[Athen] EASI Webinars and Courses for July

[Prof Norm Coombs]

EASI Webinars for July

Free Webinar: Providing and Managing Accessible PDF Documents
Tue, July 8 at Noon Eastern (New York) Time
Presenter: Paul Turenne from NetCentric Technologies
Adobe has made great strides in designing the PDF document format itself 
and the
tools to produce and read them much more friendly and accessible for users 
with
disabilities, especially users of screen readers. The complexity of
accessibility for a PDF document depends a lot on the complexity of the
document. While Acrobat itself can create accessible documents, there are 
third
party developers providing tools designed to assist the document creator with
the process. NetCentric has products to help. One plugs into Acrobat. Another
helps managers of large Websites to monitor and manage large numbers of PDF
documents.
This presentation will discuss NetCentric's efforts to help raise the level of
PDF accessibility. Netcentric is also developing a plug-in for Word to make
creating simple accessible PDF for those who do not own Acrobat itself. Watch
for future announcements at (net-centric.com)

EASI Webinar Snapshot: Making Accessible Online Surveys Tue. July 8 at 2 PM 
EASTERN
Presenter: Dick Banks
Surveys and forms are a big part of Internet life. Users may choose to fill 
out
a survey to help in a research project. Surveys are often created to help
sellers determine what products may be of interest to customers. Visitors may
want to answer questions in a poll and review the poll results to see how they
match up with others.
Surveys and polls can be detailed an complex and if they are not created with
accessibility in mind, many with assistive technology are unable to 
participate.
There are a number of online solutions to creating accessible forms, 
surveys and
polls and they will be introduced to you in this Webinar snapshot.

EASI Webinar Snapshot: AMIS a Free Software DAISY Pllayer
Wed. July 23 at 2 PM EASTERN
Presenter: Norm Coombs
The DAISY format will increasingly become the format for e-books in the near
future because of its greatly enhanced document navigation. Remember that the
Library of Congress National Library Service is transitioning to audio DAISY
books replacing the current audio cassette format. NIMAS is a version of DAISY
which is the format that publishers are using to provide electronic 
versions of
text books for grades K-12. However, the DAISY documents require a special
player to access them. There are a number of commercial hardware and software
DAISY players. AMIS, (Adaptive Multimedia Information System), is a free
software DAISY player.
This snapshot will provide a very brief introduction to AMIS and will discuss
installing it and describe its settings and functions.

Four important and significant Webinars are planned and will shortly be here
with dates in late July or August:
1 The free Microsoft Word-to-DAISY Plug-in
2 Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) version 2 guidelines
3 Comparing Windows XP and the Vista Operating Systems s
4. Understanding the New Look of Office 2007

Read more and register online for these Webinars at:
http://easi.cc/clinic.htm

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EASI asynchronous Online Course in July:
Barrier-free Web Design
This is one of the courses that can be taken independently or 5 courses 
will earn the Certificate in Accessible Information Technology.
The course does not require knowledge of HTML although it never hurts.  You 
can use WYSIWYG authoring software to create accessible Web pages.  It does 
very little with so-called Web 2.0 Web pages

Week One:
Lesson 1: Introduction and General Overview
Lesson 2: Web Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 Standards

Week Two:
Lesson 3: Evaluating Webpages for Accessibility/Useability
Lesson 4: Introduction to WYSIWYG Authoring
Lesson 5: Page Navigation and Organization

Week Three:
Lesson 6: The Use of ALT Tags with Images and Imagemaps
Lesson 7: Frames and Forms
Lesson 8: Simple and Complex Tables

Week Four
Lesson 9: Streaming Audio and Video
Lesson 10: The Document Object Model (DOM)

You can read more and register online at:
http://easi.cc/workshop.htm