Welcome to the Great Lakes ADA and Accessible IT Center's monthly Bulletin on Accessible IT in K-12 schools.

Trainings & Events

The Great Lakes Center offers technical assistance, trainings, referrals, and resource material for K-12 and Postsecondary schools on Accessible Information Technology topics.

Web Searching Tips and Resources

Search Engine Math Explains how to use simple commands to improve the results you get from search engines.
http://searchenginewatch.com/
facts/article.php/2156021

Power Searching For Anyone A summary of how to do advanced searches with the major search engines, including field searching.
http://searchenginewatch.com/
facts/article.php/2156031

Search Assistance Features A summary of how to do advanced searches with the major search engines, including phrase searching.
http://searchenginewatch.com/
facts/article.php/2155971

Search Features Chart A one page summary of major search commands and operators at various search engines, plus a comparison of special search features.
http://searchenginewatch.com/
facts/article.php/2155981

Search Toolbars & Utilities Covers search toolbars, companions and utilities that let you access search engines, meta search utilities and other programs to help with searching.
http://searchenginewatch.com/
links/article.php/2156381

Search Engine Glossary Definition of terms relating to search engines, such as phrase search, Boolean operators, stop words and more.
http://searchenginewatch.com/
facts/article.php/2156001

A Case Study in School Accessible Technology

The Robbinsdale Area School District, located in the Robbinsdale, MN, serves approximately 13,000 K-12 students and covers seven communities with a population of more than 100,000. The district has a long history of using technology to enhance instruction and a commitment to serving students with differing abilities through provision of universally designed and assistive technologies.

During the 2005-2006 school year, Robbinsdale's general technology and special education technology staff participated in a unique project with PACER's Simon Technology Center sponsored by Great Lakes ADA and Accessible IT Center. The project assist school districts in developing strategic plans for improving IT accessibility for students with different needs through the use of universally designed technologies.

In the early years of Robbinsdale's technology history, however, the situation was less than ideal when it came to integration of general and special education technology services. Rather, the spheres of special education technology and general technology rarely intersected, and global coordination of technology services was nonexistent. Naturally, the lack of collaboration between the two departments led to a host of technical and procedural problems that hampered the delivery of technology services to students and staff.

The process of coordinating special education and general education technology was challenging but went more smoothly than expected says Lyn Koss, district assistive technology specialist. "The key was finding common ground, communicating regularly, and supporting each other's staff," she adds.

In more recent years, both AT and IT staff have worked to find common ground and build camaraderie. Lyn says that they have identified strategies that work to build collaboration between assistive technology and general technology teams. "First, find down time to meet and talk about what each department does. It is much more effective to develop collaboration when you are not in crisis," says Lyn.

They have also learned that it is important for staff to work at finding common ground and ways to support each other. Also, Keeping each other informed about activities and projects in each department goes a long way in preventing future problems and maintaining good relationships between staff.

The payoff of collaboration between AT and IT has been great for technology staff, and more importantly, students and teachers. For example, recently special education and general education have partnered to purchase educational software programs, that will be used by and benefit both students with and without disabilities.

Partnering between AT and IT has also enabled Robbinsdale to amplify their purchasing power. New, collaborative procedures for technology purchasing decisions have helped the district make more cost-effective, informed purchasing decisions.

Google Labs Launches Accessible Web Search

Google Labs has launched Google Accessible Search, a version of the Google search results page designed to make it easier and more effective for the blind and visually impaired. It can be accessed at http://labs.google.com/accessible. They are requesting user feedback.

Google Labs is a showcase for beta-version products. Google collects user feedback to improve the prototypes.

Google's Accessible search works very similar to a regular Google search, which helps you find a set of documents that is most relevant to your task. Accessible Search goes one step further by helping you find the most accessible pages in that result set. Accessible Search is an early Google Labs product designed to identify and prioritize search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully — pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op's technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

Broadly, Google defines accessible websites and pages as content that the blind and visually challenged can use and consume using standard online technology, and Google has worked with a number of organizations to determine which websites and pages meet those criteria. The methods for identifying accessible pages and content are subjective; Google takes into account several factors, including a given page's simplicity, how much visual imagery it carries and whether or not its primary purpose is immediately viable with keyboard navigation.

Accessible Search is a natural and important extension of Google's overall mission to better organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. Google Accessible Search is designed to help the visually challenged find the most relevant, useful and comprehensive information, as quickly as possible.

In the past, visually impaired Google users have often waded through a lot of inaccessible websites and pages to find the required information. Google's goal is to provide a more useful and accessible web search experience for the blind and visually impaired.

Some of the basic recommendations on how to make a website more useable and accessible include keeping Web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter – especially extraneous content – and ensuring that the primary purpose of the Web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation. Archived versions of the K-12 Bulletin offer guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including Web Content Access Guidelines that are helpful for website owners and authors. Broad adherence to these guidelines is one way of ensuring that sites are universally accessible.