ZAC is for "for their enjoyment, enrichment, and freedom. Children touch it, use it, play it, interact with it, and experience independence through ZAC….. ZAC is the zone that will permit your child to interact directly with games (a LOT of games) and activities (focused on MANY interests) that cater specifically to kids who display the characteristics of autism spectrum disorders, like impairments in social interaction, impairments in communication, restricted interests and repetitive behavior. ZAC has been an effective tool for kids with low, medium and high functioning autism."

The simple graphic, interactive interface provides four main content areas: Television, Games, Music, and Stories. The browser’s emphasis is on linking to educational and fun games, activities and videos. Ease of use is further enhanced by cutting out extraneous elements such as right clicking; helping to reduce sensory overload and possible frustration.

Adult content is blocked to ensure safe browsing. The browser links to specific pages on sites such as Sesame Street, Disney and PBS Kids and it is not possible to follow any links (including the websites internal links) from these pages. I can see the necessity of this although my son found it a little frustrating not being able to access other games and activities on the site he was on, at least when he first started using the browser. From my perspective I do not mind this. I find it does keep him on task as he would normally be inclined to flit from link to link without concentrating on anything for very long.

ZAC was developed by John LeSieur based on the needs of his autistic grandson, Zackary, and is still in beta stage. (The name is also an acronym for Zone for Autistic Children). John LeSieur was also involved in the development of d the Kid CD browsers aimed at children and teenagers.

ZAC Browser’s forum provides a way for parents and caregivers to communicate and share stories, challenges and successes.

ZAC may not suit all children in the Autism Spectrum Disorder range, because of their varying abilities, and needs, but it is the only free resource of its kind and I give it a thumbs up. Its use is not restricted to those children with special needs but is a program suited to all young children.

I have installed ZAC on my PC too - well, I had to research the program myself before writing a review.- so please excuse me now while I carry on researching. I am up to level 3 on Higglytown Higgly Ball

Update:

• I just read an interesting interview with John LeSieur on about.com where he talks about ZAC.
• There is also a Zac Search Engine that includes links to Autism Resources and sites

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Zac Browser for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Table of contents for Navigation

1. Navigation Menus 1 - Appetizers
2. Navigation Menus 2 - Entrees
3. Navigation Menus 3 - Main
4. Navigation Menus 4 - Dessert

Is your navigation system plain sailing ?

image: by Today is a Good Day on Flickr

Now we have considered where we want readers to visit on our blogs we need to look at how easily they can find their way there.

This is where a good navigation system makes a difference. The more time readers need to search for where they want to go the less likely they are to stay on your site. We want our regular readers to easily find all the content since their last visit and new visitors to find content that interests them.

Is your navigation system your weakest link?

Blogs with minimal additions and default templates/themes tend to have a more intuitive basic navigation system but give little choice as to where to find more content - especially content you wish to direct them to.

However, all the addins, plugins, widgets we use on our sites can make our blog sidebars as difficult to navigate as the north west passage.

Blogs littered with too many above the fold ads hide the internal blog navigation systems below deck.

Posts easily get lost in archives so it is important your still relevant older posts can always be found.

Give Your Readers a Smooth Cruise

Show me the way to go home!

If you have tempted your readers to delve into your older posts or individual post pages, make it easy for them to travel back to your main page with an obvious link to your home page. As you can see from the image Captain Cook traveled far and wide but found his way home (apart from his last voyage, through no fault of his own!)

Ensure your blog heading image or text leads back there - have a home link in your main menu and consider a duplicate menu in the form of breadcrumbs in your footer:

Home | About | Contact | Archives | Sitemap

Do Follow

This is one occasion when it is wise to follow others. Sticking to more conventional navigation layout methods means that readers often expect to find certain things in certain places. It makes sense to them. Although you may prefer to be different, remember you are laying out your site for your readers.

The F heat pattern

A study of eyetracking by Neilson show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: that is,two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

Pointer Institute’s Eyetrack III study found that people looked at navigation more when it was at the top of the page than either left or right. Right navigation was looked at slightly more than left. Their 2007 study shows that online news readers first look at navigation bars and teasers whereas in printed news it is headlines and photos. See EyeTrack07: The Myth of Short Attention Spans for more details.

Don’t forget your sitemap!

Add a detailed sitemap for easy browsing of post titles. Mine is far too long and I need to turn the categories into drop down menus.

Categories and Tags

Always categorize or label your posts and use a category list list in your sidebars - a tag list or cloud too if your topics lend themselves to this. This not only makes it easier for searching but clearly indicates your blog topics for new readers.

Consider a search box to make it easier to find more specific topics or posts.

Make the most of your sidebar space

• Consider using drop down or scrollable menus.
• The use of tabs can keep important content within easy view.

Post navigation is important too.

• Use different colors and slightly larger fonts on links you want your readers to follow especially for comments but also for previous post/next post.
• Use a plugin to add similar posts to the bottom of your current post if possible and if not create one manually, at least where you think them most relevant.
• I am not a fan of comment links placed at the top of posts as it takes me time to search for the link. Make commenting as easy as possible.

Tips

• Ask someone to review your navigation system. You are familiar with finding your way around and may not spot problems.
• Do not neglect readers who leave comments - try to fit in a recent comments list alongside your recent posts.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Navigation Menus 2 - Entrees

Table of contents for Navigation

1. Navigation Menus 1 - Appetizers
2. Navigation Menus 2 - Entrees
3. Navigation Menus 3 - Main
4. Navigation Menus 4 - Dessert

The quick answer to why we need good navigation on our blogs is “useability” but as that term could refer to how easy it is to use your mp3 player or washing machine I should expand on this.

If we consider where we want our readers to go, after they have read the page they are currently on, the answer will usually be “Somewhere else on my site”.

Unfortunately menu bars and sidebar menus can become littered not only with too many hard to find links but with too many external links in the wrong places. Your navigation needs a purpose, a planned direction, a guidance system.

Consider:

Where can your visitors go to on your blog?

• Post pages so that they are more likely to leave a comment.
• “Read more” type post pages where you are not displaying full posts. (to hopefully leave a comment)
• Recent Posts so that regular readers can catch up on what they have missed (to hopefully leave a comment)
• Archives (to…. I think you get the drift)
• Popular Posts - if you have that feature installed.
• Back to the home page
• An about page (except on Blogger where I suggest you create an “about me” post and link to that as an about page rather than to the default Blogger profile - then readers stay on your site.)
• To a contact form or email link to send you a personal message.
• To posts found with an internal blog search.
• Your turn to suggest more please.

Apart from your site there are other places you may wish your visitors to go ( I am not counting those that leave rude comments or spam - where you may wish them to go is probably not to another webpage!)

• To a subscription page after clicking a Feed button.
• To a social media site to favorite, fave, add, digg, stumble or bump you to give some kudos and link love.

• To visit your blogging friends via a blogroll, as hopefully their blogroll will also be leading readers to you.

Tuesdays Menu:

How easily can they find their way there?

Comments this way:

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Navigation Menus 1 - Appetizers

Web accessibility is all about enabling people with disabilities to use the web or use it more easily. In addition to those with permanent disabilities there are many many people with temporary impairments. Aging populations add to the numbers of those with difficulties. I would hazard a guess that at any one time there would be at least 20% of web users with some sort of problem that reduces their ability to use the internet to one degree or other. That does not include those, like me, who sit in front of this machine for so long they get eye strain!!

• One in 12 men and one in 200 women have some form of color blindness.
• “An estimated 15-20% of the population has some sort of language or text comprehension difficulty”. - Cognitive Disabilities on the WebAim site
• There are over 30 million people in the US over 45 with some form of vision impairment and “the number of people in the United States with impaired vision - including blindness - could increase by at least 60 percent over the next three decades” - Economic Impact of Vision Problems in the U.S. Estimated at $51.4 Billion

As bloggers we can use techniques and tools to make sure our blog is easy to ‘read’ (by sight or screen reader), understand and navigate.

Although bloggers are at the mercy of programs we have no control over, or we have little knowledge of how to change parts of it that can be changed, there are some simple measures we can put in place. Many of these techniques make sense for use on blogs even if we are not considering them for accessibility purposes - for readability, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and browser compatibility reasons.

Language and Writing

• Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.
• Avoid slang, jargon, and specialized meanings of familiar words, unless defined within your document - not only for accessibility but for international readers who do not understand the lingo.
• Avoid complex sentence structures - anyone could be confused or lose interest reading these.
• Use clear and accurate headings and link descriptions - also good for SEO and those who like to skim when reading.
• State the topic of the sentence or paragraph at the beginning of the sentence or paragraph. This will help both people who are skimming visually, but also people who use speech synthesizers. - especially good for using keywords for SEO in your first paragraph.

Layout

• Use a clear understandable navigation system. Helpful to keep any readers on your site longer.
• Use headings and lists - improves readability for all.
• Avoid clutter and use plenty of clear space - this always makes a site easier to read.

Color

• Make sure of good color contrast so that text stands out well from backgrounds - this is kind on anyone’s eyes.
• Be aware of readers with color blindness in aspects where color can cause an element to be unreadable - for example use image descriptions or captions.

Other Considerations

• Use text equivalents for describing images and links - use”alt’ tags on images, use titles and or “longdesc” - good for those using screen readers as well as for SEO purposes. (I will do a post explaining how to add these elements soon)
• Use a readable size font (please use a readable size font - it bugs me having to change browser text size for just one site and I am sure I am not alone in this.)
• Use valid coding in your posts and CSS styling and in any other template coding you may do.
• Blind users of the web often use a screen reader to read the contents of a web page out loud. Important components of your page should work without a mouse.
• Pull down lists and rollovers etc depend on mouse action for interpretation.
• If, as is increasingly common, you use video on your blog consider adding an explanation of what it is about, or include written transcripts, for those who are deaf, have other hearing impairments or use screen readers because of vision problems. Consider this for those readers who prefer to read text quickly rather than spend much more time watching or listening to a video too (I am one of those - If I come across a page with a video tutorial I will go somewhere else for answers as transcripts are not common)
• Avoid flickering images or videos - Epileptic users must always be careful to avoid seeing flickering between 2 and 55 Hz
• Scrolling text and blinking icons can be a hindrance for those with attention problems - they can really bug many other people too.
• Some people even without a disability are visual learners - images with the correct tags assigned to them can help many - they add interest and color to a page too as long as they are not used in excess or combined with clashing backgrounds.
• However intelligent your audience do not assume they can read really well.

To help you understand:

• from Core Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 “A good test to determine if a text equivalent is useful is to imagine reading the document aloud over the telephone. What would you say upon encountering this image to make the page comprehensible to the listener?”
• Try navigating your site using keyboard alone and check how easy or hard it is to do.
• Try making this Origami Cup - Cognitive Disabilities Activity

There are more complex considerations - if you are interested in pursuing the topic further you could take a look at

• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
• WebAim

Website Accessibility Tools

There are various tools available, to use online or as free download programs, to help us make our sites accessible - here are some examples which would be useful to most bloggers.

• Vision Australia’s Web Accessibility Toolbar - has many tools to check your site including many that are also stand alone tools provided by other sites. This is worth having for other reasons than accessibility too - e.g. validating your code, showing the source code of a page in notepad.
• AccessColor is a free online tool which analyses the internal and external CSS of a web page to test the color contrast and color brightness between the text and background colors.
• Accessibility color wheel A tool that helps in the choice of a color pair (text/background) to use in a web page. It simulates three kinds of color blindness and it shows the result of w3c algorithms, that compute contrast and difference of brightness, applied to the chosen colors. The accessibility color wheel shows if the color pair is “good” from an accessibility point of view.
• Color Blindness Check - re-colorizes any webpage you like into a palette that closely resembles the typical palette available to a person having a red/green color vision deficiency.
• The Color Contrast Analyzer Firefox extension
• Colorblind Web Page Filter - check your page for color blindness accessibility Color Laboratory - allows you to select colors and see how they appear next to one another, and in various foreground/background combinations. It also allows you to see those colors as they might appear to color-blind users.
• ColorDoctor from Fujitzu - a free downloadable Windows program that checks accessibility from the aspect of color. It converts any images displayed on the your screen, into gray scale or colors that person who has color blindness perceives.
• Microsoft Office’s ’show readability statistics’ option in spell check.
• Juicy Studio - readability checker
• IBM’s downloadable programaDesigner - a disability simulator that helps pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired.
• AnyBrowser AnyBrowser.com - check to see if your site is compatible with any browser, view site at various screen sizes, check html validity.
• CSS Validation Service - checks your style sheets for errors.
• WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.
• AccessValet - This tool analyses HTML and XHTML pages. Reports deprecated (outdated) and invalid markup, and violations of accessibility guidelines.My site failed this one partly because of using IFrames - used in sidebar for widgets - to speed up page load time.

Making sure your blog is as accessible as possible has benefits for all your readers, not only those with disabilities - pages will be easier to read, easier to navigate, and faster to download. You will benefit from the incorporated SEO techniques. Sounds like a win win situation to me.

I am very keen on this issue, having a child with a disability, who has fine motor problems and can read only at a very basic level and a partner who, until recently, was getting massive migraine type headaches after spending time reading the screen (he is online as much as I am because of his “PC doctor” business - he brings them into the world and heals them if they get sick.)

Thanks to Nathaniel, and his article Web Accessibility is for Everyone on Purecaffeine.com, which gave me the motivation to dig out my notes on the subject and write this post. It has been a good reminder for me to take care when adding extra styling features to this blog too. In my desire to pretty it up I had forgotten that one of my original aims was to keep it very clean, clear and easy to read.

I am going to use some of the tools I mentioned on this blog now to see where I have to make adjustments.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Accessibility and Blogs - A Win Win Situation

Once they have your details a message is sent to all of your contacts spamming them with a web address which is intended to suck in your contacts to reveal their information too.

If you get a message from a trusted contact which just sends a link and nothing else, question this before you click on it. I unwittingly clicked on a link, thinking it was legitimate and got affected myself.

SOLUTION - CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD IMMEDIATELY AND LET YOUR CONTACTS KNOW TO DO THE SAME. To change your windows live password log in to http://login.live.com/ or go to options within hotmail (top right of your inbox mail window) This password controls all your windows live accounts - chat, mail, spaces etc

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Warning: blockdelete.com