In this interview, Gian Wild, CEO of Accessibility Oz, joins us to talk about a number of accessibility tools and testing procedures from her company. Accessibility Oz conducts both automated and user-based testing for its clients, and also provides them with tools and training which enable them to ensure accessibility independently. To learn more about Accessibility Oz, including the fully accessible Oz Player for videos, visit the Accessibility Oz website.
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Transcript
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Hide transcriptTranscribed by Kayde Rieken
Welcome to BlindBargains.com coverage of CSUN 2015 — the biggest names, provocative interviews, and wall-to-wall exhibit hall coverage — brought to you by the American Foundation for the Blind.
For the latest technology news and accessibility information on cell phones, mainstream and access technology, personal medical devices, office equipment, digital audio players, and web-based and app technologies, log on to AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's monthly technology magazine: www.afb.org/AW.
Now, here's J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J. Meddaugh: We are here at CSUN 2015 with Gian Wild. She is the CEO of Accessibility Oz — and we'll find out what that is in a moment — dealing with, of course, website accessibility. Gian, welcome to Blind Bargains.
Gian Wild: Thank you.
JM: What —
GW: Great to be here.
JM: Yeah. Thank you. What exactly is — is this your first CSUN, or —
GW: It is actually my first CSUN. I've been in the accessibility industry since 1998, but I just never had the funds or the time to make it over here before.
JM: Awesome. So what are some of the things that your company does, and why did you — you decide to come to the U.S. to share it?
GW: So I spent six years with the W3C writing WCAG 2, which is slowly becoming the endorsed standards in America; and basically, my company helps organizations — whether they be government, corporate, or educational or not-for-profit — make sure their websites, applications, mobile device — mobile sites and apps are accessible to people with disabilities, and basically comply it with WCAG 2.
JM: What are some of the ways that you do that as a company?
GW: So we have an automated testing tool that we built over the last four years called OzART, and it automatically determines a whole range of different accessibility errors such as images missing alt attributes and headings, not being nested properly, and pages without titles and things like that. And it also guides us through what is, I suppose, the majority of that testing, which is manual testing, where we actually go through and submit a form, make sure the — you know, there are errors, and the errors make sense and there are suggestions, etc., etc.
JM: Now, when you do the user testing, do you have people with disabilities help you do the testing on that, or how do you —
GW: Yeah.
JM: And are you — are you looking for people like that to help with that, or —
GW: Oh, yeah, we always are. We — we have a policy that we don't do the testing ourselves unless we — you know, my staff — sorry, it's very loud over here.
JM: (Laughs)
GW: There's — I have a policy in my organization — I started it four years ago — that we would mimic the percentage of people with disabilities in our own organization; so at the moment, 45 percent of us have some kind of disability. And so, you know, we've got a guy who uses a — a magnifier, and he can sometimes do our user testing. But most of the time, we — we have a — a range of people that we call for, and we call on, to do user testing for us. And we always pay them for their time in gift cards and things like that, depending on what they're doing, between $50 and $200.
JM: Do you prefer to do these in person?
GW: Yes, we always do do them in person, but we can — we can do them online as well, if necessary.
JM: So — and — and to clarify — and you are based in Australia, or —
GW: Yes, we're in Melbourne, Australia.
JM: So this might apply mostly to people who live there, as far as the user testing aspect.
GW: Yes. Absolutely. If you are a person with a disability who's using some kind of assistive technology to access the web, whether that's a joystick or Dragon Naturally Speaking or a screen reader, or you just use the keyboard only, we definitely want to hear from you.
JM: So what are some of the other — what do you feel differentiates yourself? There's lots of web accessibility testing companies that — what — what sets you apart?
GW: I suppose the thing that sets us apart is that we don't just do consulting. We have a range of products that help our clients meet accessibility requirements. So, you know, unfortunately, one of the — what we see with our clients is, they engage someone to do an audit of their website; they get a really long report; and then, that's the end of their accessibility journey. They have a lot of trouble implementing the report. They don't have any assistance with that. You know, the report sort of gathers dust on a desk somewhere, and three years later, they engage someone else to do an audit, and there's no kind of exchange of knowledge or learning in the actual organization. So what tends to happen with us is that we do the initial audit; then we work with the organization to implement products like OzART so they can do their testing —
JM: Sure.
GW: — themselves. We implement products like Oz Player, which is an accessible video player, and we give them access to things like Oz Wiki, which is our database of accessibility errors. And we provide help desk hours so they can call on us, you know, and give us code to review or pages to review and run training and things like that.
JM: I'm glad you mentioned the Oz Player. Talk a little bit about that. So that's the accessible video player, or — for videos and things like that?
GW: Yeah. So it was the — it's the world's first completely accessible video player. It was launched in November 2013, so it's been around for a while now; and it doesn't have any keyboard traps, which is a big problem with video players. It is an HTML5 player, but it has an accessible Flash fallback for those older browsers. Everything is keyboard accessible. It has really strong color contrast. You can skip the video; you can skip to the transcript; or you can get information on keyboard shortcuts. It supports captions and audio descriptions, and it has an interactive transcript; and also, it does things like — you know, most video players, if you want to move the actual time of the video, you only have the chance to do it in one-second increments using the right and left arrow keys; whereas, we've implemented Page Up and Page Down for what we call broad seeking. So it's more usable.
JM: Sure. What's the — the cost of that? Or if someone wanted to put that on their website, what's — how would they do that?
GW: Well, so just go to our website, www.AccessibilityOz.com, and look for Oz Player; or you can go to www.Oz-Player.com. It's actually free for not-for-profits with an annual revenue under a million dollars, and it's also free for all sites that have less than ten videos. If you don't fall into either of those categories, then it's $2,000 per annum. There is a WordPress plug-in, and we're working on a Drupal module; and we do guide you through the implementation process. It's not hard at all, but if you need any help or you want to have a look at the player before implementing it, just get in contact and we can send it to you.
JM: Okay. And then — that same website, if people want to get into the user testing and other things for that as well?
GW: So best just to email us at inquiries@accessibilityoz.com. And also, I should mention about Oz Player that you can actually play YouTube videos through Oz Player. So you can keep your videos hosted on YouTube and actually play them on your site through Oz Player accessibly.
JM: That's great. Hey, thank you so much for sharing all this with us.
GW: No problem.
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J.J. Meddaugh is an experienced technology writer and computer enthusiast. He is a graduate of Western Michigan University with a major in telecommunications management and a minor in business. When not writing for Blind Bargains, he enjoys travel, playing the keyboard, and meeting new people.
