7/16/13 EASI Webinar Transcript

NORM COOMBS:   Good morning, everyone--at least it's morning for me in California. A couple of you are in North Carolina and various other places so your time will vary but I hope you're having a good day. It's a nice sunny morning here in California the temperature is warm. I'm in my shorts and having a great time enjoying summer. First, I am Norm Coombs as you probably know and I want to say a couple things about EASI. First as you know because you are here, we regularly give webinars on topics related to accessibility. And a lot of the webinars are free, some of them are groups of two or four webinars for which we charge a fee. We also have a number of online courses and you can find them by going to the home page and clicking on courses. We also have a membership program that should be on the next slide. If you buy an annual membership of webinars, you get all of the fee-based webinars as part of your membership obviously you got the free ones, too. It is an archive of over 50 previous webinars and you get a 20% discount on all of our courses. And you did not come here to hear a promo. So I want to turn to our speaker in one minute, Ed Summers. He is an expert in math, of which I am very poor. I heard Ed give a presentation at the CSUN conference last February, March and was very good. Not only was he a good, clear speaker, but he presented things so that even I understood most of it. So I was very eager for Ed to be one of our presenters and I guess that's about all the introduction I'm going to give. So, Ed, you can lock your mic and you're going to be in charge from here on out.

ED SUMMERS:   Okay. I think that mic is now locked. All right, well thank you very much, Norm. And I am a software engineer and a computer scientist. And I work for a company called SAS and SAS is the market leader in business analytics software. So business analytics software is basically a software that allows people to analyze data, extract meaning from it, make predictions from the data and basically extract knowledge that allows them to develop new drugs, do their dissertation research, find oil in hard to find places, run retail stores, you name it. So SAS is very widely used. It's used in something like over 55,000 sites in more than 100 countries around the world. It's also used in almost all of the PhD degree granting programs at universities in the United States. So, and what people use SAS to do is basically analyze data and extract meaning from it and this is a place where accessibility has been a challenge in the past for some years particularly for students and professionals with visual impairments. Because one of the primary ways that we analyze data and extract meaning from it is using data visualization. So the accessibility team at SAS for a few years now we've been taking a hard look at how to make analytics and data visualization accessible for all people and with a specific emphasis on people with visual impairments. And just as a disclaimer, I am almost totally blind myself. So, this is, I bring a certain amount of insight to this problem of accessible analytics and data visualization. So, let's go to the next slide.

            So, a few years ago the McKinsey Global Institute released a paper on data, and some of you may have heard in the news this term big data. It is a hyped term, there's a lot of hype around it and it is legitimate. What big data is is it refers to the enormous amount of information that we are now collecting on ourselves, whether it be on the web, in the atmosphere, in real-time, personal data, health data, energy, there is somebody places now where we are collecting data and monitoring data and we've reached the point where data is so big that it is almost, it's very difficult to grapple with and you have to rely on sampling procedures that you cannot fit it all into one computer's memory, and the stream of data is enormous, the amount of real-time data that is being collected at lots of different ways. So, clearly this is a business opportunity for businesses for profit. It's an opportunity to improve our health and our well-being. It's an opportunity for governments to improve the way that they deliver services to their constituents.

            The problem is that there is a shortage of people who know how to grapple with data and extract meaning from it and this research paper from the McKinsey Global Institute about the data is about I think it is something over 100 page research paper of course on the front page, they have some summary items you know some executive summary items and one of those summaries is the quote on the screen now, which is basically that there is a shortage, the US alone as a shortage of summer I think it's 140,000 and 190,000 people with skills that allow them to become data scientists. These are the people who really know data and they can extract meaning from it and they work with it on databases but beyond that there is a shortage of I think 1.5 million, yes, 1.5 million managers and analysts and people who can't at least understand the right questions that can be asked from the data and work with the results even though they are not crunching numbers and running the models themselves. So we see this as a missed opportunity because the data is there, you can analyze it and gain improvements in efficiency, but we can't do that because people are not available who have the skills to do it. So that drives a lot of the work around our product at SAS.

            We recently released another product called visual analytics and visual analytics really brings data analytics, the ability to analyze data kind of out of the PhD and a statistics realm and brings it down to a person with a bachelor's in business because using this product as possible to load 10 million rows of data into memory at one time and basically in real-time in a few seconds you can ask questions of the data and get visualizations back within just a few seconds based on 10 million rows of data. So that in itself is a real accessibility play because you don't have to write hundreds of flights of crown or note that SAS programming language for all the different types of statistical analysis in order to extract some meaning from your data, load it all up into memory and start getting bar charts and pie charts and scatter plots and correlation matrices pretty much in real-time. So, beyond that, let's look to the next slide and we will talk about some of our education initiatives.

            So, education is one of our, as a corporation, it is the place where we put our philanthropic effort, really, both as Corporation and as employees as a matter fact we have quite a few employees. Here are a few of the initiatives I will run through a few of these we are going to focus on the last two at the bottom. So I have some slides for each one of these and we will just give a quick overview now and I will read them for anybody who can't see them and we will go to the next slide. So SAS mobile learning apps, SAS curriculum pathways, the Institute for analytics, SAS OnDemand for a academics and then the accessible data visualization initiative. So, let's look to the next slide.

            So SAS mobile learning apps is a suite of three, available at no cost apps that are currently available on the iPad, most of them and we are starting to look at some of the other platforms as well. But primarily for K-12 and the real goal behind these apps is to enable the effective use of technology in K-12 classrooms. So there is the laptop, you can bring upon your iPad or iPod or iPod Touch in the store and one of the ones we spend quite a bit of time from on the accessibility perspective is something called SAS plot, flashcards. That one is now accessible using voice over and it also is really nice for students of all ages or even adults who want to use flashcards to memorize whatever it may be, you know, maybe the names of all of your cousins before the big Christmas party or family gathering, there are a lot of things for that but it's really cool in that it supports text, it supports audio and pictures as well. Let's go to the next slide.

            SAS curriculum pathways. This is a collection of resources for, from grades six through 12. It contains more than 1100 online interactive resources and this is a collection of resources that students and teachers can access through a web browser. They are available at no cost, and they cover all the core disciplines and the math and English language arts content is now aligned with the common core as of this school year. So, these SAS curriculum pathways is used in more than 100,000 classrooms around the world. I don't have any rate is to share with you regarding curriculum pathways but as we evolve to some of the new pathways is a wonderful opportunity to include some accessibility features in SAS curriculum pathways. Let's look to the next slide.

            The Institute for just analytics is a Masters program that was established at NC state and it was the first Masters in analytics and we received five years worth of students graduating from the program and it was and it was a really great placement from the Institute of analytics and the interesting thing about this is the job placement rate  speaks for the people to know how to analyze, the need for people who know how to analyze data and since your data is representative sound, text, I can enlarge the text or convert it into braille, and the future I think this is a great opportunity for people with disabilities. Let's look to the next slide.

            What I want to talk about today is SAS on-demand for academics. This is a suite of applications we make available in across the background processing is done on service servers here at SAS and web-based or client-based. Professors particularly specifically for higher-end, professors in high-risk and use SAS OnDemand for academics to teach analytics and data management. It is a great way for students to gain marketable skill so if you know how to program and analyze data if you want to program SAS and analyze data you can get a job just about anywhere in the world, geographically. The interesting thing about essay on OnDemand for academics is now 100% instructor driven. So an instructor can make a choice to use SAS OnDemand for academics and there are a statistics class for example or retail management class or whatever it may be and they can sign up as a professor, the don't have to go through the IT department. They can basically go to the SAS webpage once we verify that they are a professor they can start using SAS from their perspective it's maybe a couple hours a time there may be some lag time 24-hour turnaround but they truly are an instructor. The neat thing is that you can get access from anywhere so students can install, if the client needs it to be installed the instructor can install it on the laptop or personal computers so students are not necessarily tied to the lab. Let's go to the next slide.

            So the instructor perspective for SAS OnDemand for academics. First, we have a control center for SAS OnDemand for academics and the instructor will need to set up an account and provide some information. And then we have a homepage for instructors on the control center. Where they can create course and choose some data we have available or upload their own data to use. Can they invite students to register for the course. So, let's look through the student perspective.

            So, the student perspective for SAS OnDemand for academics. They will have to set up an account, of course, and access the student homepage, their personal student homepage on the control center, register for the course that was supplied by the instructor, each course is identified for them, they have to be invited than they can install the client software if that is necessary. And then take off and start using the software. Let's go to the next slide. So there's a number of apps that are provided as part of SAS OnDemand for academics. So, the slide on the screen should be SAS guide.

            So the SAS enterprise guide is the primary interface for SAS programming and using SAS that is used as a mini sites around the world and it is many things, but one of the big things it is it is an IDE for writing SAS code to analyze data. There are also some menu-driven and wizard driven facilities for analyzing and sharing data. But, you know, I think knowing how to actually write code that analyzes data and manipulating data from a pedagogical perspective you know, for students that are learning, there's a lot of power there because that's where you can get into really some of the higher-end data scientist kinds of jobs. So, let's look to the next slide. Okay, great, my other PC went to sleep so I was not hearing the clicks as the slide advance so I did make it wake back up. So we should be on the slide that says accessibility of SAS enterprise guide.

            So SAS enterprise guide version 6.1 just shipped last week. It's part of our broader 94 release that we just shipped and it will become part of the SAS OnDemand for academics in the fall of 2013, this upcoming semester. So we've done, we've done in iterative investment inaccessibility at this particular interface. Some of the things that are in there now are the interface adopts the Windows color scheme. It supports a high contrast theme which is one that I use this when I'm writing SAS code because I can get a nice bigger font, and it has the nice higher contrast for my white on black color scheme not everybody prefers that, but there is a significant keyboard accessibility throughout the application. As of version 6.1, the programming environment, the actual IDE, integrated development environment to use the right SAS code is accessible to people with screen readers. So what that means is you can right SAS code, you can run it, you can debug it, and you can perceive the results, the output from your SAS programs accessibility using the screen reader. Though some screen readers that we've done our testing and qualification has been JAWS 13 and 14 and that's the screen reader that I primarily use with enterprise guides. So this is still a work in progress, but we are making some nice progress forward with the accessibility of this interface. Let's look to the next slide. Okay.

            SAS Web editor is something new that we are working on. What it is is a web-based IDE for writing SAS code. And the nice thing about it is that it becomes a 0 Footprint Way to access SAS in the cloud, basically so that there's no software whatsoever installed on the professors computer system, or a student's computer system. Right now it is supported on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. And chrome, sorry. And the desktop, this is browser accessed from a desktop computer is how we title it February 2013, just a few months ago and access from Safari pad using Safari browser on the iPad is currently in. Let's flip to the next slide.

            Okay they should say accessibility of SAS Web editor. So the current version of SAS Web editor supports browser zoom which is really nice, adopts your color scheme, whatever you may be using in your browser, we've got a significant amount of keyboard accessibility in there, and again, we've got a nice way for somebody using a screen reader to be able to write down and perceive the results. The recommended screen reader right now is JAWS 14 with Firefox, that's what we tested it on. Okay.

            Let's flip to the next slide for more information on SAS OnDemand for academics I encourage you to visit this URL it is HTTP support.SAS.com/OnDemand. There are lots of great resources therefore getting started, some frequently asked questions, information about accessibility on that page. There are some videos to kind of walk you through the getting started process. There is a link to be able to send e-mail if you have questions about the product. On that page. And I encourage you to give it a try and let us know how it works for you. Okey-doke. Let's flip to the next slide and we will talk about accessible data visualization now.

            This slide should be blank it is just a transition slide but it's a reminder for me to change to something else so let's flip to the next slide okay so the accessible data visualization work that we are doing is really built around this idea that that it is important to be able to perceive let's say a bar chart, scatterplot some type of data visualization or charter graph and a newspaper, textbook and academic paper all of these items where you can perceive the information that in addition to that it is also more and more critically important that students can produce their own data visualizations for their own use to let's say analyze the data that are collected during my research experiment, or to share if I am writing, if I'm drafting my own journal article that went to publish, for example. So this consumer accessibility is really what's required in order to do science, in my opinion and it is my goal for people to be able to analyze the data and show the data into that completely 100% independent and to do that efficiently.

            So some of the broader design goals here around the accessible data visualization we are focusing our efforts on affordable mainstream hardware as opposed to something that is expensive and has a very low incidence. Our goal is to be able to produce accessible mainstream constant. Cradle to grave delivery is really the idea of, if possible trying to stay in the visual realm and avoid converting bits into atoms. Because when we convert this into atoms we lose a lot of the good stuff like the ability to e-mail it to my friend across my campus or around the world, the costs go up because I have to ship those items and I have to grapple the atoms and I've got to somehow recycle the atoms. So physical things have all these downsides, some the long-term goal of this is to stay within the visual realm and to be able to work with bits.

            First hand access with perceptual precision. What this is about is allowing people to work independently completely 100% independently and to be able to perceive the information and data visualization with enough perceptual precision to be able to do real work with it. There's a lot of great work going on now around this idea of describing charts and graphs and maps and things like that using the text description, alternate text for you guys who know the Web content accessibility guidelines it is so six success criterion 1.1.1 add alternative text for your graphic chart. If I am doing my own work and I'm analyzing my research data that I got during an experiment, that really doesn't fly. I need to be able to perceive that firsthand and I need to be able to understand the differences of the data. And finally, this idea of the roles of producer and consumer. If there is a chart or graph in a book I'm a consumer if I'm the one doing research and I'm publishing, writing the book or writing it, not the producers I want people to produce it and sometimes do those two things in tight iteration. So this is a very big picture long-term goals of the work we're doing to make data visualization accessible. Let's look to the next slide.

            So, just to make this a little bit more concrete, some of the types of data visualization we are talking about of course, bar charts, line charts, pie charts, scatter plots and maps of all kinds. This is not an exhaustive list, it's just a couple concrete examples of some of the things we worked on. So, let's go to the next slide. So, one of the places we are really focusing right now with the work is to deliver this kind of behavior on the IOS devices. It's a little bit counterintuitive that a touchscreen is accessible to so many people including people with visual impairments but Apple has done a great job making the iPod iPhone and iPad and iPod Touch, making it accessible using a built-in screen reader called voiceover. They also have zoom features, the ability to invert colors, to get better color contrast and those kinds of things.

            Also another thing that is supportive right out-of-the-box right of the box including the voiceover screenwriter which is part of the IOS in every device which is really great is the voiceover screen reader is compatible with professional, math, statistics, graphs, data and visualization the professional braille displays is really a requirement for people with severe visual impairments. And then the touchscreen, that is the interesting part of these new tablets is that the touchscreen provides kinesthetic feedback to a user with no vision or severe vision loss because if you touch the screen you physically have an understanding of where your finger is on the screen if you think about kind of the old Windows some of the old pointer-based interface, the mouse if you have a know where the mouse is on the screen in the center top left, or the center, but without vision coordination is extremely difficult and it is just not possible that's why traditionally the keyboard accessibility has been such a big deal for anything we do to make it accessible but you know that requirement is changing now with the kinesthetic feedback we get from these kinds of devices so it is a really fun devices in the window of opportunity that has opened up because these devices are accessible and they are being broadly adopted in you know for example K-12 schools and also in the blind community they become very, it's a wonderful platform to be able to get accessible content to people with a visual impairment and other types of print disabilities. So we are focusing our attention on this IOS space. Must go to the next slide. I heard the click.

            So the next slide is the title of the next slide this is the point in the presentation actually would've got there a long time ago where I would be doing some diligence because I want you to see how data visualizations can become accessible on a touchscreen device so that you can touch it and see it and hear it all at the same time it's a wonderful experience but in this particular this type of tech knowledge he we are using for the webinar it just was not possible in order to do the demo for you. So I want you to go to this URL or better yet I want you to find a visual impairment that has an iPhone, somebody that uses voiceover, or and iPad asked them to go to this URL and check out some of the examples on our gallery of data visualizations. The name of the URL I'm going to read it out just so everybody can hear it is http://support.SAS.com/MISC/accessibility. On that page there are a number of examples there some bar charts, some scatter plots some line plots, we have a nice stroll down math map of the United States that gives you population data for every county, drill down by the state and drill down by the County, population data for every county in the US, there's really it's enjoyable to be able to access this data for the first time people with visual impairments, you know the accessible periodic table that we get from is a great big thing we have to hang on our well but we can access the periodic table in the gallery using the iPhone and there are lots of students out there with visual impairments using the periodic table for their classwork. What else is there? We have some maps orientation on disabilities big challenge for people with visual impairments so when you shop at college or freshman year it said a lot, had big campus at UNC or a big college like that so one of the things we've been working with this technology is making maps of places accessible on an iPhone so, on this page we've got, we have a match, map of the venue that is used for the CSUN conference which is the San Diego Hyatt, Manchester grand Hyatt in San Diego we created a map of that huge conference facility. We created a map of Cary Towne Center is one of the first succeeded and recently we pulled together a map of the government (inaudible) campus which is the school for the blind and Rolly North Carolina and the neat thing about the governor map is that rather than being a browser-based map we did this one as an e-book so we specifically designed this e-book to be accessible and iPad secondarily on the iPhone and iPod touch, it can be loaded into iBooks which is a free e-book reader which, that is available, it is accessible so if you download and install iBooks on your iPad and then install, go to the page and follow the link and installed his e-book into this iBooks app on the iPad you will see a nice interactive map of the Morehead school campus.

            Okay. Let's look to the next slide. And I think that's it you know, so the last slide is questions we can take a few now it sounds like we might have plenty of time I was trying to get done in about 30 min. let's see how we did I am about 5 min. off we can take a few questions now and also I am more than happy to answer questions if you send questions to accessibility@SAS.com I included this e-mail address rather than the personal address because it's a lot easier to remember this one accessibility@SAS.com and you can also certainly e-mail me personally SAS.Summers.com so I'm going to do now is hop off of the my clock so that Norm and Beth can jump in.

NORM COOMBS:   Well, Ed, I hate to do this, but when you mention big data the first thing that came to my mind was say you are working for the NSA.

ED SUMMERS:   Well, Norm, that's a great question and I think I have no comment on the question, can I take the next question?

BETH:   I'm not seeing any questions typed into the text box. I have provided in the text box all of the links that you gave.

ED SUMMERS:   Well I consider it a point of great pride that I can stun an audience and to silence.

BETH:   I hear the word statistics and you make me go silent.

NORM COOMBS:   Honestly I'm impressed again, and at the work that's being done and it's probably going to take a few years for kids with disabilities to start to get into managing K-12 and gradually work their way up into college, but you've got a giant spectrum of tools available. This is overwhelming and exciting.

ED SUMMERS:   Yeah, I agree, I think it's going to take some years to refine his tools and get them into the mainstream products basically some of the things we talk about here is very much frontage research we are really interested in figuring out what works and what doesn't. But, these kids with disabilities today in grade school, middle school you know, the opportunities for them as they come up through college and this information economy, this 21st century knowledge economy is the catchphrase that I use because of the great accessibility work that's being done at SAS and Microsoft and Google and George cursor at IV PS there's a bunch of great work going on and a lot of it is coming to fruition. And access to information and data and math, it's getting better and better and better. So, it keeps us busy and I'm incredibly excited to be a part of it and moving the whole thing forward.

BETH:   Terry asks if you anticipate moving to a PC environment and to android devices?

ED SUMMERS:   At some point in the future, absolutely. What keeps me, what keeps us focused on the iPad as that, I have a pretty good market share in the disability community as well that means that we can get accessible content to a lot of people immediately. So, as we are monitoring the market share of the other devices and there's a lot of great work going on in those places Microsoft and Google for sure as the market share increases we will certainly be looking very hard at taking the solutions that we've developed and pulling them over to those devices.

BETH:   Patrice comments that her campus is launching an iPad initiative this fall so she thanks you for the information. Lisa also asks in SAS enterprise are color palettes accessible, or should they be looking for some specific groups?

ED SUMMERS:      Can you clarify the question about color palettes?

BETH:   The question is in SAS enterprise are color palettes accessible or should we be looking for some specific groups?

ED SUMMERS:      I might have to have a little bit more context about the question so I can actually answer it. Nina, I will take a guess at it if the idea is to build data visualization with creative output and specific colors that is accessible using the SAS programming language. If the question is more about the user interface we have to look at exactly, we have to talk about exactly what aspect of the user interface we are talking.

BETH:   She clarifies with, are palettes accessible for designing web graphs?

ED SUMMERS:   Okay, gotcha if we are going to design graphs for the web using, let's say the SG, the statistical graphs procedures or the SAS graph product, yes it is my understanding that you can specify those colors as part of the SAS program which is kind of like a textbased way to specify the output of let's say in the scatter plot maybe make the blue points represent male, and the pain point represents female but I would encourage you also to use in those kinds of situations to something other than color to represent the information so perhaps make them blue squares and pink circles for example hopefully that answers your question if not I'm happy to take another pass at it.

BETH:   Okay I hope I do not butcher your name, but (inaudible) wants to know what is the current level of access available for screen reader users to SAS data grid and then it puts in parentheses spreadsheet-like interface.

ED SUMMERS:      Okay that is a good question we have you no grids are represented in lots of places we have to look at something specific. You know if we are talking about the ability to produce tables in output like we were just talking about with Lisa for example I want to produce a webpage that has a table in it and also maybe some charts or something like that, then we do have certainly it is possible right now to specify the column headers and other road editors, markup the headers correctly in HTML so the screen readers can read those tables correctly. Yes that is possible if you e-mail that specific question to accessibility@SAS.com I think I have some sample code that I can send you to do that.

BETH:   That is all I see for questions at the moment. Personally going to bring my iPad down and let down to go down to the Manchester Hyatt because he knows the area so it will be interesting to see how he interacts with it.

ED SUMMERS:      Okay that's great, turn on voice over, put it in portrait mode we specifically designed one for the iPhone which is generally used in portrait mode so put your iPad around the portrait mode and it should work great.

NORM COOMBS:   This is Norm, I will check out my recording later today and by tomorrow sometime I will have the text from the captions. I will get them up on the web and I will send out the link where everybody can go and watch the archives again, read the transcription, look at the slides. So, certainly someone like me will have to look at this three or four times, but we have tools like this when I was a kid I might know more about math than I do. This is an amazing new world. So I want to thank everybody for coming, next week John Gardner is doing one on lean mass and they assure me it is not a new diet program. Only it's going to be on Wednesday. Wednesday next week, Wednesday the 24th. And it's going to be an hour later than we usually do, which would be 12 Pacific one o'clock Mountain, two o'clock Central and three o'clock Eastern. But I will send out an announcement, so thank you, Ed, very much for very thoughtful and purging webinar about what is available now and I'm going to change the lives for a lot of students. This kind of thing is accessible, somebody who wants to go into it has the opportunity of getting a pretty high-quality job and probably one that is pretty secure. So I want to thank everybody for coming and I want to thank Ed for the time.

ED SUMMERS:      Thank you, Norm, it was my pleasure.