Sina, If you remember, I went to college well before the ADA, 508 and the related state regulations. NYU had no office of disability affairs and when I asked the CS department to provide me with a new ribbon for the punch card typing things so I could read my Fortran programs with the higher contrast afforded by actually having a decent amount of ink in the machine, I was refused and had to go to a stationary store and buy my own and had to change the ribbon every time I wanted to change my programs. As a low vision student I had to take chemistry in a department that would not let me skip the highly visual tasks like finding chemical signatures by the portion of the spectrum they excite so I had to let my lab partner do the looking and pretend that I had seen those colors myself. Physics was a real ball in a poorly lit lab where, even more than in chemistry, I had to rely on a partner to do all of the looking for me and had to assume she was right. Life in pre-ADA universities was just a barrel of monkeys - a laugh a minute - a real party for BLV students. I got really good grades but without the value of an indifferent university administration or faculty but with a lot of help from fellow students who pitched in because people who want to live in Greenwich Village tend to be pretty nice. There is a reason I don't even include my degree from NYU on my resume as they did squat for me and I did most of my learning as an autodidact. I would not want to hear about students in the era after the passage of ADA and other laws having to go through the shit I had to 25 years ago. Until we can assume that accessibility will be provided automatically, without special negotiations with cement headed professors and even stupider administrators, we are riding in the back of the bus. cdh -----Original Message----- From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sina Bahram Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:37 AM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: Story Boards Wouldn't want to go about it in a sensible way, would we? 100 times out of 100, I have found the DSS office, and not the professor, to be the most ignorant of both the intention, and even the letter of, ADA, 508, etc. This can be likened to Microsoft caring more about accessibility than the AT companies, for example. I think that a lot of these situations can be resolved by simply talking to the professor in their office hours or on the phone and explaining the process by which you can translate your internal knowledge into external representations of that knowledge. Discussions involving lawyers tend to be counterproductive at best, and costly over an amazing amount of time, at worst. Not to mention, you are simply feeding the already ridiculous stereotype that all blind folks are going to sue you if you do even one thing wrong. This is an unhealthy, unproductive, and amazingly all around bad idea. The entirety of Chris's technical suggestions were quite excellent; however, and I urge you to follow them. Good luck Take care, Sina ________________________________ From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris Hofstader Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 8:38 AM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: Story Boards Hi Marvin, Drawing tools have taken a back seat in the development priorities at the commercial AT companies. We had a contractor (Will Pearson) working on a audio version of Visio that used 3D sound for us at FS a bunch of years ago. When I moved on, FS shit canned Will and killed the project. One way to story board a project would be to make your "slides" using html itself. The pages you make will not be fully functional but, rather, describe the contents of the page when it is finally completed. This will provide a set of pages that your instructor can view in any order that he prefers and will contain all of the information you need to use to develop the stories for your ultimate project. Another approach would be to do it using the MS Word Outline mode (View/Outline in Word 2003, I haven't used it in 2007 yet so I can't tell you how to get it in that version). The Word outliner creates kind of a tree view of information which can be up to 12 (I think) levels deep. The person reading the document can set the depth she wants to view so, for instance, they can read the Heading 1 information to get a "big picture" overview of the information and, using the outliner button bar, or a number of different useful keystrokes, they can drill down further. This creates a hierarchical view of your story board which can be corrected to jump from topic to topic under different headings by using the Word hyperlink feature (I know this works with JAWS but haven't tried it with Window-Eyes or System Access). Another approach would be to use PowerPoint slides in a logical, albeit hierarchical manner. It has been a long time since I did anything interesting with PowerPoint but, if I remember correctly, you can include hyperlinks that will let the reader jump from one slide to another in a less sequential order. I find it easiest to create PowerPoint slides using the MS Word outliner - items at level 1 will translate to PP slide titles and those at level 2 or higher become PP bullets. Once you have your outline done in Word, you can go to File/Send To/PowerPoint and it will create your PP slides for you and open PP to the top slide. From there, you can edit the slides to add things like hyperlinks and such to spiff up your presentation. I know that editing PP slides can be done pretty well with JAWS as I've done it myself but I have been told that it works pretty nicely with Window-Eyes but have no hands on experience with it so can't speak to its usability. I'm sure there are other tools that a blink can use to accomplish such a task but I haven't tried any and cannot remember what other people have told me over the years as my caffeine levels haven't reached the point where I can function at full capacity. If your instructor doesn't like any of the above accessible solutions, I recommend you get hold of a Braille embosser or Perkins Brailler and make a whole lot of pages in Braille. Do not add any printed information and turn in the project using only Braille and tactile graphics ( has a nice program for doing this). If the instructor complains, tell him that it was the only accessible solution he hadn't rejected yet and that you will deal with the Office of the Dean of Students to try to help you negotiate a solution that will work for you and the instructor. If your instructor does not allow you to use a technique that is accessible typically colleges have an office of disability affairs and, if not, they definitely have a Dean of Students. People in these departments are usually quite helpful and aware of ADA and, if your college gets Federal money (most do), 508 as well. No one wants a discrimination lawsuit and, if it comes to a point where you and your instructor reach a point at which negotiation no longer provides either of you with any satisfaction, your lawyer's office is the next stop. You can write to me privately or call me on Skype if you want to discuss this further. Enjoy, cdh ________________________________ From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of marvin hunkin Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 12:00 AM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Story Boards Hi. doing a project for my website development course. now, part of the requirements says that i need to create a story board to represent what content is to be displayed on each page. Now sighted students, would draw navigation and story board diagrams. now, had to do this in word tables and tried html. but my lecturer is still not happy with what i have come up with. now, just wondering, is there any software, that might be able to represent the story boards for the four websites that i am developing for this semester. any tips, tricks, or any other similar experiences. let me know, if anyone been in the same position. unfortunately the guy who did start to develop an accessible text to speech drawing software, got his phd, and did not complete the project and still in limbo. he got to the third user tests, and then nicked off. he did this at Burkely University in Callifornia and the product was to be called Intercommunication Draw 2. okay, can you help out or give suggestions or how to resolve these problems? cheers Marvin. ________________________________ Join Lavalife for free. 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