Berkeley Macintosh Users Group

Transcription

Lynn Zummo: Welcome to our Webnet meeting June. This is the last meeting of the 09'-10' season. Sorry, I work for Cal Performances and we were on by season. So this is the last meeting. We usually reserve it for accessibility and for Lucy's group. So without further ado, I'm going to get started with some introductions. The first I was offered the opportunity to just give a little bit of history of Webnet. Webnet's been around for about 13 years, and it is a group of volunteers who produce a meeting every other month on topics that are generally of interest to web developers on campus. It doesn't have to be necessarily someone who works directly with web editing. It could be a programmer who is doing applications programming. It could be someone who is doing writing for the web. It could be a graphic designer. We have, like I said, meetings every other month. And then in addition to those meetings the general Webnet meetings, which you are all here for, we have every other month. On the off months a meeting for special interest group for Webnet editors. So, that is a different subgroup of this group. There are, I don't know, six of us who are on this steering committee for Webnet. We determine what topics are going to be available each year and then we set up the schedule and invite you all to come and listen to presenters and panelists. So my name is Lynn Zummo. I don't think I said that. My name is Lynn Zummo. I am the new technology coordinator for Cal Performances. And I am on the steering committee for Webnet. So this is -- like I said, we usually reserve the last meeting of the year for accessibility. And this is the fourth time that we have done a meeting with Lucy's group. So I'm really pleased that we are able to do this for the campus. It seems to be a really hot topic. And so, anyway, I'm going to introduce Lucy Greco, and I am really happy that she's available to do these kind of meetings for us. Oh, by the way there is going to be a sign-in sheet that comes around. I forgot to mention that. So please write down your name and e-mail address and whatever it asks for on that. She is one of the leaders of the campus Webnet, or the campus Web Access Group and the access technology specialist for the Center for Disabled Students. Lucy. >> Lucy Greco: Thank you, Lynn. I'm very proud to be here today. And I'm actually very proud to work at Berkeley as the assistive technology specialist because I see this room full of people, and everybody here is here to talk about accessibility. I have never ever been rejected when I go to people and talk to them about accessibility on this campus. People are always very interested, very happy about accessibility. And even people who say, "Oh, I don't know if this is accessible or not and I'm really worried about it." Really have done a good job because they've at least got that niggling in their mind and they've taken the first step and come and ask about accessibility. So, I want everybody to give Berkeley a round of applause for having a great accessibility environment. So to give a little bit of history of web access, web access was formed five and a half years ago as a group of people interested in forming a policy on campus about technology in general and accessibility primarily for that technology. And they met for about five or six months and worked on kind of a draft policy which continued over the next year, year and a half and actually got forwarded to the Office of the President as a system-wide policy. It got denied. I'm sad to say. But that denial was not, we're not interested in having a policy on accessibility. We just don't know where the funding is going to come from to sponsor that policy. So, we kind of stepped back for a bit and the Office of the President said the campuses need to take responsibility and that's where we come in because Berkeley is currently ahead of every other campus in its accessibility initiatives. Our web access group now runs clinics once a week where somebody can request a clinic for any website they want that they're working on or any web application they are working on. It doesn't even have to be a web. It just needs to be something computer related, bring it into the group and we run it through a screen reader. We have experts who are in the room who look at the coding, look at how the page is laid out and try and figure out ways to make that website more accessible and inevitably more useable. We had a BILD grant two years ago, which the BILD, grant how many of you are familiar with that? Is the Berkeley Inclusion and Leadership Diversity grant where we actually went out and specifically worked on a couple of staff websites to see make them more accessible, which was very successful. And now we've been in so many websites in the clinic environment that I've been going through and trying to actually catalog all the websites we've done and I've lost count. So, on the sign-up sheet there's a slot there for people who might want to bring their website or application to us for a web review. Please put "yes" on the sign-up sheet and we will contact you and you will get a chance to fill it out, or go through a web client application review. Let's see, I think I didn't miss anything. I would like to recognize all the web access members in the room. If you could all stand, please. Hopefully I didn't miss anybody as they walked in. We have Jon Hays from ETS, Steve McConnell from the NewsCenter, Karen Eft from Office of the CIO, Kim Steinbacher from, what is your department nowadays? Equity and Inclusion. Okay. Did I miss anybody? Caroline Boyden, my co-lead, the most important person, my co-lead from the Office of Letters and Sciences. And I wouldn't be able to do web access without her because I may know how to screen reader works but she knows how the coding works. I now would like to hand over the meeting to Shel Waggener our Assistant Vice Chancellor of Information Technology and the campus CIO, who has been our biggest supporter and our strongest mainstay. When we go to Shel and say something is wrong, we need accessibility in something, he has never turned us away. He has always helped us. He has always sponsored us. In fact, he is sponsoring this session today. He is the one doing the recording of this session so that we can post it on the web and have it archived for posterity. So, Shel, I'm turning it over to you. And thank you very much for moderating our panel. >> Shel Waggener: Thank you very much, Lucy, and I think we should all start by putting our hands together in a special round of applause for Lucy for all of her personal efforts to make all of this happen. [applause] You know, one of the things that makes Berkeley such a special place is people's passion for lots and lots of topics, and this is one that I think there is a large number of individuals on the campus who feel very passioned about. We have but three panelists today, but I think we could have had a table full of panelists of people who really care about this subject. But I'm excited to be able to present the panelists today and hopefully have a real interactive dialog with all of you on where we see web access, web technologies, accessibility playing a role today and going in the future and where you see the needs, and hopefully you'll have some good questions and we can play stump the panelists a little bit as well. So starting to my left, our first panelist is Jon Mires. John is an accessibility expert with the Center for Accessible Technologies. It's a local nonprofit group organization that among other things provides consulting services to corporations, libraries, governments to help them on creating accessible websites. Welcome, Jon. Our next panelist is Tom Holub. Tom's the director of computing for the College of Letters and Sciences here on the campus. He first joined the L&S computing resource team in the desktop world in 1995 and then eventually letting no good deed go unpunished was promoted into management over time and took responsibility for that group in2000 and has held that role as director of the Letters and Sciences computing since August of 2000. He's very active in quite a few committees on campus and cares deeply about delivering solutions through technologies to everyone and all of our communities on campus. He's also the co-chair of the IT Managers' Forum to provide a forum for IT managers to address these issues. So, welcome, Tom. And our final panelist is Bill Alison. Bill is a senior manager within the Berkeley's IS&T information and services technology group. Bill runs the web application's unit for that group and provides expert application support and leadership in a number of areas including open source development. Not just on central or enterprise-wide applications but also on departmental and locally developed applications. And he again is an active participant in many campus communities. Not the least of which is his current role as chair of the ITAC or Architecture Committee for Information Technology. He's also participated extensively in our security committees in our road map work. So, welcome, Bill Allison. And I'm here as a moderator today, not as an expert in web accessibility or even, I'm sad to say, today an expert in application development as I atrophy my skills by the day. But I was in a past life an application developer as well as system administrator and I worked in technology for many, many years. And one of the things that is important about this subject to me is the challenge of change. We often think in terms of solving a problem is an event; it's a one-time thing. And if we could just get that website to be accessible today, it would solve the problem. I think as technologists one of the things that we are trained to realize is that, you know, the half-life of a solution is getting shorter every year. Whatever work you put in today, you should expect it will only be around as long as that technology is prevalent. And, in fact, the ability to decide what is going to be prevalent no longer rests with the CIO or with the technology managers or the leaders. It actually rests with every individual, an individual's choice. That presents an enormous challenge for creating experiences that are accepting of all communities. You can imagine if you solve a problem like accessibility in a enterprise application, and you work very hard to make that work for all communities, you can expect to live with that for two, three, four, five years. Creating an application today you may need to create an application that's only going to be around for 60 days or 30 days. And it's possible to do that by the nature of the underlying infrastructure that exists today. Many companies don't even have IT departments. They have people that are putting solutions together from other technology organizations, cloud computing, consulting firms, et cetera. So there's a very dynamic environment going on. And a lot of that is being infused today with an almost inexorable march towards technologies, full multimedia and rich user experience that creates particular challenges for accessibility. In many cases we have websites that are presenting content that are not able to be converted into accessible formats and profiles. It isn't just a visual, it's audio, it's color, it's all kinds of aspects of those presentations that are particularly challenging for us because the devices, the tools that are being developed on a daily basis want to push the edge of what those technologies can do. I think many of you would have heard or saw the iPhone4 announcement yesterday. You know, not the least of which in the myriad of Steve Jobs pontificating about waxing poetically about his wonderful device, but he did in fact break ground on something that we've been waiting for since the Jetsons and the ability to have full video conferencing and video phone calls one-to-one and potentially over time one-to-many in a personal device. I was moving a machine at my home the other day out of the garage, and it occurred to me that my little phone device here has more memory, ten times, and a faster processor, more than ten times than that PC had that needed wheels that weighed so much when I went to move it. What does that do for application development for us? Everything is going mobile and everything is going multimedia. So all of the work in web accessibility from, say, five years ago when Lucy and team started web access to create a policy, in many cases one of the challenges of those policies outdated because they're written about specific technologies. For those of you that don't know, we have a huge problem with content today for educational content. Many of the federal legislative statutes that are on the books assume that all that content was in books. So what do they do to make them accessible? They say, yes, for no cost cut the spine off the book and feed it into a scanner. Is that the most arcane thing you've heard of? The publishers will not give us the electronic text in all cases, but they'll give us a book, which we can cut the spine off and feed into a scanner to convert it into machine-readable format so that then we can have it available for accessibility purposes. The world is moving much faster than many business models, many laws and many policies. So my role is to ensure that Berkeley is keeping up with the world or in many cases leading it where we can. I do serve on a committee for the system on accessibility and have done so on and off for the last several years. And I'm happy to say that we are reinvigorating that effort at the system-wide level because we still believe, in spite of the perceived unfunded mandate of designing for accessibility that it is really a requirement that we set standards by which there are appropriate expectations for the delivery of our content, our scholarly experience to the world needs to be made accessible to all communities. And so we need to make sure that we're keeping up with those policies. So that's a little bit of my background and what I've been working on. I think it wouldn't happen again, you know, without people with a passion for this. And I've learned a lot from our web access group, and I hope I can learn a lot today as well. So again, I'd encourage you to ask questions as we go. We are going to give each of the panelists the opportunity to speak about their areas of expertise, what they're working on, their specific challenges that they're dealing with and what their focuses are. And then we will also intersperse some questions throughout that. So feel free to ask during the session. But we left time at the end as well for anyone to take the discussion in a direction that's most appropriate for you. So why don't we start with Jon. I'll turn to Jon and ask him about really the history of your organization, I think, the Center for Accessible Technologies has a great name. What's its real mission and its focus and how did you get involved with Berkeley? >> Jon Mires: Sure. Well, first of all thank you for inviting me here. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. A little bit about CforAT, which is the acronym we go by. We've been around for about 25 years. We're a nonprofit based in Berkeley. And we were the first assistive technology center in the country. Assistive technology center is basically a place or an organization that connects people with assistive technology will help them do their everyday tasks, whether it be for work or for home life or for that sort of thing. And we think of assistive technology broadly, so not necessarily high-tech devices. But if you think about someone who has dexterity difficulties with their hand and holding a pencil is challenging, then wrapping a bunch of rubber band around a pencil is a form of assistive technology. So we serve, expand that to everything we do. So we're looking for the best-fit clients. And our clients tend to usually be, they range the whole gamut of age ranges. So from little kids who are in preschool who haven't learned to talk yet or something like that and are trying to communicate with their parents totell them they're hungry to seniors who are aging perfectly normally but are having vision problems and that sort of thing. So we work a lot with schools and we work a lot with the Department of Rehab on helping people find solutions to technology. And the last five or six years we have we started getting requests to look at the accessibility of people's websites. And for the past five years we've been pretty heavily involved in that. I was asked to talk today about our experience working with corporations and sort of how you get them to think accessibility and work on it and keep working on it after done working with them. But first I think it's worth saying a little bit about our organizational philosophy around web accessibility. We do this work because we're trying to help people, not punish people. So we try to avoid the sort of being the dentist of the web accessibility world. So you know you have a problem or you think you might have a problem but you don't really want to go talk to anyone about it because you're afraid of what the dentist might say or how they might make you feel or in our case that we might call lawyers on you or something. So, we try to avoid that approach 100 percent. So, we look at this as a collaborative process with organizations we work with. And some of them do come to us because they are being sued by someone else or threatened to be sued by someone else for not providing equal access. But our relationship with them is more about how can we actually improve this so it's working for people. Another piece of our philosophy is that we shared the view that Shel articulated which is there is no such thing as a 100 percent accessible web page or web application. Because the moment you get there, the technology changes or the way users interact with it changes or there's always a user or a situation that you didn't think of. So, we don't think of it as some sort of end goal that you're striving for but a process that is always part of your development and always part of your planning and design. The other big piece is that we see accessibility as not something that is an add-on or a separate set but a subset of usability. So one of the comments we hear a lot is, "Well, we don't, our audience doesn't include any people with disabilities." Or, "Well, you know, we haven't gotten any complaints so we know it's fine." First of all, that's probably not true that your audience doesn't include anyone with disabilities, but more importantly or as importantly as making your website more accessible tends to help all users. There are certain instances where there are specific things you do maybe technical aspects of your coding or something that are for a very particular type of disability. But for the most part the things that you do for making your website accessible apply to everyone. A good example is video. So we always say you should caption your video and provide a transcript because not everyone will be able to see the video. So everyone always thinks of blind users and deaf users or people who are hard-of-hearing. But the reality is that a lot of people benefit from having closed captions or transcripts. Like I'm sure all of you are going to watch the video of this panel over and over and over again, and your co-workers in the cubes next to you or in the desk next to you are going to get tired of hearing my voice over and over again. And so you're going to want to have another way to watch it. So, a lot of people are going to fit from that type of, if you call it an accommodation, but really it's applicable to everyone. And then the last piece of what we do is, and I mentioned this when I was talk about the pencil analogy but is to try to expand people's view of who the audience really is or who is benefiting from the accessibility improvements that you might make. Depending on the study or survey you read, you'll here that maybe between 10 and 20 percent of the population has some sort of disability. And if you look at the 2000 census, I think it's 19.3 percent of allpeople have a permanent or long-term disability that affects their daily life. So that's a pretty high number and that's way less than the actual number because there are lots of people who functionally are similar, have similar functional limitations but would never classify themselves as having a disability. Some of your parents might fall into that category where they are aging perfectly normally but your vision or your hearing or something else may be functionally identical to someone who classifies himself as someone who has a disability. The other great thing about disability is that it is one of the few protected classes that anyone can enter. So you can become disabled at any moment. And so when people say we don't have any visitors to our site who are disabled, you could have a whole a lot depending on what happens tonight. So this is sort of a morbid kind of way of looking at it. But if you're riding your bike and you break your arm and you are in a sling for a few weeks, all of a sudden you can't press control-alt-delete at the same time and you can't, and maybe it's your mouse hand and you can't use your mouse. You have to use your mouse with your other hand and then type with that hand. Well, you're probably, If that's a few weeks you're probably not thinking of yourself as a person with a disability. You're probably thinking, well, I'm hurt, this will get better and it's a pain. But functionally it's identical to someone who doesn't have a hand. So the point of all this is that this impacts a lot of people, probably more than you can really even imagine. And so, a lot of what we do is convincing people that this is actually true. And what we've been doing for the last three years or so is we partnered with the California Emerging Technology Fund, which is a foundation set up by the merger of Pacbell and SBC, I think, who is basically trying to spend down the money they were given as part of that merger to improve broadband access for under served groups in California. And so one of the under served groups is people with disabilities. And so what we've been doing is through our partnership we are able to provide no-cost technical assistance to organizations interested in improving their accessibility. It's actually a lot like your web access group. And it's is a pretty rare thing that you can get free professional consulting on accessibility. So that's a great resource that you have but we're trying to extend that to other organizations. So the basic model is an organization can come to us and we'll review their site and invite them in to see people who are blind or can't use a mouse or deaf using their sight so they can sort of see, wow, that's pretty serious. We need to make some changes. And then we help them along with those changes. What they get out of it is some free help and learning how to start and how to think about this. And some help writing guidelines that will extend after we're done working with them. What we get out of it is a chance to spread it to large corporations that otherwise might not have the time or inclination or money to get started on it. And we can also give them recognition at an annual awards dinner which helps us increase the whole issue of accessibility in general. For instance, last year we worked Intel, BART, TechSoup, worked with Gap in the past. By saying, look, these organizations are doing this, they're small and large organizations. A lot of the arguments about we don't have the money or the time are, don't have to be a block to doing anything at all. So we try to show them how to get started and continue that work. And so, what are the benefits? Well, I mentioned a few of them already. Additional ones are, I think the biggest one absolutely is you have a larger potential audience. If you've never heard a complaint about your site being inaccessible, it may be because no one knows how to contact you. And so if you said to most people, well, there's potentially 10 to 20, maybe as high as 40 to 50 percent of people out there who can't use your site, they would say, they would drop everything and say this is a totally untapped resource for us whether it is customers or perspective students or whatever your situation is. That technique does not tend to work very well because it is so hard to quantify the size of that market. So it's easy for me to say, well, the census is 19.3 percent and that's our thing. But for some reason people have a hard time actually saying, wow, that's really big. Because you tend to think, well, things are fine and so this is a kind of a big issue. But the fact is it is a much larger potential audience. The other thing is that it doesn't do any harm and it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. So, we hear all the time, I don't want to have just a plain text site. We need Javascript and we need video on our site. Well, accessibility has a hard time keeping up with the latest standards and the latest technologies. But it's definitely possible and there are lots of people all over the world working on this all the time. So you can have a nice attractive site and you can use Ajax and all sorts of things and still make it really accessible. And it's just a matter of learning how to do it. Another thing is we often see that sites have improved search engine rankings after they've made their site accessible. This is another one that's very appealing to companies but also hard to quantify because it sort of depends on how bad it was when you started. So, it's not easy to say, well, you'll move up four places on Google for your preferred key words or something like that. But all of the things that tend to go along with accessible coding like well structured documents and unique page titles and all sorts of things, they overlap a lot with search engine optimization. Another piece is that good accessibility relies on using Javascript for progressive enhancement. So this is another one that helps all users because there's still a nontrivial amount of organizations that block Javascript for security purposes. And so that type of Java intends to help a lot of users who otherwise might see a blank page, or I can't tell you how many times we see pages where all the menus disappear if you're not using Javascript. There's no warning that you're not seeing something. Or everything looks fine but you can't submit any forms, that kind of thing. So, these types of things tend to help all people. Their thing is that, well, if people can find information on your site better and it is accessible for them, they're less likely to call your customer support line or that sort of thing, which to me is not the purpose of doing this. But it's an argument that speaks to the bottom line. And a lot of the bottom-line metrics that decision makers and web managers tend to look at, like how long are people staying on the site? How many conversations are there? Are people signing up for our e-mail list? Are they buying products? Are they requesting information? A lot of those go up when after you've made your site more accessible. So, that's an argument we use. And one I wouldn't underestimate is the morale of developers. So developers tend to, especially in large institutions, are sort of, I have to tread carefully here because there's so many developers here. But they tend to be viewed as the implementers and not so much the decision makers or driving the process. And it's really a fulfilling, as a developer, it's really fulfilling to say, well, we did this because it was right and we figured it out. And it's -- it involves a lot of problem solving. So I'm not going to pretend making a website or especially a complex interactive website accessible is easy. It's definitely doable. But it takes a lot of problem solving and creative thinking. And that is really, as a developer, I find that really fulfilling and sort of engaging. And that with some of the corporations we worked with, we've heard from them that their developers in general are a little bit happier now that they're, they've sort of gotten together and accomplishedthis piece they wanted to and they're excited about it and they want to keep working on it. But it's also impacting their other work. Again, that's a hard one to quantify. It depends a lot on the organizational dynamics, but it shouldn't be underestimated. And then we can talk more later about sort of the mechanics of how we do our work. But the key thing for us is that to keep the benefits going, organizations need a champion within the organization. So, hopefully that's someone high up who can say, look, this is important and we're going to do it. But it can also be someone who is just enthusiastic about this and cares about it and sort of keeps bringing it up so that it's almost certain that accessibility benefits will be lost over time if there isn't a real champion with at least some decision making ability in the organization. And the next is that you need internal accessibility guidelines and a process for reviewing and updating them. So, what this all means, basically, is that it's not something that someone can do for you. Or they can do it for you, but then in a few months or maybe as little as one month or a year or something, all the benefits are going to be lost. So it's something that needs to happen and then become part of the workflow and the internal thinking. And our experience is that developers really love working on accessibility because for most people, unless you're in this field or you have a disability or a family member with a disability and you've sat with them while they surfed the web or tried to check their bank account balance or something, you've never really thought about this. And that's perfectly normal and understandable. But it's really sort of a fun thing to work on. And so developers tend to be really into it and it's more a matter of how do we institutionalize it? And for that, a champion is good and updatable documents. So thanks. >> Shel Waggener: Thank you very much, Jon. One of the things I often hear from people who want to make this happen is they equate this with the experience of the curb-cut phenomenon, right? Where everybody argued against in the legislation for ADA, the inclusion of universal curb cuts until they started getting put in and they realized that they benefited everybody. And that everybody wanted to see them in, and it didn't have anything to do with the disabled community as much as it had to do with, you know, all of our ability to get around easy. On the website it's a similar phenomenon. When you do the work it makes it easier for people to get around, it makes it easier for people to interact. But the difference with the curb-cut is a one-time investment. It's done. Here it's an ongoing investment. Have you developed in your work or how do you consult with companies around how much additional investment is it really to keep it involved? Is it more money from a technical perspective? Is it more process time? What guidance do you provide? >> Jon Mires: It's absolutely true without a doubt that building accessibility and from the start when you're making an application is much less time and money than retrofitting it or trying to fix it later. So, some of the organizations we work with actually higher educational institutions are a good example. They have tons and tons of pages. And a lot of them are put up by, you know, a biology professor in 1998 who had a web space and now that's the biology department website. And it was made with Frontpage or something. And so we don't necessarily say, well, you should fix every page. If you have 40,000 pages and they're all really bad, it's not the best investment to fix every single page. It's just not practical and it's not really going to provide the most benefits. Our general view is to, okay, let's get to a point where things are highly accessible where they need to be and as successful as possible in other places, and then let's make sure everything that's new is accessible. And that is actually not a big time or money commitment. It's just a focus andcommitment. Sort of, you know, a mind commitment. >> Shel Waggener: I think I have 40,000 pages from my department alone here. But Tom actually does have 40,000 pages with L&S that he has to manage. And, Tom, you engage in a lot of people in trying to ensure that content is accessible. And it's been an ongoing challenge for you. Why don't you describe a little bit how you engage the user community to make that possible. >> Tom Holub: Sure. So as Shel mentioned, I've been working with this group since 1995, and we've been doing, among other things, web design and application design for that entire period with all the implications of the different eras of web design that that implies. And I'd like to say that I came to a understanding and interest in web accessibility out of sort of deep-seated interest in social justice issues and things like that. It was more accidental than that. That we were transitioning from being a group of geeks who also did web design to being more a professional web design shop and hired our first application developer, web developer who was seriously in that role. Melanie Archer was her name. Some of you may have worked with her. And she happened to have a very strong personal emphasis on accessibility and really accuracy of code and adherence to standards. That's kind of where she came in from is that we have to have valid HTML and it has to be accessible and meet these guidelines and things. So, I as a manager of this group, I think one of the things that's interesting about accessibility is it's actually a topic that a lot of people can go from never having thought about to being in full support of very quickly. And we see that with our customers often. Often they haven't really considered that there are issues around accessibility with their websites. But when you bring it up with them, a good portion of them are immediately, like, that makes total sense and we want you to do this. So, I made that transition pretty early in this process once we started real professional web development things. So that focus on standards compliance, raised the awareness of the issue for me and for our customers that, you know, and there are two aspects to it. One is that we can say this is a federal requirement. You know, we have Section 508 and you have to comply with this. The lawyers may not a hundred percent agree with that. But we're able to sell that at least to departments. And it's a -- and the moral obligation piece that this is something that is just the right thing to do and, you know we're Berkeley. We have a lot of people who are concerned with their moral obligations and social justice and such. And in that through that lens we've been able to have a lot of really productive conversations with people we're developing for. A couple of ways that it worked for us as an organization, so my group is mostly a recharge unit. So we charge departments for our work. And one of the ways that accessibility helped us is that it gave us some business advantages in that we were differentiated from many of the other options that departments had. Once we got them to understand that accessibility was an issue then they were talking with -- so there are basically three options for departments in L&S. They can use us, they can go to a third-party vendor or they can hire the Chair's nephew. And departments all choose those different options. There are sites of examples of those all throughout L&S. We can say once we've raised the awareness of the issues, well, the Chair's nephew really doesn't know how to do this. We have this expertise locally and we can say now that you think this is a moral obligation for you, we can do it and the Chair's nephew probably can't. And really a lot of the third party web designers are not very up on it as well. When I've run job interviews for web developers, we've had to explain what Section 508 means. You know, we'll ask the question: What do you think about making websites compliant with Section 508. And probably 80 percent of the developers who come in don't know what that means, at all. And then you bring up accessibility and then they'll know what that means as least to some extent, but they're clearly not versed in it. So, from a business perspective it's useful for us to be able to say this is something we think is really important to do on campus, and we have the expertise to do it. And a lot of your other options for doing this work will not be able to meet that need. The only concern that people tend to have is what's it going to cost me? And as Jon mentioned, that is something people will push back on. But it's really not very expensive to do. It's expensive to retrofit but to build it in is really not very expensive. And part of the way we get around that push-back is we don't ask them. It's just how we design sites. We design them with accessibility in mind. And we don't charge you extra for the accessibility testing. It's part of our overall testing. And so partly people don't see it. But also it's really not an additional large expense that we incur as developing our sites and our applications because it's just part of our process. So, from the actual products that we create, there are some advantages. So the actual websites we're delivering, the applications we're delivering. Clearly, there is the advantages of having it accessible to larger groups of people and not being sued is a good advantage. But beyond that I think that having concern for accessibility indicates a more complete approach towards your development process. So, there are three things that on campus are sadly lacking in most development processes, except everybody in this room, of course. One is consideration of the quality of the code. So, so much development happens that you've got your browser and it seems to work in IE 7 and Firefox 3.6. So it must be done, right? What percentage of the code on campus is valid HTML? I don't know what that number is but it's long. So the fact that you are paying attention to it brings you to a place where you're having a higher, your code is going to be higher quality. It's going to be more robust. It's going to work better in the future on IE 8, IE 9, Firefox 4 when those things come up. It's also putting you and your customers in a place where you're considering the needs of the audience. So John also talked about audiences, and we have heard the same comment that, well, our website is mostly for our staff and faculty and nobody's disabled in that population. And that's first of all, that can change. And the broken arm had nothing to do with the unicycle. I fell down stairs in Tahoe. I've had that experience of having several months where I had my right arm broken and having to use our sites, which worked just great and other sites, which were harder to work with. So your audience can change, but it opens up the conversation to say, okay, well, actually your audience isn't just the people on your staff and your faculty. When we look at your web stats you're actually getting 80 percent of your hits from outside Berkeley. So your big portion of your audience is potential students or general public, people who are interested in your discipline or your subject or your faculty. And that helps open up the conversation about what is the website for and how do we need to make it work for those different user groups? So having that accessibility helps open up that conversation and make the process better. And the other thing that you need that is often lacking in development is testing procedures. So if you're going to be developing for accessibility, you're going to be going and looking at that. And in the end is this thing successful? And what we're also going to look at the code. Is it valid HTML? Does it work on these different browsers? So it's one more piece of what's in your acceptance procedures for your sites or for your applications. But the fact that you are doing it indicates that you actually have procedures and testing going on, which again brings that higher level of being able to say we're, it's part of our professional development process and it's a differentiator for how we're doing development verses some of your other options, which may look cheaper on paper because you're hiring a grad student to do it. You're not going to get the same type of product at the end of that. And then the other thing that has been a business advantage, I think for us, is that once you've set accessibility as a goal, then you're going to hire people like Caroline. I'm going to embarrass her for a minute. Who has a very strong focus on, Caroline knew what Section 508 was in the interview. But that's not specifically because she is advocate for the disabled or anything. It's that she has a strong concern for doing things in the proper way. And whether that's making the code right, making it work on different browsers, different platforms. It is almost a proxy for a whole different mindset in a developer that I'm concerned about accessibility. And Caroline has been a great asset to us. It so happened that we were getting into your accessibility efforts at around the same time that Diane Walker was starting the web accessibility group for the first time. So we've been involved with that group since its inception and it's been a very useful collaboration, I think. So that's been great. And then we produced 20, 25, 30 some departmental sites and applications. So we've had a pretty big impact across our college over the years. And I think it's been hard to quantify yes. Can we say that how many students avoided having to make a phone call to the office because they were able to find information on a website that they wouldn't have been able to find before we redesigned it. We don't have any way to really measure those kinds of things but it's clearly in aggregate. I think that's a real major benefit for us. >> Shel Waggener: So, Tom, you pointed out the phenomenon of the Chair's nephew and, in fact, the democratization of technologies empowering everybody to create, everybody to generate not just content but applications, environments using tools on the web. How are you providing guidance to your communities that are doing this on their own around accessibility issues? Because it sounds like from a business perspective if they're buying your services, you're bundling it in. They get the benefit of your expertise in advance. But you don't want to suggest to them that they shouldn't do anything on their own. So have you found that accessibility is an issue for those individuals and leaving it out of their designs in the beginning. >> Tom Holub: Well, I think it's something that you can bring up as a risk. So, it may be that if you cobble something together using Google sites and various other Google apps, it might wind up accessible. But if you're talking with a faculty member or chair, whoever who's got this project do they have any way of assessing that? Are they going to know at the end whether they've created something that's going to be accessible? So, I'll bring it up as an issue and it sometimes will change decisions. Sometimes again we'll make that distinction between what my grad student can do versus what I'm going to get if I engage in a more professional design process. There are, it's not a hundred percent successful. I mean, there's certainly particularly on smaller scales where you're talking about a faculty lab or a particular academic project or research project that is trying, very specifically trying to do things kind of on the cheap. Some people still throw up their hands. But it's been pretty successful, I think, getting people at the departmental level and up to understand the issues. And whether or not they're contracting with my group there, I think there's a lot more awareness of this is something I think at least I should be looking at. >> Shel Waggener: So, Bill, your challenge is a little bit different. Instead of working with end users, you often work with departments that have technologists in the department. Youprovide application development for both large scale applications as well as departmental applications. What challenges do you have in representing this question of accessibility when working with departments who often already bring you pre-built technology and ask you to take it on or partner with them and developing something new. >> Bill Allison: Right. And as Jon noted it's a lot more expensive to retrofit when it's not built in up front. So really I deal with the questions of accessibilities in two realms. One is as the chair of the IT architecture committee. And that is thinking about the problem on the really the more macro scale how's the university with technology should we weigh in on this? And then the other is my day job, which is managing the web applications group. So I'll backup in just a mine minute. And I was just a lot of what you guys were saying was really resonating with me. So in 2006 Diane Walker rang me up. And I had heard of Section 508 because we argued with PeopleSoft extensively and didn't seem to sway them very far on it. So I was conversant with it. My level of awareness was, you know, pretty superficial. And as Tom said, in a very short period of time it's very easy for someone to make the case if the other person's listening for making stuff accessible. So at the end of that call it was really clear. And I talked to all of the managers that work in the web applications group. We all agreed. We were going to send someone to web access. A bunch of us signed up on the e-mail list. It seemed like this is something we can do. You know, like there's a lot in a large university in a complex environment. We can't do to change the things we want to change, but this is something where we could really get engaged. So, you know I think the big challenge is just really organizationally you can make a commitment, and a lot of people make a commitment and then the phone rings again and, you know, 100 more e-mails come in that day. And the challenge is this is a commitment that has to be renewed and it has to be renewed constantly. And that's why Lucy has been so valuable for us. Because, you know, frankly she e-mails Shel. Shel says, "Hey, Bill, what are guys doing about this?" Or Lucy will e-mail us and she's been very generous about making the lab accessible. So we committed, we're sending every one of our developers that are in the area because we're not able to hire people that necessarily are conversant with a lot of this. But that part of the expectation is on the job they've got to learn how to do it. And then they're really psyched. And I think that the trend with technology supports the thing. As Shel was saying, technology is moving incredibly fast. I watched a video. You can Google it on find on Ted Talk - The future of User Interface. Well, this is scaring me. We were having discussions about mobile technology. Well, this is about holographic 3-dimensional, you know, stuff where your pen on the table can interact with the computer. That's going to bring a whole new realm of challenges. And so going back to the theme of constantly renewing this, if we're not constantly in contact with people like Lucy and people in the community, we're going to diverge. You know, we're going to be still in circa 1999. Yeah, we were compliant in '99, but you know things have evolved. First there was 508 and then there was WCAS, the Web Content Accessibility Standards 10, which mapped the 508. And now there's two and I think three is in draft. So as the technology changes, we have to really, really stay engaged with that. And so, I mean, I'm going to get back to Shel's question. But when we, for us it's the question of costs. We'll get a customer who has a fixed budget. They have some flaming systems problem they bring to us, and they want our help and they want it to be for a predefined cost. And it might not have been on their radar. And so it's interesting because we take a very different approach than Tom's group. We'll put a line item in. We'll say, hey, you know, accessibility it's going to cost you and it's part of this. And it's kind of like, you know, the University wasn't there with wheelchair ramps. Susie Castillo-Robson told me some story about how the physical plant people a long, long time ago didn't have ramps and all that stuff. And there was this huge lawsuit. And guess what? We all have ramps. You know, you can get into pretty much any building here. Well, web it's a space. It is a way of interacting with the University that is fundamental. And we're just in the infancy of the web and this technology. We think, wow, how far it's come and my phone and everything, but we're just at the beginning, which is slightly terrifying. So we really, we have to be raising people's awareness. And so part of it is we get accused of sticking the people with the bills and stuff, but they need to know that this is an important thing and relatively speaking it doesn't cost that much when you consider that, I think John was looking and I Googled all the census figures, too. And figuring like it's is tens of millions of people who have visual and auditory impairment. And then when you couple in the mouse aspect of that, it's affecting a huge population. And then on campus then if I extrapolated them, just the student population that's a couple thousand people that are impacted. And it can happen to anybody. And I have a friend who is a VP at Lexis Nexis. And he lives in Colorado and makes killer salsa. And he brewed up a batch of this. He's crazy. And he brewed it up and opened up the top of the blender and put his head at the top to smell it. And he was blind for two days. And he re-experienced; he re-experienced the world. [laughter] And so that is there for us. >> Shel Waggener: Blinded by salsa, let me get that down. [laughter] >> Bill Allison: So the truth is though is I think these guys have said - >> Shel Waggener: Is that covered in 508? [laughter] >> Bill Allison: Salsa blindness. I don't know. But we can do a lot. I think that as people with a lot of pressure on us, we can feel overwhelmed and we can feel like not one more thing is getting onto my plate. And the truth is, if we just take a look at what's involved and walk a mile in those people's shoes, and that's why going to Lucy's lab is great. You know, we may read a web page or two and think we know what we're doing, but until you go and watch someone use the technology, you really don't understand. You know, I was laughing because initially I think people tried to make our stuff accessible and they'd type in, you know there's every Berkeley web page, Steve knows, has the little Campanile at the top and stuff. And so on all of our systems we had that logo. And we helpfully put Campanile. So anytime someone used the assistive technology, every page Campanile, Campanile, Campanile. You know they were sick of the Campanile. But until you really experience it from their perspective and that doesn't take a lot of time. >> Lucy Greco: Sometimes they say "Cam-pa-nile". >> Bill Allison: Cam-pa-nile? Excellent. Excellent. >> Shel Waggener: At least it wasn't saying Hoover Tower. Bill Allison: And there's a real analogy between this issue and security. So we've done a lot of work with security. It has the same characteristics. There's policy and federal requirements, state requirements and large lurking liabilities. And nobody wants to pay for it because it doesn't bring a perceived value to the perceived audience of the application. So we systematically looked at how to make a commitment to security, which is an unfunded mandate. And we created a program in IST's web application unit called "Secure by Design". And we did that a year and a half ago and I've since seen if you Google "Secure by Design", I'm not sure we were first. But there's a lot of people doing that now. It's kind of a no brainer. And we're doing the same thing today with accessibility. We have a software development lifecycle that sort of specifies the steps that we go through. And up front in the very beginning, we talk about how threat models work with security. At the same time we talk about who are the users of this application. What are the types of things they are going to be doing and we profile that and look at the accessibility. It's called "Accessible by Design". You know, we're not that creative. It works. We'll keep using it. I guess I want to leave it open for some time for questions, but I'll just say one more thing in the hidden benefits side of this. As the technology evolves so quickly and things are moving so, you know, dramatically, the pace is increasing as well. And the fundamental nature of the changes when you think about the UI that's going to be in place, the user interface that's going to be around in 10 years. It's going to be radically different. I mean they are talking about a device you sit on a table that projects stuff around you. You don't really have a screen. You interact with your hands and your body with it. We have to be and we're in the middle of transitioning to do standards-based development. So all of the development we're doing today is based on open sourced generally, community sourced and sort of multi-entity kind of collaborative-based standards. And as long as we follow those, we're like 90 percent of the way towards accessible design. It's when we kind of just do stuff in a vacuum and don't try to adhere to those standards. When the standard comes out there's a cost to learning it. But if we do that the payoff is huge. So we've begun decoupling some of the way we present information from the data that's underneath it from the logic. That's sort fundamental to software design today. But the dividend for that, that is when the new thing comes out, it's much easier to switch from one to the other. So we have that modularity there. Those are the things that also enable the people with the accessibility technology to use our stuff. So that's my answer. >> Shel Waggener: I think you've heard a lot of great input today from our three panelists. We'd like to hear from the audience any questions that you have. I was sincere in my stump-the-panelist question. If you have a question for any of us on any topic related to accessibility, we have a mic we can pass around. But I'll start with something I didn't mention before which I think is really relevant to this community is for many years we designed things based on paper processes. And then we moved from those paper processes to basically being automated paper processes, right? We took the paper processes and we put them into technology and we said, hey, we automated them. But the current generation of students don't think in paper. They don't think in linear processes. They think in parallel terms. Everything is supposed to happen realtime. It's supposed to happen all the time, 7 by 24. And it's supposed to happen concurrently. I mean, you know If people are twittering what they had for lunch instead of telling you later when they see you what they had for lunch, it's a different world, right? Well, one of the things that we need to be considering is that's the up and coming generation. But one of our largest communities and largest audiences for our information is actually going to be in the elderly community as we see more and more people coming back for education later in life. And that's the largest growth segment of the population. Many of the tools that the students may be designing today may not be applicable without accessibility built in for that same community for the elderly community when we want the same content to be available to both. This isn't just a question of wanting to do the right thing. This is also a question of needing to do what our mission is about in dissemination of information. We've got to get to all of those audiences. And that's a real problem for us right now that we haven't taken all of those communities into consideration andmany of our designs. I would like to have you to think about in your own jobs and your own world where you're making decisions that may be really tuned to a current generation or the up-and-coming generation, trying to be this leading edge or bleeding edge as it's comes out in the holographic projectors. When we have these broad diversities of communities, we still have to meet and then your savings you may gain by trying to make something the latest and greatest. Then the latest and greatest is immediately lost when you then have to convert that into, you know, other things. You have other challenges. So open that up for questions? Anybody? >> Lynn Zummo: Raise your hand and I will bring the microphone over. >> Audience Member: Bill, you know you talk about developing new interfaces and systems as opposed to renovating old ones. Have you ever found that you've been discussing with departments the costs of propping up their old system versus creating a new one that has accessibility been shown to save? I mean the fact that they want you and they both want accessibility and this version is much cheaper. Have you seen that kind of discussion and decision point? >> Bill Allison: So, that the question is that have we encountered departments where the older technology that they had was a lot cheaper to maintain but it perhaps wasn't accessible and then the cost of retrofitting that being an issue. Usually by the time we're seeing a technology look central IT we're pretty expensive. The number of really small departmental solutions we can provide has really dropped as we've been held to the standards of financial accountability for recharge. We break even today and it's an expense. We're cheap compared to industry. But what I'm saying is by the time they're coming to us they have a big, they usually have a pretty sizable problem. And usually we're talking about a large project. So, as a percentage of the overall effort in our area we're not seeing that as a big problem. Where I think the issue is for that and the sweet spot that we can get to is that many people built an application where a grad student or the nephew or someone built a system using some of the technologies that were available that have a very low barrier of entry. So many of the scripting languages you can start learning a little HTML. And I guarantee you that any one of you can go to the web and you can learn if you don't already know a little HTML, you can learn enough in an afternoon to put a good, probably ugly, but okay looking web page that will get across what you want to convey. It's another afternoon to begin writing code, you know, using some of those frameworks? So a lot of people had jumped in and their department needed something. You know, a legitimate need that wasn't met in the center of the organization that they were able to build rapidly. And then now they have 40,000 of those things. But they're not truly an application in the way we think of them today. And meanwhile in the rest of the world technology has caught up and we have things like Sharepoint, like Drupal, like Google docs, like Office Live type things. So there's a lot of tools that are available either that we can run locally like Drupal and Sharepoint or things that are run out in the Cloud. And most departments will be looking to move those little tactical applications that they had or aggregate into something like Sharepoint, which is a perfectly good way of dealing with it because they don't really need to get into an expensive software development project. So the answer to really the question of how these people encounter accessibility is those platforms must be accessible. So, you know, there's a lot of activity in the open source community among Berkeley people. There's a large vocal. Those people have to be involved in the Drupal discussions at the national level, and they are. And that's leading towards the platform being designed for accessibility. Microsoft is deeply aware of the issue and we negotiate campus level agreements. And I'm sure Shel can speak to strategic sourcing. You know accessibility is part of what we put on the table. In fact, ITAC is working and has been working for a while on accessibility standards to be built into every RFP where we're seeking some kind of agreement with a vendor and it's the VPAT. So it's about scoring the RFP and making the vendor actually put their true position on the line and holding them accountable if they're bending the truth. And we're holding them; we will hold them to that. >> Shel Waggener: Virtually every vendor will respond with a check mark "yes" their software is accessible because they don't know what you're asking. And if they know they put a "yes" in that column it's better for them. But, in fact, we're getting far more sophisticated and nuanced in the way we're asking what we're asking. We're evaluating a product right now that we would be interested in providing a site license for to the whole campus community. Not passing accessibility, not going to be given the opportunity. Right? So they're going to lose the business opportunity if they can't modify their product and they can't guarantee in contractual language that they will make their product a VPAT standard or otherwise accessible. And this is not an exceptionally sophisticated problem. It's something that if particularly for smaller vendors they're unaware of the business opportunity. And so you need one of our obligations as a public institution and an educational institution is to raise that visibility, not just for our own community but for the market as a whole. Lucy? >> Lucy Greco: I just wanted to respond to that a little bit by saying once we've done that work for that vendor and they've come back and made an accessible product, we're not holding that accessible product hostage. It's going out into that marketplace and everybody else is getting that accessible product. The more we take that effort here, I mean, as a public institution it's our obligation. Berkeley's taken the lead for many, many years on accessibility. I mean a lot of people say that Berkeley is the home of the accessible world, and it's because we here at Berkeley do things like that. You know, the more we work with vendors to make things accessible and the more we say we won't buy your product if it is not accessible, the more everybody, not only here but all over the world, will benefit from our work. >> Shel Waggener: So, Jon, I wanted to follow-up on the previous question around retrofit. When you're providing consulting, how often do your clients choose to retrofit verses understand the learnings from the experience and then just go into a rewrite process? >> Jon Mires: I'd say depends on the size of the application or site in question. So, for instance, on one extreme if you have 100,000 pages and they're all static HTML, well they're probably not going to retrofit the whole thing. So it really depends on both. Part of it is the scope of our consulting agreement, too. Generally we're not, if you have 100,000 pages we can't review all of them because by the time we finished it would be obsolete anyway and it would cost you a fortune. So, we tend to focus on percentages of sites based on most used features, most important features, most hitting every template, that kind of thing. And so what, for most clients it's usually an in-between path where we prioritize things for them and say, look, this is really important. This is, if you don't do this you're totally inaccessible. You're losing lots of visitors. And so, and then we try to set them on a path of retrofitting older stuff or possible and then making sure everything new is accessible. And like I said before, the real, the real, when we feel we've been really successful is the development team is on board, the marketing an executive teams are on board and so accessibility becomes a part of the institutional culture. And then enforcement is, we're not an enforcement agency, but enforcement is really a nonissue because some of the groups we work with in our grant funded program they still call us from two or three years ago. And they say, well, you know, we got this video player, we're trying to do HTML 5 and get ready for that, but we have these flash problems. And so what's the best way to do this now? And what's the best way to plan for the future? And so that's when we say, okay, they're really getting it. They're thinking about it. They're getting new technologies and thinking about how it will work with that. And that's about as much as we can ask for. Because you can't just say, well, it's accessible and now we're done or we'll just do this forever every time we post a video. We'll do this because then you are sort of missing the whole point. >> Shel Wagggener: Other questions? Here in the middle and up front. >> Audience Member: Another contributor I think to the phenomenon of the dean's uncle is the distributed nature at UC Berkeley where every department, every unit has their own ivory tower carefully defended against all borders. And there's not for many of these things, any kind of central support system, any central knowledge base central tools. Within L&S has the great services of Tom and Caroline and company, and even there you get a few deans' uncles building things. How can or is the University making information, making tools and technologies and assistance available to these many small places where we've got accidental webmasters building things based on Frontpage and other great stuff of ten years ago? >> Shel Waggener: I think the problem, the heart of that problem is a combination of the lethargy of change within higher education matched against the extraordinarily evolving pace of change and technology, right? So even 15 years ago when some of these comments we were talking about the age of technology then you were designing in a client server world, you were dealing with change being a function of a major dot releases of Windows essentially things that did get measured in months or even potentially years. In a world we're looking at if you had said to somebody 15 weeks ago that Flash was going to maintain its dominance, that HTML 5 was an emerging standard and you have that same conversation today, you'd have two entirely different conversations, right? In 15 weeks not to mention competing ads and fighting marketing pitches between Adobe and Apple and Google. The evolution is so fast. Then you apply that to the campus, and you say, okay, we're going to offer a common solution, a standard solution for the entire campus. In order to do that, that solution has to evolve at the fastest rate that the slowest mover can handle. Well, the slowest mover in higher ed, let me tell you, I've got some emerita faculty who I think we still print out their e-mails on memo format and give them the 3-part carbon paper because that's what they're comfortable with and that's what they want to work with. I haven't seen a mimeograph machine running lately. I missed the purpling smell. I'm sure somewhere in this institution we have them. It's important to recognize that because that does limit the ability of the leading edge to continue to leverage a common solution. They basically end up having to break free from the anchor of the common solution that's tied to the slowest mover. So we have to basically parse our solutions up into slow mover, medium tier and early adopter rather than a common solution. Well, to do that it's more expensive. If you're going to have three tiers, it's more expensive than offering one option. Corporations and enterprises don't do that. Do you want black or black as your color? Right? You get one option usually because it's the cheapest thing to do. They can give you one thing, they can put all the investment into that and they can make it work very well at a relatively low cost and sometimes at an extremely low cost. In our case if we attempted to do that we would not get enough of the community. So what we have to decide, as an organization, is how much is the benefit of that lower cost and how much can we get adoption in principally the middle tier? How much can we expand the middle tier and recognize that we're going to have to orphan the slowest mover sooner than we ever would have before. And we're going to have embrace, allowing the leading edge to churn faster without impacting the middle. It's a different mindset and a different financial model and a different approach. But one I believe we're going to have to embrace if we want to get more cost effective. And within that cost effective you can then offer things like Accessibility by Design and Secure by Design because it's part of the platform, it's part of the framework. If you don't do that, we're leaving it to every individual to choose their own which inevitably means their path to solution will often not include accessibility because they're just trying to get the job done. So unless we can get everybody trained and keep up with the skills. I think it's a very complex and challenging question. We have time for one more. There was one up here in the front. Can we pass the microphone forward? >> Audience Member: This is a practical question. I would like to know a brief answer to the hopefully there is accessibility built into these products that I'm going to mention. Drupal is number one, do you feel basically - >> Jon Mires: Yes, so, the long answer is depends on how you use it and depends how you present it. >> Bill Allison: I can give you a short answer within the Berkeley context which is right before I came over here because I knew this was just going to come up. I ran the tester, one of the testers that's recommended against ist.berkeley.edu and we passed. Now, is that, that's sort of anecdotal? Like it's not as systematic. >> Audience Member: So it is possible? >> Bill Allison: It is possible, yeah . >> Shel Waggener: But it's possible to make it inaccessible as well. The product won't drive you to accessibility. >> Tom Holub: The thing about Drupal is it's so modularized. So you're going to install if you have a complicated site you may have 10, 15, 20 different custom modules that you're putting in there. And those may or may not be accessible. I think the core trunk is fine. >> Bill Allison: So right now the platform support for Drupal is in my team and so one of the things that is our responsibility for running the campus Drupal platform, which will be re leased this fiscal year, is that the modules that we review and approve must be accessible. And there's a list of those somewhere. >> Audience Member: So there's also within Drupal an accessibility group that I'm a member of. And Drupal as a, you know the Drupal community has been very responsive to accessibility questions and so there is four modules, a new thing in accessibility pledge. I don't know if you're a Drupal user you've probably seen the Drupal 7 pledge because upgrading to Drupal 6 was such a nightmare because the modules weren't ready. Module developers are now pledging that they will be ready for Drupal 7. We are also now rolling out an accessibility pledge so that if you see that badge on a module you will know that the developer is committed to making that module accessible. And this will also be for themes, et cetera. >> Audience Member: Great. >> Audience Member: One more product, one more type of product. Because I try to get people away from these things, Frontpage and Word converted to HTML. >> Tom Holub: Oh, oh. Caroline is screaming. Certainly you can create accessible sites with those products but it takes more work than the people who are using those products are likely to be able or willing to do. >> Audience Member: Thank you. >> Shel Waggener: Okay. With that I'll turn it back over to Lynn. >> Lynn Zummo: Okay. Great, thank you. I want to thank the panel, Shell, Jon, Bill and Tom for coming and speaking with us today. Give them a hand. [applause] I'd also like to thank all of you for coming and attending, listening to this very, very important issue that affects really all of us. So with that I'm calling the meeting to a close and see you in September. Look for e-mail. Oh, oh, oh. Wait. Video for this, I've been told, may take a week, week and a half to go through final production and getting it ready for the web. So I will send out e-mail to all of the lists saying when it is available. And it will be on the Webnet site in probably forever in some location, and I will give you the URL for that. Thank you very much.