Next Generation Internet accessibility pages
NOTE: We are updating this page about once a month with new information about accessibility and with the program for the lunch meetups. If you want to receive the updates and the agenda by mail, please send a message to ngi@han.nl with subject “agenda and update”.
You are working on a Next Generation Internet (NGI) funded project. In that case, we hope you will want to produce a safe, secure, open and accessible end product. A product that people can trust and that they can all use, including if they have a (visual, auditory, motor or other) disability. This is important now that our NGI journey goes beyond the Web and mobile applications, to include a flood of connected devices on the outside and inside of our bodies, vehicles, buildings and infrastructure.
If you need support to make your product accessible for persons with disabilities, HAN University of Applied Sciences is facilitated by the EU to provide you with accessibility support. For that purpose HAN has researchers, domain experts and more than 30 thousand students that may be interested to support you with your project.
How can we help you?
We can help you in many ways, from training and audits to network activities, research and user testing. See below for the first information and links to get you started with accessibility. And you can always call or mail us at ngi@han.nl
What do we expect in return?
The EU facilitates us, so we do not expect anything in return from you. We would appreciate to hear back from you about what worked and what did not work. And, it would be great if our students could maybe help you in the form of a semester study assignment, internship or if you could present your product and experiences to our team and network.
Who we are?
We are the NGI Zero accessibility support team at HAN:
Eric Velleman
Professor Inclusive Digital Design & Engineering
Wouter Nordsiek
Project lead
Meetup lectures agenda
Agenda of the meetups and who will be speaking.
Please contact us if you want to speak or present your project at one of the monthly hybrid Tech Tinker Tuesday meetups so we can announce you in time.
And let us know if you want to attend one of the meetings or presentations during Tech Tinker Tuesday, to see what others are doing (online or onsite), send an email to ngi@han.nl.
Accessibility training
First, include accessibility from the start! To make your product accessible, it is best to include accessibility into your agile production environment. If included in an early stage, accessibility is mostly straightforward and cost effective. Make sure your production team is knowledgeable by offering training and education about accessibility. Every member of a production team should be aware what accessibility concerns are and have a basic understanding of how they are addressed. Also make sure you include users in your processes. Do not forget to include persons with disabilities.
Tech Tinker Tuesday
Every Tuesday teachers, students and our network meet at Tech Tinker Tuesday in Arnhem. We ask projects to present what they are doing and we co-create and share knowledge with them and with users. Students work together with experts, users and network on XR, games, programming and other projects and every month we provide lunch and lectures. You are very welcome to present your work in person at the weekly Tech Tinker Tuesday meeting or during one of the hybrid lecture meetups.
Experience Lab
We have a fully equipped Usability Experience Lab with a double room, one way mirror and all the necessary AV equipment, hardware and software necessary for usability testing with real users. We also have tools like Tobi Pro for eye-tracking research. To use the lab, please contact us.
Projects
Castopod
Castopod is an open source podcast hosting solution for anyone who can connect to the Fediverse via a W3C ActivityPub standard. Here, fediverse means ‘a collection of federated (or interconnected) servers for web publications such as social networks, microblogging, blogging or websites’. And on top of that, for file hosting. NGI Zero Discovery supported this project by improving search, discovery and discoverability through free and open source tools.
Ipfs-search.com
Ipfs-search.com is the first and only provider of search and discovery services for Web3. Since 2016, the service has been growing with IPFS (the Interplanetary Filesystem, a peer-to-peer data storage). This means that the files live in the users' computers and when sharing data, the information does not pass through any centralised entity. The ipfs-search.com search engine is not censored and provides unbiased results - no one is looking over your shoulder when you use it. IPFS asked NGI to investigate the accessibility of their service.
Open Food Facts: privacy protection of personalized food information
Open Food Facts is a collaborative database of nutritional data on over 2.7 million food products from around the world. This nutritional data is shown in this database as open data that can be consulted by everyone, without having to share your personal data or search data. Open Food Facts asked NGI Zero Discovery to review the content and provide advice on searching, discovering and improving discoverability through free and open source tools.
Taler
Taler is an anonymous payment system that works using modern cryptography. In the near future, customers will be able to use their current traditional money transfers to send money to a digital exchange. In return, Taler will receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital money to pay completely anonymously if they want to buy something.
CryptPad
CryptPad offers an encrypted and open-source document collaboration editor that enables secure, collaborative editing. It offers its users a comprehensive digital online office environment with all the tools necessary for effective and productive collaboration. Applications include notes, polls, documents, spreadsheets/excel, code/markdown, Kanban boards, presentations, whiteboards, and various other forms.CryptPad is a free and open-source project made by XWiki, a French company.
The Web and mobile applications
If you want to start reading about web accessibility immediately: as proud members of the W3C we strongly recommend one of the following interesting links:
- Strategies, standards and resources for an accessible web: https://www.w3.org/WAI/. Depending on your role in the project (developer, manager, editor, etc.) you can select relevant information.
- Getting Started tips for webdesigners:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/ - Preliminary testing for web accessibility:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/ - More in depth and technical testing can be done using axe Dev Tools – Web Accessibility Testing. It is a Google Chrome extension that can be installed from the extension pages.
- If you want to see all tools that can help you test for accessibility, please visit the updated W3C tools page. You can select the sort of tool you are looking for, e.g. to test for color contrast, or for dead links:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/
More information
Continue reading about accessibilty guidelines, free online courses and legal information.
