okay, thank you Brian. 

I'm just going to go through a wide range of common problems that we come across time and time again when we build web sites, 

and that the WCAG guidelines and checkpoints address, and that many of them are very easy to address.

The first one that Brian has already mentioned is image based navigation.

I suspect that nearly all of you out there will be using images as part of your navigation.

Three-quarters of the sites on the web do.

But, think what happens if you can't see those images.

How are you going to get around the site? So, that's the first problem.

So, really it brings back to home the issue of the first content checkpoint which says have some "ALT text", to use the jargon, for all your images.

This is particularly critical for important text on your site.

Obviously associated with images are download times if you haven't done the right thing by your images.

PDFs.

I always talk about this because it's a very common problem across government in particular.

Government statutory bodies love PDF files because of their reports.

Sometimes they have used them because of a statutory requirement.

Particular forms or particular documents are enshrined in legislation in terms of the way they have to be presented.

Maybe there's a good reason therefore using PDF.

But PDF with no alternative access is a major problem for a lot of people.

People with disabilities, physical disabilities, visual disabilities, even cognitive disabilities, can have a lot of problems getting hold of your PDF .

While there are tools out there to turn them into HTML or into text they can be quite tricky to use especially if you only using them on a casual basis and they don't necessarily do a good job.

PDF was designed for distributing documents electronically.

That's what it does.

It is not a Web browsing alternative.

So the very least you should be giving people a summary of what the document is about, so that they know whether they want to try and obtain it as a PDF or through your office or some other way.

Another one we see regularly is no allowance for different browser settings.

As you get older your site starts to deteriorate; you are starting to build up a disability, in vision particularly, and you'll need larger print as your glasses need to get thicker, the easiest thing to do is just increase the print on your web site.

That's the most common thing that people do, is increase the font size on their screen.

But so many sites actually lock in the font size and make it very difficult for somebody to adjust the font.

Other people who use assistive technology can't do things that they want because of these settings that you've locked into your web site instead of allowing people to very them according to their needs.

Interjection from the audience: Excuse me, Andrew.

The phrase "assistive technology" has been raised a couple of times.

People might not be aware of what it is.

Andrew Arch: Thank you.

"Assistive technology" is a term that we do tend to just use, working in the area.

It is a whole wide range of different things to help people use technology, starting off at the extreme if you like with a speaking screen reader, a piece of technology that actually takes all of the text from your page whether, you know it can be in Word or Excel, 

but particularly in the context today, from the web, and actually reads it out to the person trying to use your web site.

So if you don't have any ALT text for those people who can't see the images in rural Australia,somebody who's using a screen reader won't be able to read those images either and won't be able to navigate your site.

Other assistive technologies are alternative keyboards, alternative mice, for people with physical disabilities, at the extreme of physical disabilities we have people who are using single switch devices and on-screen based mice that can actually scroll across the screen.

They click a switch at the point where they want to activate the screen.

So, we get into issues of the size of your links, as Brian was saying, a site that he has to go to regularly with tiny links to get the statistics for the Vision Australia web site.

If you are using some of this adaptive technology and you have a screen base that is actually scanning across the screen.

You have to stop it at the right point on-screen rather than moving your mouse up, you get a little pointer to click on it, that can even harder for those sorts of people.

Brian, do you want to add to assistive technology? 

Brian Hardy: Probably the only other major sort is magnifying programs that make things bigger and then combinations of things that people would use to enhance what they do,

 so that there might be somebody with a cognitive disability who might find it's hard to digest large amounts of print, so they will have a text-to-speech reader which supplements it, as opposed to a screen reader, which deals with all things like icons and toolbars and things.

A text-to-speech reader simply takes the text and read this out to you, or highlights it, puts each word that is read in a little word box or a yellow box or something to give you focus.

There's a whole range of wonderful gadgets.

Graham Oliver: Dragon Dictate, for people who are unable to give commands to their PC any other way bar through their voice, so they will use a program such as Dragon Dictate or Naturally Speaking to get the computer to do what they wish.

Andrew Arch: tables are often used inappropriately for layout and to present text.

These days tables aren't as much of a problem as they used to be, but a lot of people still use tables inappropriately.

How many of you have print out a web page and found that the right hand word and a half is missing when you send it to your printer? That is just a general usability problem that you can easily overcome by not forcing the size of your table to fit a particular device you think everybody is going to use out there.

The other thing with tables is that people who are relying on screen readers all who can't use a mouse and so on, if you have laid out your screen in a less appropriate way than you could have done you'll be giving people information in the wrong order.

The screen readers will read it in a certain order according to the way is that the cells of the table appear, somebody who can't use a mouse will be navigating through it using the tab key or a switching device in the order that the tables are laid out 

so there are some tools for checking those sorts of things that we will talk about later in the conference but it does become an issue.

Problems with the construction of forms.

Again this becomes a problem for people who are some assistive technologies, screen readers and mouse impaired, people who can't use a mouse again could have problems with forms in terms of the layout and the order and how they hear what it is you are asking them to fill in.

There are some simple rules about that and they are well documented on the World Wide Web Consortium site and we will talk about some of that probably in the session where there is going to be some redesign of some websites.

I'm not sure exactly where that is on the program that there will be a couple of people given some sites to say "okay what with the do with this site? ".

I'm sure that there will be a form on there that they will be addressing.

Use of plug-ins and scripts that exclude some disabled people or inconvenience many others.

Just think about the many others first.

Many many corporate sites actually disable ActiveX and Java and try and disable Javascript, so even if your audience is the general public, who think of as able-bodied, with good access to Internet, 

a lot of those people won't be able to access something that requires them to use one of these plug-ins.

A lot of people don't like, there are a little bit technologically phobic, they don't know how to download a new plug-in to run Flash or QuickTime or something like that, 

and then we are getting to the stage where a lot of these things are now multimedia.

You've got voice you've got vision, so people with different types of disabilities may have problems with them.

Other people with disabilities may find your little animation, your instructional video much easier to understand than if you explain it in text.

So we're not saying don't do it, but do it appropriately and make sure that you have different ways for people to access the information that you are supplying.

So don't just have one method of delivery.

Text only versions.

A lot of people think that they just take all the pictures out and created text only site then you have solved the problems for everybody.

Not so.

What you often find is that the text only site is maintained badly because it is done as an afterthought and as I say all you've done is to strip the images out and you haven't replaced, many people don't replace what was in those images with some text in the text-only only versions.

So you are actually giving people less information, which is not very satisfactory.

The other thing that we often find is that text only versions are dramatically out of date.

Our experience with our own staff is that they tend to avoid them for this very reason, their experiences being that more often than not they are out of date, haven't been maintained, 

and they would prefer to struggle with a less accessible, full graphics based site, than go to the text only site where they know that they are not going to get the latest information.

Brian Hardy: the New South Wales government used to provide us with a most wonderful example of this, but unfortunately they fixed it last week.

When the first looked at the New South Wales governments site late last year, the graphics site was congratulating everybody for how wonderful the Olympics had been, the text only site was encouraging people to go.

On the graphics site you could get this wonderful help to reduce your electricity bills.

Sorry, that was appropriate for people who needed text only.

They couldn't get it.

They updated the site, and every time we ran a workshop we were going to the site and see how it was going, and they usually found some new thing that they could do wrong.

The electricity one was there for nearly a year before it was fixed, last week, which was a bit of a shame.

The last time we looked you to get access to job on the graphics site, but sorry not on the text only site that took you somewhere else.

It had the same thing, it just took you somewhere else completely inappropriate.

And that's the problem.

It's not that those people were dills, it is just really hard to maintain two sites, and so stupid.

It was completely unnecessary.

There was nothing wrong with the graphics site that couldn't have been fixed with the most minor adjustments, and it was just a complete waste of time to run this text only site, 

but it was a great thing and I thank them very much for their usefulness for the past year.

Anyway, I hope that no-one from the New South Wales government is here, but take it as thanks from us.

Graham Oliver: one more thing about text only sites - I believe that people with disabilities are looking for the same solutions as everyone else so they don't want to be pushed into using another solution.

They want to use the same solutions as everyone else.

Brian Hardy: text alternatives are not the same as text only sites.

Providing people with different ways of accessing a particular piece of information is a good thing.

Big tick for that.

Providing people with a whole different way of doing it because you can't be bothered fixing the first one is not good enough.

Andrew Arch: sloppy and inadequate code.

It is less of a problem these days when people are probably using good authoring tools, or better should I say, authoring tools, than when people used to hand code their sites.

A lot of people still do hand code small sites and they use hand coding to tweak their sites.

What we find is that the browsers are very forgiving for mixed up code but assistive technology is not so forgiving.

If we come back to screen readers.

These days they are actually getting clever and looking at the HTML behind the page, and so they will tell somebody using a screen reader that they are actually in the table and allow them to interrogate it.

Some will allow them to jump from heading to heading as well.

Microsoft is also now, in their latest version of Internet Explorer, is actually looking at it to see whether you declared what version of the HTML you're using, 

and will portray it differently if you have declared what version of HTML you've got as opposed to a page that doesn't say what version of HTML you've got.

So now it's starting to say "okay if we've got this version of HTML given to me, then this is how I'll portray the page for all people", and its following the guidelines.

Problems with overall usability and navigation.

Most of you have probably got web sites with fairly consistent navigation, but so often you see on a government or a large corporation site and navigation on the homepage follows through on the corporate pages 

but you get to a subsite put out by an individual business unit and they change the colour scheme, they change the navigation on the page from across the top two down the right-hand side.

They might not link their home button back to the original homepage.

These sorts of problems become a problem for lots of lots of people, particularly people who might have a cognitive disability or a literacy disability, or even someone who's just a new user, and think that maybe they're gone off somewhere else, and that the brand has changed.

The final point that I want to make is just that the HTML writing software, the authoring tools are by and large don't encourage compliance with the guidelines, or the standards that companies and governments are setting.

I don't think that, well in fact I know that there are no tools that fully conform to the authoring tools guidelines.

Some of them are getting better as a result of some recent activity and they will help you do it, 

but what it means is that you really do need to have an understanding of what the guidelines are and you have to think about how you're going to make your site accessible, you can't rely on the tools to help you do it.

Just another point, I know we have quite a number of people from education here, and things that people don't tend to think about our things like courseware management systems.

They are an authoring tool, because you are actually using the courseware management system to put your material upon the Web for your remote students, and you don't know necessarily at this stage what disabilities they might have collectively or individually.

The content development systems you are using have the same problems as everybody has, but the other thing interesting, I was doing some work for a New South Wales University earlier, 

looking at some of their online systems earlier this year and their courseware management system, the way they had implemented it was reasonably accessible.

It wasn't perfect but it was reasonably accessible.

But then they had gone and purchased an off-the-shelf learning package for Excel, and it did some very nice things, it actually had voice associated with it, explaining what the techniques were.

But the only techniques it was demonstrating were mouse driven techniques.

So, for somebody who couldn't use a mouse, they had to use a switching device or they could only use the keyboard for whatever reason they couldn't use a mouse, then the whole exercise of running this tutorial was just wasted on them.

Those of you who are writing your own material, accessible authoring and delivery is all part of the package, and you have just got to think about it within this context.

The same messages apply to corporate content management systems.

People are using Lotus Notes, and Vignette, Cold Fusion, whatever you are using, you might have created accessible templates but is the content that your staff are putting into those templates accessible as well? 

Thanks