iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

The draft of the AODA Integrated Accessibility Standards is currently posted on the Ministry of Community and Social Services web site. The section on “Accessible websites and web content” subsection 4 was what I was most interested in. There were only minor changes from what was in the last draft that I saw, but the changes were significant.

Update: Friday April 1, 2011

Looks like the link is dead, but Google still has a copy: webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:W2_8OUCWcYAJ:www.mcss.gov.on.ca/en/mcss/publications/accessibility/standards_iar/part2_iar.aspx

Running key phrases through the Ministry’s search tool yields some really interesting results. Here is an example search.

What is the same is that it references the WWW Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

The draft AODA Integrated Accessibility Standards document applies to Ontario public web sites on the internet and in intranets (university LMS’ would be in either definition) and outlines targets for NEW content to be WCAG Level A accessible and then level AA and eventually ALL content to being Level AA.

The change is that there will be exceptions for online audio and video content. That is, content that would require Captions (Live) and Audio Descriptions (Pre-recorded) as outlined in the WCAG2 specification here www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#media-equiv

The WCAG2’s Captions (Live) and Audio Descriptions (Pre-recorded) requirements are unlike other content formatting previsions in the WCAG2 in that these are not items that content authors can simply modify how they format their content to achieve this high standard of accessibility. The Captions (Live) and Audio Descriptions (Pre-recorded) require many orders of magnitude more hours of labour to comply with than is often needed to produce the original artifact. To quote Stuart Robertson, webmaster, UofGuelph.ca and contributor to alistapart.com at the 2009 Aiming for Accessibility conference at Guelph University “[the] Transcription requirement represent a serious disincentive to publish audio/video content to the web”.

Those who host audio and video on the web need to figure out how to provided captions and descriptive audio to content. I want this to be a positive process of adding value to audio and video content, not a chilling effect preventing it.

After making my stand on what I think is reasonable for those creating content for the web I figure that my next steps should be to share my own informal check-list for posting and reviewing content for the web. My next post will be What to Look for when mattclare.ca/blog/2011/02/21/what-to-look-for-when-trying-to-author-accessible-content-my-list/ Trying to Author Accessible Content: My List.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you wipe an iPhone via MS Exchange here’s my video.

I hope you don’t find yourself in a situation where you need to wipe your MS Exchange linked iPhone because you lost it or it was stollen, but I think everyone who has their phone connected to Exchange at work or Apple’s MobileMe service appreciates this kind of piece of mind. I know I really value knowing that if someone’s got my phone they at least don’t have my data like E-Mails, contacts, pictures and whatever else is on my most personal device.

In the case of MS Exchange 2010 here is what the confirmation E-Mail looks like afterwards.

If you don’t have your phone linked to Apple’s MobileMe service I’d recommend the Exchange based options that you might have through work (or a BlackBerry Enterprise server) or Microsoft’s hosted Exchange services or Google’s Apps for domains premium services.

The Conservative party’s take on Copyright reform, Bill C-32, is working its way through the parliamentary process. The last two copyright reform bills in Canada have died on the order paper, so it’s about time we revisit copyright as the Conservative government looks long in the tooth.

The Bill C-32 Legislative Committee has invited Canadians to share their views. The Committee has set the following parameters, as summarized by Michael Geist:

In order for briefs on Bill C-32 to be considered by the Committee in a timely fashion, the document should be submitted to the Committee’s mailbox at CC32@parl.gc.ca by the end of January, 2011. A brief which is longer than 5 pages should be accompanied by a 1 page executive summary and in any event should not exceed 10 pages in length.

www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5577/125/

I couldn’t write that much, but I thought I’d take an other opportunity to send my thoughts on the need for an educational take on fair dealing (fair use) that deals with only who has access and not how (dead trees versus electrons) and doesn’t suggest that anyone should help enforce a company’s “digital lock”.

Here’s what I’ve sent to my MP and modified for the committee. I encourage you to send something similar to your member or parlament and perhaps to the committee.

Honourable Ms. Raitt
Member of Parliament for Halton

Dear Ms. Raitt,

I am writing you with respect to Bill C-32, Canada’s copyright reform bill. I want to urge you to help ensure a fair approach to Canadian copyright works used in education and that respects the rights of those who purchase copies of copyrighted works. I would further urge you to ensure that the Canadian government does not create a copyright regime that centres around fundamentally flawed concepts and technologies that create “digital locks”. This type of approach is no more appropriate than when politicians first tried to control access to the printing press.

When Canada updates its copyright act it should acknowledge the difference between educational uses and commercial use or public performances. A distinction for using copyrighted works in education can be made by either loosening of restrictions of copyright for educational use or in imposing fair costs to students and educators.

For creators, to custodians to consumers of copyrighted works; “digitals locks” are too cumbersome, rarely effective and need to be written into law in order to give them an artificial validity. Please do not adopt any concept of “digital locks” into Canadian law.

Thank you for your consideration,

.\.\att

Matt Clare – mattclare.ca

You can learn more about the changes coming to Canadian copyright and the threat it poses to fair dealing (fair use) and what almost all consumers assume to be fair at www.speakoutoncopyright.ca/

The convoy hauling six giant beer vats passed our house. You can follow twitter.com/ChallengerMF to track their progress.

This was one of my first attempts at night photography with the DSLR.

While my wife was getting a valuable two hours of sleep before she was woken with contractions signaling the birth of our first born child 19 hours later, I was not quite tired enough to sleep. UnknowingIy missing out on my last chance to sleep for a while, I was typing away at a PHP script to allow us to share pictures of our new baby – whenever he was going to arrive – with our friends and family privately with nothing more complex than the ability to eMail photos from my iPhone.

It was important to us to be able to share these pictures of our new child, but also to protect our child’s image from the very public exposure of the public internet and the still too public (or at least, un-trustable privacy of) Facebook.

Here’s how I was able to achieve this with a web server, some PHP, a GMail account and my iPhone:

Creating Galleries
First off I created a folder with standard Apache Basic Auth settings and let our friends and family know the simple username and password. I also turned on WebDAV access for the geekier viewers. In order to construct interesting galleries I placed a copy of Qdig, a Quick Digital Image Gallery PHP script to create galleries and thumbnails on the fly (and secured it against the WebDAV access). I had to increase the amount of RAM PHP could use, but otherwise it was very easy to implement.

Getting eMail Attachements from GMail with PHP

I created a new GMail account (specifically through my Google Apps domain) to receive all of these cute baby pictures via eMail from my iPhone. The next step was to check it automatically and store the attached pictures in a specific folder.

I wrote a PHP script, fetch_mail.php, that POP’s the GMail account, looks at new mail for attachements, and saves the attachements in the protected folder.

The full PHP file, save my account details, is here: mattclare.ca/~mclare/blog/fetch_mail.phps

The configuration settings:
$user=“your-address@gmail.com“; //GMail address 
$pass=“your password”; //GMail address
$save_dir = ‘./’; //Folder to save the files into
//lower case array of EMail address that are allowed to send.  Don’t set if you want to allow anyone
$senders = array(‘maybespam@mattclare.ca‘,‘something@hotmail.com‘);
$extensions = array(‘png’,‘jpeg’,‘jpg’,‘gif’); //lower case file extensions to allow.  Don’t set if you want allow any file
$prepend_date = true;  //Add date and time to start of file names to prevent filename collisions
$status = true; //Should a status report be reported at the end?

The GMail imap_open string for POP:

// GMail with pop3
$authhost=“{pop.gmail.com:995/pop3/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX”;

$connection = imap_open($authhost, $user, $pass);
imap_errors();

Then over a hundred more lines of PHP to look for an attachement and to then save it to the designated folder.

Running the PHP Script
I added the following to my server’s crontab to have it check for new mail every ten minutes.

*/10 * * * * nice php -f ~/bin/baby_pictures/fetch_mail.php


I ran the script from the command line, but it would work through the web.

That’s It

Hopefully if you know a little PHP and have a web server at your disposal this script will help you move files from GMail to your web site. I know we’ve really appreciated sharing our joy this way.