IBM has been a pioneer of sorts in web accessibility and has figured prominently in recent years at the Cal State Northridge Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference.

Last year at the CSUN accessibility conference, IBM Presenters Rich Schwerdtfeger and George Kraft outlined the IBM Linux Accessibility Project’s efforts in the open source community for enterprise Linux accessibility, and did the first public demonstration of the new Linux Screen Reader and gscope magnifier.

This year, IBM’s focus was more on the accessible web. IBM has been a pioneer in this area and has great references on their immense site to help ensure compliance with disparate standards. This page ( http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/web/ibm508wcag.html ) in particular. In some ways it seems that IBM is creating their own standard, but I don’t believe that that’s IBM’s intention. Rather than a standard, IBM has created a best practices document to aid designers unfamiliar with typical web accessibility issues (per attendee Scott Jungling, a v4 of IBM’s checklist is forthcoming). IBM’s document is particularly helpful as it provides a nuts and bolts how-to, rather than an academic sounding research-paper approach. A great example is the comparison a how to treat images in an accessible document:

IBM Web Checkpoint Description Section 508 WCAG 1.0 Guideline
Use the alt=”text” attribute to provide text equivalents for images. Use alt=”" for images that do not convey important information or convey redundant information. 1194.22 (a) A text equivalent for every non-text element shall be provided (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content). 1.1 Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content). This includes: images, graphical representations of text (including symbols), image map regions, animations (e.g., animated GIFs), applets and programmatic objects, ascii art, frames, scripts, images used as list bullets, spacers, graphical buttons, sounds (played with or without user interaction), stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video. [Priority 1]

My favorite part of doing this blog for the past year has been learning this kind of stuff about IBM. I’ve followed the company for more than a decade now, but I’ve never really appreciated how many different things IBM does, and how many of them IBM does very well.

In unrelated news (maybe?) IBM had a press release today about their support of open source tools helping professors (read: the graduate students who do their work for them) develop accessible web content. IBM created something called an “Accessibility Common Courseware Exchange for Software Studies”. There was nothing very interesting to me there except the timing of the PR. Congrats to IBM if that was coordinated rather than serindipity.

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