[Athen] Five Webinars open to the public in the next 5 weeks

[Prof Norm Coombs]

EASI is gearing up to provide a series of Webinars over the summer.  Five 
of them are listed here, and more will be announced soon.  We will also 
have a fall line-up of single Webinars and Webinar series to announce and 
post on the Webinar page.

You can register for any of these five Webinars all of which are open to 
the public at:
http://easi.cc/clinic.htm
Those who register will get a link later to its archive

EASI month-long online courses for July are:
Barrier-free Web Design
Barrier-free E-learning
Read more and register online at:
http://easi.cc/workshop.htm


1  Free Webinar: Providing and Managing Accessible PDF Documents
Tue, July 8 at Noon Eastern
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)
CommonLook for Adobe Acrobat is a NetCentric plug-in test and remediation tool
for Section 508 compliance. Its features include:
dynamic drag and drop capability to remediate PDF structure,
automated generation of speak text for tables and forms,
visual manipulation of PDF structure (tables, lists, forms)
enhanced support for table testing and remediation and automatic 
remediation of
common problems such as text running together, repeated characters and
hyphenation.
PDF Enterprise Compliance Management Framework enables management and 
testers to
effectively measure and manage the state of Section 508 compliance of their 
PDF
holdings. It provides the spidering capability to automatically locate PDF
documents on the enterprise's Website and manage PDF document 508 compliance.
CommonLook for the Web is a Web testing product that applies section 508
standards to websites and identifies each instance of website 
non-compliance. In
addition to accessibility testing, CommonLook checks for key quality and
performance requirements, such as broken links, local links, forms,
objectionable language and slow-loading pages.

2  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.


3  Making the Move to Vista: Things You Need to Know
Tuesday July 15 - 2PM EASTERN
Presenter: Dick Banks
Change in software often means improvement in performance, security and
stability. Users of assistive technology want that as well but have to think
about how friendly that software is to their assistive technology.
If that software is the operating system, they need to think hard of making a
change because the operating system is where everything starts. If the 
assistive
technology user is forced to make a change because their job requires that 
they
make change, it can be difficult.
This Webinar looks at the basics of the Windows Vista operating system from 
the
standpoint of the assistive technology user.


4 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 which can be downloaded from
(http://amis.sourceforge.net/)
This snapshot will provide a very brief introduction to AMIS and will discuss
installing it and describe its settings and functions.

5  Free Webinar on the Word-to-DAISY Add-in
Tuesday August 7 at 2 PM Eastern
Presenter: George Kerscher from the DAISY Consortium
The new "Save as DAISY XML" add-in, designed for Microsoft Office Word 2007,
Word 2003 and Word XP, will allow users to save Open XML-based text files into
DAISY XML navigable books. It was created through an open source project with
Microsoft, Sonata Software Ltd. and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem
(DAISY) Consortium and can be downloaded by Microsoft Office Word users for 
free
at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy.
This XML output can then be processed through the DAISY Pipeline, a free
downloadable transformation suite that supports the seamless conversion of 
DAISY
XML into DAISY Digital Talking Book (DTB) format. Together these technologies
provide a comprehensive solution for converting text documents into accessible
formats for people with print disabilities. Users can download the DAISY
Pipeline from the DAISY Project page at 
http://www.daisy.org/projects/pipeline/.


You can register for any of these five Webinars all of which are open to 
the public at:
http://easi.cc/clinic.htm
Those who register will get a link later to its archive

Norman Coombs
norm.coombs at gmail.com