Hello I am Marisol Miranda from EASI and I want to welcome you all to the webinar on blackboard accessibility. Today's presenters are Stephanie Weeks and Hadi Rangin and I'm going to turn the mike over to Norm Coombs. Hi Norm.

 Thank you, Marisol and welcome to all of those who've you are here and to those of you were going to drop in late I want to talk to a little bit about the future. You may have noticed in my announcement I've tried to take up the habit to put in the Greenwich mean Time for the presentations for those outside the states. I hope it's helpful to you. And one of my many shortcomings is that I like to work intensely on one thing at a time and not think too far into the future. And so what happens is I have a bunch of nice webinars and before I know they are all gone and I've got nothing else scheduled which is about where we are at right now. With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up it's hard to get people like that. But here's a little bit of stuff I can tell you that may not show yet on our webpage. Adobe has been promising to do something on flash. I'm having a lot of trouble nailing that down and when we do I think we will satisfy them and comment on their Adobe connect which I don't think is as accessible as this, but we will make due to see what they can tell us about flash. We had a good webinar a year ago on accessible android phones and we are going to have to probably before the end of this year one of the update of accessible android phones and another on accessible apps for android phones. Earlier next year we're going to have a webinar on HTML 5. Which is probably a little bit like Web 2.0. But it gets a little bit more technical than where I am. The change that is coming to HTML and I figured it's about time some of us learned something about it. I have some others in the back of my mind but I will not mention them at this point. I want to give as much time as possible to our presenters, Stephanie Weeks who works with, works for blackboard and Hadi Rangin, who is from the University of Illinois but has done a lot of work with the blackboard people working on accessibility. So with that much of an introduction I would like to introduce Stephanie Weeks. Stephanie you are in charge from here.

 Thank you very much and thank you for the introduction. I very much appreciate the opportunity to share what we've been working with the blackboard community to make it more accessible to everyone. As Hadi and I start off we will start with some introductions of ourselves and kind of where we are coming from in presenting this information I would love for those who are participating if you could just note in the chat if you are currently using blackboard or if you haven't used blackboard I want to make sure that I understand the perspective that you all are coming from that you have experienced the product yet or not. I would be very helpful for us. So we will get started here. I do want to be very clear that blackboard is a public company I do work for blackboard and a couple things will be talking about near the end of the presentation are about the potential for future changes in the product. Those things could change but I'm telling you as much information as I know today. The goal of today's discussion is busy with love for you to leave understanding how accessible blackboard as what you can and can't do with it, where you can get more information about the accessibility with an additional helpful information on the topic and how you can participate in this process as well. So those are our goals. As I mentioned Hadi and I will introduce ourselves. I will talk a little bit about blackboard's commitment to this and how we approach accessibility and (inaudible) blackboard learning and we will speak to how we feel about the tackling the challenge of making blackboard accessible as well as enabling content authors who use blackboard to design accessible content. And we will leave you with some resources that we hope will help with your endeavors and also some information about again or you can get involved. Hadi, I will let you introduce yourself.

 Good afternoon everyone, this is Hadi Rangin from University of Illinois. I am glad to be with Stephanie with this presentation. We work really hard in the past years on improving the accessibility of blackboard and some of you might remember, those who Web CT we started actually a collaboration with them in 2005. We have gone through that bumpy merger road and that it seems, three years ago we have established pretty smooth working relationship and then as a result of blackboard 9.0 and 9.1 has significantly, have been improved. As far as accessibility goes. I don't know if Stephanie you will give me another chance, but if you let me say that first let me also thank everyone who worked with us on the past year and a collaboration with your help we really couldn't achieve that. Accessibility is really a challenge for everyone. And I called the accessibility (inaudible) approach. It means we can always try to become more accessible but there is still not a final point to that we say that we have achieved accessibility 100%. Because it depends on a number of vARIAbles, the users, the assistive technology you're using, the platform also API and also techniques that's used in the application. We have you know, very big challenge ahead of us especially with ARIA and the applications are becoming more accessible. So any time if possible, please please contribute, please participate in such collaboration groups. We can only achieve the accessibility or approach the accessibility collectively because as I said there's a lot of big challenges for us because we do not, I consider myself accessibility specialist, but really there are on a daily basis I run into a lot of challenging questions from vendors from local developers here that I do not know, I don't have a well-defined answer. For them. So please participate. We have collaboration we have collaboration on the resource page, which is I think one of the last slides. And then real participation, with your participation in really shape the future of accessibility for blackboard. He knew that this is beneficial to everyone considering, especially for students that will allow them to engage and still engage with the students and do their job at the right time and become more independent when they graduate. So please participate and one thing I would like also IP and to mention that you know, all those learning management systems that we have considered, we have you heard about from sky to portal, desire to learn and take a blackboard this is not really for I know three of them. I don't know Sakai. But I know little, desire to learn and blackboard, all these applications they are unique products by themselves. They have some common features. You cannot easily really compare one LMS with another LMS because the working environment and complexity of each environment is different and I hope it is clear that we are not really always, you don't see from that perspective what I think I am trying to compare apples to apples. There are, in blackboard there are a lot more complex modules involved in the wake of the approach that might be a little different than the other models. So I think Stephanie can talk more about that, and now back to Stephanie.

 Thank you, Hadi. So I am the head of user experience for blackboard and I wanted to just sort of share with you how the user experience team approaches the concept of accessibility when we are designing a software solution. Really we gauge the effectiveness of our solutions based on what we call our design principles and what we want is to deliver software that is delightful to users, that is useful, that is simple, reliable and engaging. And fundamentally we believe that unless it is accessible for all of our users, all of them, there is no way we can accomplish those goals. So accessibility is a fundamental part of how we approach our solutions. So that is where I'm coming from and sharing this information with you today. So I did want to make sure that I sort of ground, a couple of you mentioned you do not use blackboard today. Blackboard has the company produces a lot of different technology-based solutions. We actually have five different types of solutions and what I'm talking about today is called the blackboard learning and that is the web-based teaching and learning platform. Blackboard does also offer a transact product, what we call connect mobile and collaborate. And these are, you can find information about those on our website. They are all about the teaching and learning experience. Blackboard and like I said is really focused on the teaching and learning that may supplement the classroom, may replace the classroom. It's really where the courses are put online. Blackboard learning is comprised of four different modules. So we have our course delivery module and that's where the instruction that classroom experience experience occurs and there's also a content module nuts for file collaboration. There's also community engagement and that's really about who and how, how information is delivered to various constituents on campus and how the system is magic managed and we also have a system for outcomes assessment. That's an institution or program level assessment for the effectiveness of the institution and its goals. That's sort of what comprises blackboard learn. Our mission really is to transform the experience of education and our accessibility approached there is really to learn, design, develop (inaudible) but also testing with volunteers in the community who are willing to say I used this kind of technology combination I will test out some of the things that you are working on or use a different combination of technology let me test it out and give you feedback. And we tried to really engage anyone who is willing to come work with us before we even release our software so that we can have time to change and make improvements to getting to be a delightful and engaging experience before we release it to the general public. And that is very much a big part of what Hadi has been a leader in is helping to participate in, well how can we design is in the best way for everyone to leverage it. What is the best technical approach to this and let's test it out together before we put it out there. So that is our approach to delivering a solution. So blackboard, in order for blackboard as a concept to really provide equal access to all of the educators and learners at engage, both the platform and the content within and need to be designed accessibly. Both the design and the content have to come together for this to be real. In the blackboard will we are trying to do is provide an accessible platform and we are trying to provide support for and evangelizing about those who offer content can do so in an accessible way. So let's talk about some of the activities there, but I fear he must acknowledge that a lot of this might rely on some of you on the call to help educate the folks at your institution or creating content about how to do it accessibly. So as I'm sure you know, both of these things have to work together. So I will spend a little bit of time first is talking about the platform itself. The way we approach this was again working with the community, designing and testing this both with the expertise that we are developing in product development, in my organization and QA group, and the engineering group and in the support groups, testing this, designing it together, but also working with users like Hadi and others in our blackboard accessibility user group who are signing up and willing to spend some time with us saying yes this is designed with everyone in mind. We also have partnered with a company called DQ. And they have provide verification testing for us to ensure that we are developing accessible experiences. So they are doing both automated and human-based experience testing. And providing us with feedback and consultation on how to make improvements. And we've also partnered with the national Federation of the blind. Our release 9.1 is actually certified by the MSP for nonvisual access at gold level so we are very excited to have achieved the milestone. It was possible through working together to achieve that. So from a development perspective I wanted to talk about a couple of areas to give you a real sense of what it's like. I see from the chat, thanks for posting sort of where you are with your LMS. Not a lot of you have experienced blackboard learning NG. You might have term heard the term NG, that stands for next generation, or really what it's talking about is blackboard learning release 9.0 or higher or higher so the current release out his blackboard 9.1. The higher the number, the more accessible it is because every year we learned more and more, we do better we develop better, we test better (inaudible) blackboard 9.1 is definitely the most accessible really sweet and we are very excited about it somewhere we focused in developing this accessible solution is first around how users navigate and how the system is organized, so how you find your way around, and we focused on a consistent use of elements throughout the screen. And this is really for reducing the learning curve. So, everywhere that there is a forum it is constructed the same way. Everywhere there is a list is constructed the same way. Everywhere there are times you always even constructed in an ordered list etc. We will talk to about these things but we are really focusing on consistency so it's very quick to learn and easy to recognize. And it helps us to maintain a very consistent code so that the markup is easy to navigate. We work through the community to prioritize some high-priority scenarios for students and educators. And while he did go through the entire system with our nine point out and 9.1 releases in an attempt to make everything accessible to recognize that there are a handful, about 10 scenarios that are absolutely critical. It is the lifeblood of the course experience online. So we hammered and hammered and hammered away at those to make sure that they are ideal. We prioritized (inaudible) and the community grew. We also are able to work through and respect individual settings whether the settings on your browser, your operating system rather than forcing an individual to go and say hey I need this setting if it's already on your computer we are attempting to recognize and respect that. And we are also working to enable others to extend the blackboard platform with accessibility in mind. And what I mean by that is that blackboard offers a public open Senate of APIs. So that others whether they are developers on campus or they are some commercial vendors who build extensions onto our platform that they have the opportunity to use what we call our open (inaudible) library which means that the GUI experience, those features that they develop cannot be accessible. We give them everything they need to plug in their information and make the experience accessible and we provide guidelines for them to use as well so the goal here is that again we can deliver them a platform that we build an accessible way and we provide a guided so that as others build onto what they can do that as well. So going a little bit deeper into navigation and organization I wanted to talk through some key areas of the system that we think are helpful. First of all as of 9.0 we reduce the number of frames that are used. And there are still frames, they are very carefully labeled so that we can navigate through them and they hopefully don't get in the way. So most of what you need to do you can navigate to, and you can be in the mainframe and really do the work that you need to dress a teacher or a student. Throughout the entire application we have a very strict use of header structure. So we have been very careful to follow the guidelines of the how to use headers and we've been very thoughtful about what is meaningful as H1, H2, H3. A great example of how this mirrors the platform and the content development side is that inside a course an educator's creating content for they receive for each page of content that is added as a title and it has content of course. When the teacher creates the item they don't have to specify what header to use. Because they may or may not understand what is relevant for that. So we've applied a consistent use. Every time an educator creates (inaudible) inside the course, the platform applies an H3. So that way students are navigating through the course know that they could quickly navigate and judge the right content within the course. This wasn't like the H2 and H1 that are consistent throughout the application inside the course especially. Tabs are the main way to navigate backward learned as a system. There are always on the top frame and they are quite easy to use. What's been improved is that they are a simple unordered list, so you can read through the tabs and we are careful to note which tab is the active tab so you always know where you are. We applied a similar approach with our Breadcrumbs Which causes us to be extremely consistent in wow they are used and where they are placed on the page and making sure to label where you are today, what do appearances that you really note that content of where you are when using tabs. Menus are also something that's common. So for example in the course there is a course menu that is generally found on the side. Rather than just being shifted these are really structured, labeled as a menu so that you really can quickly find the menu, use it effectively when you are navigating and be able to get to where you need to go inside the course. One final note is a feature called My Places. (Inaudible) I use My Places frequently. And when you access it they provide a bookmarks to content that you have dropped the system. So the benefit there is that you could be in week two unit three, deep down inside one of your courses and you have an idea, I need to jump over to my other course. I have an idea of something I need to tell one of my students. (INAUDIBLE) Rather than navigating through the top frame, go in to the Correct tab that you may or may not remember because the institution could put the list of courses anywhere. This is an immediate, consistent way to jump from course to course. So I will go ahead and answer a question we have in the chat. The instructor does not need to know which content used (inaudible) how does that assignment happen? It is automatic. And it's done by the system. So every time a teacher creates content at the top of the page there are a number of options for the types of content. So for example it could be a file being added. It could be an assignment, perhaps just some general information for the student. The teacher is required to put in the title of whatever it is they are trying to express to the student and that they continue on whatever the object might be it may be that you continue to write instructions for the assignment. (Inaudible) making the entire area able for you to focus. So, next we will talk a little bit about personal preferences. Again, imagine that, you know the point with personal preference is sometimes there are some options that individuals want to choose for themselves as to how the system should respond to them and sometimes there are things in the system that the user shouldn't have to choose. The system should just understand and so we are attempting to find the right balance. One example of that is how we have separated our presentation layer from the application layer and really that is tech jargon for just saying what it looks like as I'm slowly nothing to do with how the system works. That means that if you for example have your operating system or browser to set to use a particular color scheme is for example you white text on black background because that is how you can most easily interpret the information on the screen you can set your computer to do that and blackboard well-respected. There are obviously tons of combinations of colors and fonts and sizes that individuals may want to use on their computer. Rather than you having to go find a setting and select the type of theme, blackboard will simply respect on your computer. Another option that is more about how you may want to experience the system that we ask you to actually set in our personal preferences is how you want to use a text editor. Blackboard offers a text editor that has 2 to 3 rows of functionality whether it be attachments or bold or bulleting for lists, you can choose to use the rich at a day for all these options or you might just want a smart text type of area to type them. This is up to each individual so the system administrator can choose to let everyone choose for themselves whether they want to take advantage of that and you can turn them on and off any time you encounter it however you prefer to remain for you, it well. If you have it on and you don't need to use at this moment but you don't want to turn it off there is an option to quickly skip over all of the rich text editing options and jump right into the area where you type. So that makes it effective for (inaudible) just to jump directly into the text area and start writing content. Another option that we provided the system is around the task of reordering. There's actually a lot of reordering that happens in an LMS. It's really about system administrators deciding the order of information to be presented to their constituents. It's also about portal administrators deciding about the information. There's also the case of educators deciding the order of information to be presented to their students. So what is the reordering of content? With PNG really says of 9.0 we introduce the concept of dragging and dropping for order preference. At the same time we introduced a keyboard reordering control that's basically a simple list with arrow keys the evening with content type down, left right, whatever the particular task requires and this has proven to be more efficient in many cases then drag and drop so a lot of individuals are using this and preferring that are reordering to use that tool. And one final note on personal preferences is on the new SmartMedia control. An example of how this is used as we recently partnered with YouTube to develop a smashup feature where a teacher can within the blackboard interface and search YouTube, find search results and accurately polling that search result for example a video of a whale swimming through the ocean, could be quite educational, you can, through the blackboard interface and find that, validate and describe to your students the relevance of having your course without having to understand how to embed videos. When we did that, we found that the default player simply wasn't enough. It wasn't accessible for everyone. So we provided an overlay on top of this player that provides the controls for play, forward, go backward, that is keyboard accessible. And we provide instructions and options for as instructors are adding this type of content, are reminders that say, hey you have your transcript here is where you should upload it to be accessible. So those are some of the personal preferences another question in the chat, do you know if blackboard 9.0 was just with the NBDA screen reader before version 2010.2 and of frames very poorly the version I tested with blackboard did not work with it. I don't believe that particular screenwriter has been tested back in double check and get back to you. Nevertheless I'm going to note that and do some investigation on it so thanks for letting me know. Sure I can repeat information about the transcript. What I was saying was that if a teacher wants to upload a video into the course for their students to watch, during the process and workflow, blackboard learning provides a reminder that a transcription be provided if it's not captioned or otherwise embedded in my file we provide information as to why that's needed and a way to upload the transcript. Which is a great segue to content accessibility. So I mentioned the information about the transcript option. There are also, we've talked about the headers for each one, two, three. As content authors write more and more content into their courses they can either write baffling if they are using, if you are an instruction designer you might use something like Dreamweaver for example, or you might free hand regular on HTML and upload that. But if you are writing with a blackboard authoring tool within the text editor we do provide the headers in a simple drop-down so that you can properly structure your markup. You know there is certainly some education there that must exist for a content author to understand the proper use of headers and that is something that we will also talk about in our resources section. When teachers are uploading images or other non-text type of the elements, we do in courage through the GUI of the use of all text and descriptions. We provide some instruction as to why that is useful. And we also provide training about all of this. So on the website we have a course that anyone can get access to and we provided in two formats. One format is an individual could simply take the course online for free or we provide another format which is an archive so that perhaps if you have a service at your school where you want to educate, provide a full education to your content authors and teachers about how to develop content accessible you could use this as a set of resources to use in your own curriculum but it is information on how to leverage blackboard, but I really think about universal design unstructured content tunneling. And it teaches us what universal design is, how to sort of begin to think about it, how it is beneficial to everyone and how to use some of the tools on blackboard to develop content like that. So, I talked a lot about the benefits in terms of accessibility within blackboard work. I wanted to also share with you some of the challenges they really do still exist. We have a couple of areas that we wish were better. And we want to continue working on them. One area is the discussion board.the objects and elements are all developed according to technical guidelines on the technology would agree that that doesn't necessarily make something simple and straightforward to use. So we want to work to improve this. The discussion board has a lot of elements on the screen and it's a very robust feature. And we believe that we could work to make this more, easier to navigate and easier to read through as a participant in the discussion board and we think we can improve there. Another area of improvement for us is our greatest center. The blackboard learning great center has a dynamic grade, and what that means is that it refreshes angles (inaudible) life according to the size of your browser and it allows you to scroll it in the screen if you've got a large spreadsheet of data that you are managing and provides for some text options. That proved to not be able, we could make that exact screen accessible. In the meantime what we've done is we've provided with labeled, as soon as the page is loaded it's as if you're using a screen reader please click here to access this version of the grid. And what's not available is the usual (inaudible) is much simpler for a screen reader to navigate the version of the grid. All of the functionality exists in both cases. We would like to find a way to actually advanced our use of technology so that we have one equal access grid that is used by everyone. Proves to be challenging especially especially for screen readers and we are very excited about the merger of blackboard illuminate and when the habit of illuminate and when about half the time I have had great investment and has also worked with the blackboard illuminate and Wimba community-base to make their communication technology accessible so I am highly confident that the work we are doing together to bring our solutions together is really going to improve the experience for everyone. We've also recently introduced what we call able to file upload in our content management area. So this enables the user to select see note 20, 30 files to upload all at once and it allows to provide feedback visually of the upload progress of those files. Unfortunately that does not get work with some assistive technologies. The option for everyone to upload one at a time to visual indicator we've not yet been able to get it to respond with screen readers. It's a Java applet loads which is also challenging to get to. Again everyone can upload files. The difference is being able to put a lot of time and fast. And finally another area for improvement is now the area is available we have ideas of how to apply them or to wrap the application. We are very excited about where we have applied, for example inside the Corpsman especial technical tabs has been applied that if you've got the latest technology gets very easy for you to know that that is your menu. So, like I said these are areas, we just wanted to share with you some challenges may exist here. If you are interested in making improvements here, there's definitely something that we will be calling for help for her so that we can make improvements. So, where is this course found? Here's the information you need. We have two websites that I would love for all of you to check out. At blackboard.com/accessibility we can find information work with the blackboard accessibility user group, where commitment to accessibility is, how you can report an issue if you are a teacher or if a student has trouble how we prioritize those issues, let's say someone you or someone you know is not really familiar with screen reader technology you can actually send them to this page and they can watch a video to see what it's like to interact with the blackboard one using Jaws. It's proven to be very educational for many in school administration. And you can also find here all of the accessibility changes per release. The improvements and the challenges, known issues that you may find, are published here. This is something that we are actually very excited about. From a software perspective most of our communication is with the system administrator. But we recognize when it comes to accessibility there are a lot more people on campus that need quick access to the information that is known about the pros and cons of how to work with the system so we have put this here on the public website rather than hiding on the extranet where the system administrators can ask us to it. And the second resource available to you is the blog. The blog address is listed here. This is a blog that you can follow from awesome and members of my team who participate in the accessibility community blogging here about what they learned conferences, some exciting things we might be researching, how and why of how we implemented or design something in the latest release. So, check that out and maybe find some tricks on how to support students with disabilities as well. And finally, mention it in number of times, this is a call to action. If you are willing to help, we definitely needed. There are right now for ways for you to get involved. Number one if you are using blackboard work and you find an issue that is preventing access for someone to effectively teach or learn. We need to know. I am surprised to learn that a number of schools to realize they can report these issues to us. We absolutely want to know, that's how we can make the software better. However you may report lets say, the great book was broken, that's the exact same entity you would use to report in next issue on accessibility (inaudible) if there's a phone number that you call, please tell them that there is an accessibility issue and that blackboard once to know that we take these issues very seriously and have fun doing training within our support organization so they can understand the issues, understand the right questions to ask it properly escalate the entire product development so that we can make those corrections. Next is the URL for the blackboard idea exchange. This is the umbrella organization for all of the ways that we interact with our customers which is a very fun set of opportunities. It can be anything from answering a survey to really dedicated diving in deep and getting in testing with us and everything in between. The bumper accessibility user group also has a website where you can sign up to join and this is where you can hear discussions in the community about accessibility, conference, blackboard initiatives and opportunities to get involved. And finally there is something that is very exciting to us. We have this year announced the bumper accessibility grant. As we have partnered with the national Federation for the blind they actually presented us earlier this summer with an award, that Jacob bulletin award for what they called our groundbreaking work in accessibility. And (inaudible) with a $10,000 award and we immediately want to push that back into the community. So, the president of blackboard learning, Ray Henderson actually committed to more than double that amount. We are committed to providing five $5000 grants and we are accepting proposals now. This is all about enabling students with disabilities to really achieve educational excellence. Doesn't have to have something to do with blackboard software. It can, but it's really about the education of students and equal access to educational experiences. So if you have an idea or know someone who might, please go to the website blackboard.com/accessibility grant, read about it, submit your proposal and in the early part of next year, first quarter of next year we will be gathering a committee of customers and partners and members of product development to select the most tactful proposals and get those grants awarded so that we can (inaudible) more for education. So, I will take myself off to make your

 hi, Stephanie this is Norm. Great presentation and the work you've been doing in recent years is extremely commendable. I have two questions you didn't mention text chat, live text chat or whiteboards. How do you deal with those?

 Thanks, Norm. You are right I didn't mention them by name. Those are actually what we call the virtual classroom. Which is an area for improvement for us. And those are the expertise of illuminate and wimba. So what we are doing is working together with the merger of these three companies that we have coming together, they have experts on their team in accessibility and ideas actually worked with a number of members of both organizations. We plan to deliver a combined solution to the community. So look for improvement there definitely.

 If you allow me to add a few words. I still want to thank you very much for that presentation. I wanted to, you know, talk about accessibility culture. I have worked enough with external companies to see that to realize, to identify that none of them really so far I have worked maybe over 25 of them, that none of them purposely, they make their application inaccessible. They don't have the knowledge or expertise. I was very pleased to hear that as Stephanie was I think one of the last slides that she was talking about the blackboard accessibility page. That was not a known issue to them. You know how we can report for example the accessibility issue. If for example you called because you have any problem with the blackboard, you call the local help desk, they didn't know anything about accessibility and in the best case they could call corporate coordination with blackboard, but that was tied to the accessibility in accessibility was not one of the things that (inaudible) support dealt with. So it is really some time to convince and work with them that we need that influence structure, and blackboard to record that the user can record their accessibility issue, and, you know, as blackboard should release their accessibility improvement, that would make it public, the (inaudible) what accessibility features are present in their application and of course you know, as Stephanie mentioned, that up to this stage, that they are even providing a grant for any accessibility project that could improve the user's interaction with blackboard environment. So all of their accessibility work that we've done, not just only for the technical issue (inaudible) (inaudible) technical issue that Stephanie went briefly through that, there are also about educating the community, educating the developers and helping them to think accessible. And I'm really pleased to see that not for every module that you are going to design, or redesigned, but for for some modules that we get the chance to preview them, to get involved right from the beginning as they do the markup, to discuss that what technology is good for that think that they want to approach and of course during the development phase of testing. So there really are a lot of work that needs to be done to make a product and its environment accessible. So the more that you can help, the better, the sooner we can reach, we can make those products accessible. I know that some of you might not have the time, but please make the time, one hours, two hours, three hours, it could significantly change the future of accessibility of the product. Thanks.

 Is the the question and answer open to all participants or just the moderators because I have two questions I would like to ask.

 Go ahead.

 my name is Mike Busboom, I'm in Vienna Austria studying at an American university. One of the two questions I have are, what is the level of accessibility of the blackboard on the Mac, but the other question that just has not given me any peace of mind so I'm glad I have the opportunity to ask it here publicly used the discussion board difficult, and they really are difficult to use isn't there some way that the programmers could create a listserv out of the discussions thereby preserving hierarchy. What's not as good as perhaps people would like it to be but at least people could then do a listserv type of configuration fully participate, respond to the questions they wanted to not responded to a question, thinking they are responding to a question but a totally different level within a discussion thread.

 Stephanie do you want to address that or do you want me?

 I will let you take that first, Hadi.

 Hi, Michael, good and hard. Michael is a good friend of mine living in the beautiful city of Vienna. For the discussion board those of you who are familiar with the discussion board you are dealing with three layers of communication. Forum, thread and messages. Web, for those of you who can see and interact with those typical discussion boards, you can see how complicated it can go now, and see if you wanted to use that with a screen reader especially Mike is also a screen reader user, he's not blind, but he uses it. He's a screen reader user. Consider that, you have to see all of these components, the entire component one element at a time which is difficult. I think ARIA might address that issue, but I think the general web is not ready for that. But until then, we really need to improve the existing product and actually it is the top of my list to go, push it further redesign phase. And then hopefully next time we can make it work sensible. It has been cleaner now in the latest version, you can detach the motto and see it in a separate window without any technical blackboard infrastructure or menu system. So it reduces the number of elements that you are dealing with on the page significantly. But still the application itself is difficult to see. The nature of the application is so come and I need to be honest with you, it is outdated application. It does not for example support RSS. It does not support external mailing lists. So these are the top of the, blackboard knows about those feedback and I'm pretty sure this time it will be attacked. So I will let Stephanie answer the rest of the question.

 Mike, I think that's a great idea and I think that's exactly why we need continued continued participation. One is the reason it really exists with the software processes that when you participate with us sometimes you won't see those ideas come out for general availability immediately. But participating with us in a pre-GA release where you are willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement so that we can discuss openly what's happening in our organization before it is released, we will actually provide you with insight into which I guess we are trying out, while we are finding with those. What other areas we are exploring and like I said by joining the accessibility user group for the blackboard ID exchange of information such as when we are going to send out a call for help to say hey, it's time on the calendar now for the discussion board, who can help us, who has great ideas. But actually having information in outside the system is definitely something is definitely room for improvement so I appreciate your input on that.

 I still get the other question addressed, or maybe I did, Hadi I grew up near Champaign Urbana so the University of Illinois is also my alma mater by the bypass to my question I'm going to be bowing out since it's getting late over here in Europe but I was curious about one other thing. I'm a Windows user I use windows excessively, they'll see is the back extensively. Are you getting any feedback from users of the Mac operating, Mac and Safari, or is it just primarily Windows? Windows operating system where you're getting feedback?

 Most of the users that we work with are on Windows. So if you are a Mac user all the better. We would love for you to join us in helping us ensure that it works for everyone.

 Let me also add that until four or five months ago I didn't have a Mac (inaudible) in our discussion during the design stage at least accessibility and back was not at the top of my list. Because as we know that at least until recently most users are either under you Windows and we don't have the accessibility resources. Would very much also like to ask blackboard to increase the accessibility expert in their environment that they don't have to also relate to external users so they have also injured the resources that they can test or welcome during the design stage, and of course test and evaluate that as we go through the QA process. But Mike, I promise you that I have a Mac and actually I talked with you a couple of months ago and you help me to start with the Mac. I promise as a thank you to you I will include checking with voiceover, or testing with voiceover will be part of my job.

 And just to provide insight about the testing exposure that we have, we really handle testing in a number of different ways. So one thing that we do is ask the community to participate with us, and that is where we get a huge amount of variety that comes with just personal preferences, combinations and types of technology. We also didn't do automated testing in-house. And our developers, QA analysts and product designers also have access to various types of assistive technologies. They are learning down, some are proficient, some are better than others at them. It is not their day to day use of technology. So, just like with say a software beta program the reason we ask others to participate in the testing is because you can't really tell unless you are the person who uses something on a daily basis and that's how you use your software, so that's where we could our best feedback and in addition to that we leverage the third-party partner called GQ two, we have a better partnership relationship where they are testing with automated processes as well as individuals with a variety of types of assistive technologies to test the system formally and provide us with support backup issues.

 This is the norm again I believe the captioner has to leave now so I'm going to formally thank Stephanie and Hadi again and then they're recording. If others want to stay around that's fine so I'm not kicking you out but we are going to close the recording. Thank you very much.

 Thanks also, Norm, for the opportunity to share the blackboard accessibility experience with you and the easy users. It was a pleasure presenting for you.

 We can certainly stay on for a few minutes if there are other questions. I can first address the one from Jeff. They're not explicit instructions of the discussion board for screen reader users. It is simply so complex that is very very time consuming to figure out (inaudible).

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