Cognitive impairments and learning difficulties are often overlooked

Summary

When people think about accessibility of web content, there's a tendency to concentrate on people with visual impairments. People with cognitive impairments and learning difficulties are often overlooked.
This article by Roger Hudson, Russ Weakley, and Peter Firminger, examines the types of problems visitors may encounter when using the web, with insightful and practical suggestions on how to develop websites that are inclusive for people with cognitive impairments and learning difficulties.

http://juicystudio.com/article/cognitive-impairment.php#intro    

viewed 20th March 2011

 Introduction
The largest disability group in our community are those with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties, yet they are often forgotten when it comes to website accessibility.
The labels, cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties, appear to encompass such a broad range of conditions that web developers often find it difficult to identify or address the specific needs of the individuals or groups they are used to describe.
Many distinct disabilities can affect a person's ability to access a website and use the information it contains, for example:

• Cognitive impairment, which includes memory, perception, problem-solving, conceptualisation and attention deficits. This may result from a range of conditions such as mental retardation, autism, brain injury, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and old age.
• Learning difficulties can also affect a variety of memory, perception, problem-solving and conceptualisation skills. Learning difficulties include reading problems such as dyslexia, computational, reasoning and organisational deficits and non-verbal learning disorders. These are sometimes also associated with Attention Deficit Disorder and Hyperactivity.

For the web developer, the situation is made more complex by the fact that individual users with these conditions can have very diverse needs. It is common for individuals who have cognitive problems in one area to be highly skilled in other areas. For example, a person who is an excellent reader may have considerable problems understanding the way a web page is organised, or be easily distracted by a small animated image.
Can the web address the needs of all of these different groups? Probably yes, but with different websites.
The web can bring considerable pleasure and aid people with different, and in some cases quite profound, cognitive disabilities. The Peepo project (now closed) provided a wide range of resources and ideas to enable people with severe learning difficulties to browse and use the web independently.
The focus of this article is primarily on improving the web for people who have the functional capacity to independently access and use sites that contain some text content. In particular, the article suggests some simple methods that may improve the accessibility of sites for people who find it hard to read and use written content.
For a more detailed version of this article, go to An Accessibility Frontier: Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties

thank you Jesper Jarlskov this What is PHP include is very helpful

What is PHP include

According to the PHP manual:

The include() statement includes and evaluates the specified file.

In human readable form this means that everytime you include() a file in your PHP-code the following will happen:

1. PHP reads the included file
2. Any code outside classes and functions will be executed
3. All classes and methods is made available for later use
4. Code execution continues from the next line after your include()-call

If your included file only contains PHP-code without any functions or classes, the code will be executed procedurally, the same way code in a function is executed everytime you call a function.

How to PHP include

A great use of the PHP include function is to spread different parts of your page into different files, allowing you to include the parts you need, whenever you need them, allowing code reuse. So instead of creating complete pages all the time, stuff that you need in several pages can be put into files of their own, so they can be used several times, just like you can apply the same CSS-stylesheet to several pages.
An example could be the header of your files. All of your pages needs a header with opening html and head tags and so on. This will very often be the same header for all of your pages. This makes the header a good thing to move into an external file, that can be included when you need it. The same goes for a footer. This means everytime you want to serve a page to a user you can do three include:

include('header.php');
include('content.php');
include('footer.php');

This allows you to change the content, depending on which page on your web site the user is looking for.
The header could then contain something like:

<html>
<head>
<title>Full page!</title>
</head>
<body>
W00h00 header ftw!
<div id="main menu"><a href="index.php">frontpage</a>

and the footer could be something like:

W00h00, footer ftw!
</body>
</html>

This will provide the full skeleton needed to glue together a validating page. Between the header and footer you are then able to include whatever content you’d like to serve to your users. The important thing here is that your included content should only output html that you would normally put between the <body> and </body> tags of your page. If your include(‘content.php’); outputs a fully validating web page, the combination of the three include will together output a web page embedded into another web page. This is NOT valid HTML.
I hope this makes sense, and provides a bit of clarity of how the PHP include() could be used (this is not the only use of this powerful method). If you’ve got any questions to this subject, feel free to ask them in the comments, and I will do my best to answer them

so much reading

The exercises each week are very helpful and each time I discover something new that I did not know about which I find somewhat exciting. I have updated to the Firefox 4 and downloaded the Firebug. I understand more about the Html5 is about making browsers more able when I am doing web applications. The Google web fonts will be great for my site. So..... so much to read about......

Challenging

Thank you for the comments on the Macro and Micro analysis they were very interesting. As we delve deeper into this subject I am finding it very rewarding and challenging. The challenges that I am facing is all the reading which I feel I need to do to keep up. I only wish I did have more of grounding prior to commencement. I am also very determined to do well and if I need to continue doing 30 hours a week out of class I will.....

Week 1 to 4 DMT

Well when I commenced this subject four weeks ago it was explained in the first lecture that I would understand website building, why you built it and how you built it.
In the first week the lecture covered Fundamental Languages for Website Building, Html the ‘mark up’ language, CSS and Databases oh... and... Blogging.........
 Also great referencing areas like ‘World Wide Web Consortium’ with the world standards and world recommendations for website making.
Then for me I need to get the web developer toolbar and ‘Firefox’ 'FileZilla' 'Notepad++' 'Web Developer' and set up a web site to upload my work on to it......And watch the vido

Week two Html and CSS note....saving text files, save as ‘filename.html’ class exersize... when working on the website keep both the text editor and the webpage open... check your progress, save the ‘text editor’ and then in the webpage ‘reload’ so to see any changes you have made. Write your html as a ‘screen reader’ so it can be easily read aloud....... ‘Notepad++’ automatically highlights the end tags. Google: ‘CSS Zen Garden’ show what CSS can do..

XMl stands for the extensible mark-up language for writing languages a meta-language. In hHTML you always have a starting tag and an ending tag   for example; <p> is a tag for commencing the constructing of a paragraph and to end the paragraph use <p/> Also, <head> for a heading, <strong> for making bold text, <img src= <- stands for image source and <br /> is a line break. HTML5 is a simplified version of the predecessors, I think I like the simplified version. And so much more............ including some of the History of html and xhtml....and the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee.

 Week three and the lecture was about drawing 'network' diagrams as they would be required in the final system plan for my assessments.  Also the language they use in conversation is  ‘protocol’. a set of rules for communication, the Internet has a protocol address which is a string of numbers... AND...' Ports' are connected to the servers database.

The 'internet' is a global network connected by TCP/IP. when the messages are sent they are broken into ‘packets’ they are then numbered, addressed and transmitted. Domain name system, are some examples ‘.com .au .edu’ Watch the video for week four.

Week four the lecture covered 'Language' 'Framework' 'CMS' lots more has been covered this is just a small part... and I was able to upload my Micro and Macro on the web page... such an achievement for me  

By week four complete a Macro and Micro Analysis Assessment 1 about what I have learn about the technologies of the web.

BrandExpressionVideo

 

Brand Expression - The State of Video

BrandExpressionVideo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g4hg-hayoc

Finished the Macro and Micro Assignment

The Macro and Micro Assignment was a great learning experence

I am unable to open FileZille to conect to my web page

When I open FileZille in Firefox and try to quick connect
it will not conect at all
...symtex error as before

So then if I try windows I can conect but another error I will email
................................................
Not sure what to make of a call I had this evening
on the same line as the internet is conected to
The caller said that there were problems with my computer it was sending out error messages and was vunarable to virusous 

He said with a very broad accent that he would help me fix it
Did I have the computer in front of me......................... I hung up!!!

Anne Cosentino blog

I could only get the one lecture onto the Ipad through iTunes  

Anne Cosentino blog

DMT Autumn 2011