the tasks on WebAIM's Screen Simulator. If you don't have headphones, do this exercise outside of class; it's a valuable experience.
Go to the Cognitive Simulator on the same site, and complete those tasks as well.
On the Vischeck site, provide a URL to a web page you've created, and see how it would appear to a person with color blindness. Try it with some of the web pages you frequent most often.
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The Screen Simulator is reallz hard for me, I couldnt do it. Might have to do with my language differences.
The second one was pretty funny, I kinda enjoyed that. I dint find the penguin picture.
On the third one I tested my weblog, which actually looks better for color blind people, so I might actually change my colors a little.
The screen reader was a little different. It took a lot more calm waiting. I did it the night before class and I had to close my eyes and imagine what it looks like. It was particularly hard when it came to the table that the class schedules were in. Also the sudden breaks in speech were annoying, probably due to misuse of a p tag.
The cognitive one was interesting, but nearly as frustrating. Including a game was a good idea to make sure that your focus keeps wandering from the tasks. But if it weren't a game then I think I could have really gotten a grasp on how frustrating it can be. By the way it took me nearly three minutes to complete the tasks on easy.
I looked at my site through the color blind tool at Vischeck and it doesn't look any different. But my site is done in a gray scale so it makes sense that it wouldn't. I tried a few other sites but they wouldn't work. It was probably due to them being dynamically created with php or whatever.
This inclass exercise was...interesting. The first on when you had to listen was so freakin annoying I just quit. I really had no idea what the hell was going on. The second one with the guy and the bombs was actually fun. The harder version was a little challenging but after a while I got it.
Posted by: Brian Daggett on September 30, 2004 02:59 PM | Permalink to CommentI did the cognitive simulator one in class as I didn't have headphones and I had no idea how annoying it would get - I would be able to liken that to say, clicking on a link but instead of going where you want to go, you get either a dropdown menu giving you more choices or some popup alert text telling you what's going on.
The screenreader one was weird when I turned on the captioning - although it did bring to mind how blind and deaf people would be able to read captioning on a screen.
Posted by: Julie Mason on October 14, 2004 05:07 AM | Permalink to CommentThe vids at this link might help illustrate the use of screen reader to some of your students.
http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/video/index.asp
Posted by: Justin Thorp on November 17, 2004 03:06 PM | Permalink to Comment