Good day ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Social Networking Sites and Accessibility Implications For Employers conference call. At this time all participants are in "listen only" mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will follow at that time. If anyone should require audio assistance during the conference, please press star, then zero to reach an operator. I would now like to turn the call over to Peter Berg.
Hi, thank you very much, Jamie, and welcome, everyone to the ADA Audio Conference Series. The ADA Audio Conference Series is a collaborative effort of the national network of ADA centers, also known as Disability and Business Technical Assistance Centers, or DBTACs. You may contact the ADA center that serves your state by calling 800-949-4232. The ADA centers are funded by the U.S. Department of Education National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation, Research and ID. Today''s audio conference is being archived and the audio archive as well as a text transcript of today''s session will be posted to the ADA audio conference web site after the first of the year. Today the topic we are going to discuss deals with networking sites and accessibility and implications for employers. We are pleased to be joined by two speakers who are with the Job Accommodation Network which is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor''s Office of Disability Employment Policy. Our first presenter today will be Linda Batiste, who is a principle consultant with JAN; Linda has in depth training on the Americans with Disabilities Act and reasonable accommodation solutions for persons with mobility impairments, also a focus on emergency preparedness and substance abuse. Linda also leads JAN''s disability legislation initiative as well as steers JAN''s usability program. Linda has a law degree from West Virginia University School of Law. Our second presenter today from JAN will be Dr. Beth Loy. She is a clinical assistant professor at West Virginia University. She is a consultant that specializes in ergonomics and accommodating individuals with motor impairments. Beth is also JAN''s web guru or web master. So with that, I will turn it over to Linda, go ahead and take it away, Linda. Thank you.
All right, thanks Peter. Hello everyone. I just want to start out by thanking the folks at Great Lakes DBTAC for inviting us to speak to you today on this important topic. As you heard, Beth and I work for JAN, and we want to emphasize that JAN is a free service as Peter mentioned, we''re funded by the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Disability Employment Policy. So what that means to you is that all of the services we provide are available at no cost to you. As Peter mentioned, we''re here to talk to you today about our experience with social networks and some of the accessibility issues that we''ve encountered. My co-presenter Beth is going to be doing most of the talking because as you heard she''s not only a consultant here at JAN, but also our web master and resident web accessibility expert. Before I turn the mic over to Beth I want to give you just an idea about the line up for the presentation today. I hope that most of you have the Power Point presentation that we provided. It will serve as an out line for the information that we will present. So it will be very useful for you to follow along if you have access to that. For those of you using a hard copy of the Power Point, we''re now on Slide 2. So here''s our plan for the presentation. My understanding is that a lot of you are probably familiar with JAN, but I just want to make sure. So I''m just going to start by just spending a few minutes discussing how you can use the services that we provide at JAN. And Beth is going to talk about accessibility in terms of web design, then Wikipedia, blogs, MySpace, Face book, Second Life, and finally, YouTube. She is then going to give you some tips for overall accessibility, and then we''ll open it up for questions toward the end of the session. So moving on to Slide 3 what do we actually do at JAN? Well, our primary mission is to help our callers resolve job accommodation issues and come up with successful accommodations. We do this mainly by providing one-on-one consultation over the telephone, but we''re getting more and more questions coming in through e-mail as well as our social networking venue. Our customers consist of anyone who contacts us. There are no restrictions on who can use our services. On Slide 4, in addition to the one-on-one consultations about job accommodations most of our questions involve ADA questions. So we also provide consultation about the employment provisions of the ADA. We''ve also found that it''s helpful for our callers to have follow-up information that they can read. So we provide numerous technical assistance documents. Again, free of charge. A lot of employers contact us for help developing policies and procedures, so we''re in the process of developing a series of guide lines for them. And you can look for those on our web site in the future. We also have been doing ongoing research about the cost and benefits about job accommodations, and we publish those results periodically. And the other exciting thing that we do and this involves you if you use our services, providing our funding agency with information from our callers about the work place barriers that people with disabilities face when seeking or maintaining employment. So when you call us you''re actually helping develop national policy. Moving to Slide 5 when you call or e-mail JAN your call will be forwarded to the specialist on duty. We''re split among four teams. Our largest and busiest team is the motor mobility team, and as Peter said, Beth and I are both members of the motor team. This team handles questions about medical questions that effect motor movement, such as multiple sclerosis, quadriplegia, cerebral palsy, and other conditions that we call non-traditional impairments like carpal tunnel syndrome, back conditions, and other industrial type injuries. The cognitive psychiatric team provides information on accommodations for individuals with conditions such as learning disabilities, bipolar disorder, depression, traumatic brain injury, and other neurological conditions. And the sensory team deals with conditions that involve respiratory, vision, hearing impairments, and skin disorders. JAN also has an entrepreneurship team which provides information on how individuals with disabilities can start or maintain small businesses. On Slide 6 you''ll see that we are a national service available to people throughout the United States and its territories. Just to give you an idea of how busy we are, we receive on average 32,000 to 38,000 contacts per year. Approximately 6,000 of those are via e-mail, and the rest are by telephone. We also receive 3.5 million web page requests per year, and because of our web site traffic we''re receiving more and more e-mails from people in other countries asking for accommodation information. On Slide 7, as I mentioned, anyone can call us, but our primary audience base is employers, number one, and then individuals with disabilities and their family members, and service providers such as rehabilitation and medical professionals. We think that hearing from people on all sides of the work place accommodation issues really helps us see the bigger picture so we can provide a better, more balanced service to our customers. Moving to Slide 8 we offer over 200 technical assistance documents and an extensive web site with several online tools, including SOAR, which is our Searchable Online Accommodation Research tool, an ADA library, and an A to Z page by disability to help you easily find accommodation information specific to certain medical conditions. We recently added an A to Z page by topic so you can quickly find information about various topics related to accommodation, things such as parking, service animals, and medical inquiries. And now on Slide 9, of course, as I mentioned, we''re also looking at the accessibility of social networks, and that''s what we''re here to talk to you about today. We''re finding more and more employers are using social networks for a variety of employment activities such as advertising jobs, doing initial applicant screening, conducting job interviews, communicating with employees, and even conducting training. Using social networks for these activities means that making them accessible is not only important from a practical standpoint, you want them to be effective channels of communication if you''re going to use them for that purpose, but also from a legal standpoint. Title 1 of the ADA requires employers to provide equal opportunity for people with disabilities to apply for jobs, to perform their jobs, and to enjoy the benefits and privileges of employment. This means two things. First, when using social networks employers should consider accessibility in general, and Beth is going to give you some tips about what you need to consider in general. And second, it means employers need to respond to individual accommodation requests when general accessibility is not enough. And JAN is available to help you with your accommodation issues on a case by case basis. So with that, let me turn it over to Beth to talk with you about the accessibility of social networking. Beth.
Okay, thank you, Linda. Let''s move to Slide 10. And let''s start with an aspect of accessibility many of us are at least familiar with. It will be interesting to know how many people attending today''s session actually design web pages. If someone has experience in this area it can be fairly easy to design a web page, just any old web page. What about an accessible web page. Well, this takes a little bit more time and expertise in the short run. But over the long term, the benefits far outweigh the initial time in making something accessible. The basic principle that we follow with web design are the same principles that we follow with our social networking venues. The major problem with our social networking sites is that they do not sit on what we call in-house servers. So we don''t have that 100% control that we might have with our web sites. With social networking venues you have very limited control to what you can do to get in, to get in behind that source code and make something more accessible. We''re going to talk about some of the things that we''ve tried to do at JAN to increase accessibility. But there are still limitations. Social networks are not 100% accessible. It''s sometimes frustrating, because you know how to make it accessible, you just don''t have the access yet that you need to get in and be able to do those changes. So we try to do the best we can and publicize what needs to be done to make them as accessible as possible. So let''s start with some overall things related to web design. We provide what''s called text alternatives for all non-text content. An example of what that means has to do with how we program images. This includes images such as graphics, pictures, and buttons where there are links associated with those images. Accessibility for images is just like the Power Point presentation. For every image you have on a Power Point presentation you should have a text alternative for that image. Basically, any time you have something that is non text you want an alternative that has accessible text with it. What about abbreviations. In the disability field we use a lot of abbreviations. Why might we spell out abbreviation? Well, if you want to be found by Google and Yahoo and Bing, and you use acronyms, the spiders that search out everything in those search engines won''t understand them. They don''t understand them, so they won''t be found. Well what about a screen reader. The screen reader is going to try to pronounce something that is an abbreviation which is essentially junk to the screen reader. So be careful when using abbreviations on your site. Think about if a piece of assistive technology is reading those pages how will it read it. That piece of technology doesn''t know whether the word is an abbreviation or a word. Keep a standard design with your header and footer. That helps individuals who have learning disabilities or cognitive impairments that have difficulty tracking text. If you keep something standard at the top and something standard at the bottom, just like how we do it in our house, we have standard things we keep in certain areas. The analogy I like to use is how we organize our kitchens. When you get up in the morning are you thinking about where things are? The less you have to do in the morning when you''re making your coffee the better. It''s much like when someone is on your web site. You want them to focus and find the content that you make available. So the less they have to do to sort around at the details on the top and the bottom using those as navigational aides, not things that detract from the content, which will be helpful. Provide mechanisms to freeze objects and control volume. Have you ever been on a web site where there''s something that starts up immediately, some type of video that starts up and you can''t control the volume, you can''t turn it off. What if it''s talking and you''re using a screen reader, who wins? Does the screen reader win or does the video win? Nobody wins. And what happens to the person on your site? That visitor quickly leaves. When we use any type of multimedia we need to be sure that we have captions with them. Open captions are those that show all of the time. They are essentially hard-programmed into the video. Some use closed captions. These are the ones that you can turn on and off. And audio captions, well, what are these? Audio captions are those that are primarily for individuals that can''t see what''s happening on the screen. So you run an audio description of what''s happening on the screen rather than just listening to the audio that''s being given, because there might be something else happening on the screen that the person can''t see. So you can run audio captions, you can run traditional captions, and traditional captions can be open or closed. We didn''t used to have all those options available. We traditionally talk about reliance on color and music. A lot of people are what we call color vision deficient. What many in the audience know as colorblind. Red, green, and even that famous JAN blue can sometimes be difficult. So relying on them to be able to navigate a page can also be difficult. Just like what about relying on music for a site. Have you ever been in a Face book site or a MySpace site, and as soon as log in music starts blaring and things start happening. Again, any type of audio like that interferes with primarily a screen reader, but what about somebody who has a cognitive or a hearing impairment, very, very difficult for that person to get to the content. Allowing keyboard navigation is always important for individuals who have fine motor limitations. Keyboard navigation allows someone to be able to use the keyboard to navigate around a web site rather than using a mouse. There are very simple thing that''s you can do to web sites to make it keyboard accessible. When you program your sites you want to make them keyboard navigational, and you want to make sure that the keyboard navigation operates in a logical manner. First, second, third, just like somebody would read it to you. Not skipping from one thing to another. When creating and posting Power Points to our site we want those to be accessible. JAN can provide information on how to do this, and I''m sure that DBTAC does as well. It is sometimes time consuming. But obviously, if someone has a visual impairment or a hearing impairment that person isn''t going to be able to get much out of your Power Point if it''s not accessible. Any more, if we do them, they''re created accessible. And we can give you different tips on how to do that. Any forms or PDFs should be made accessible as well or an alternative should be given. Again, we can provide you with tips on how to go about doing that. So with the next bullet, what I mean by using relative text size for a web page. Do you ever try to change the size of your text in your browser and it won''t change. Well, I like to make my text nice and big, and sometimes it won''t change. If whoever does your web site says well, we don''t do that because it''s being designed to look good, there are very easy ways to get in behind the source code of the site and use what''s called relative text size. That means that the user can change the text size. You don''t have to do it, but the user is able to do it. And last but not least because we have JAN''s ADA expert Linda in the room, I had to bring up that we want to be sure to display any Equal Employment Opportunities (EEO) reasonable accommodation statements so people can get to them. This is particularly important for online application systems. If I''m going online to apply for a job and I have to click more than three times to get to the reasonable accommodation statement we consider that inaccessible. And our goal is to try to make everything link within three to five clicks. We certainly don''t always meet that goal because we have a lot of information and technical assistance that we''re trying to provide, but that''s our underlying goal, three to five clicks. Slide 11 accessible web site design is the basis for us to talk specifically about social networking venues. How many people in here are on YouTube? Don''t answer that. How many people operate a blog, how many are on Face book? If you are on Face book, certainly log in and become a JAN fan. And who tweets with Twitter? Well, JAN is also on MySpace which doesn''t get a lot of traffic any more, and something called Gov Loop which is for federal agencies and federal contractors. JAN is also engaged in bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious. We''re also on LinkedIn, which is mostly for businesses, communicating with groups and disseminating business-related information. Probably our most interesting social networking endeavor is currently Second Life which is a 3-D virtual world that gives us the opportunity to have a 3-D virtual office. And we''ll get into that here in a little bit. What about Wikipedia? We consider that a social networking venue, whether you want to call it a site or whether you want to call it social networking media. That was actually our first venture into the social networking world. So Slide 12, let''s talk a little bit more about what we''ve done. Up here I have a picture of our Wikipedia site. It''s very simple, very to the point. Not a lot of links but a great deal of text, one of the major weaknesses with Wikipedia is anyone can post anything, so you have to check it often to make sure someone hasn''t said that Beth with JAN has very bad hair. Of course that would be absolutely devastating. But on Slide 13, lets talk a little bit more in depth about Wikipedia. Wikipedia does have kind of a difficult initial learning curve for anyone who''s interested in setting up a page. It''s difficult to use any type of assistive technology to actually set it up initially. It is a lot easier to maintain once it is set up, to get in and make any edits or changes. What we use it for is just a basic summary of the JAN service, our research, our partnerships and history. Of course Wikipedia is very much unsubstantiated, because one person can say Beth has great hair, and another person can say I don''t like Beth''s hair so much. So far, before this presentation anyway, there have been no attempts to edit or contribute material to our site, including comments on my hair. So I guess we''ll have to see what happens after this session. We typically update it about once a month or if anything with a JAN project develops. The category we''re in happens to be the accessibility category. So if you do something related to disability, there are different categories that you can join in Wikipedia to make it easier to find you, to make it more accessible. We usually get about 500 or so page views a month now. That''s pretty good because there''s not a lot of maintenance with the site other than to see if someone talked about my hair. So I guess with that, we''ll move to Slide 14. A couple of suggestions related to the accessibility of Wikipedia. What we tried to do is minimize a large number of links down to just a few because these long strands of links in different sections of your Wikipedia page are very confusing and also difficult for a screen reader to access. Also if they''re put very close together and someone has any spasticity or uses assistive technology, you have to hit a very small spot to be able to use those links. So we suggest minimizing the number of links. You also have to work within that traditional Wikipedia structure. I''m always hopeful they open the source code up, let us move things around. But there is a structure that you have to use, and you really can''t do a lot with it. So I look in the future for them to maybe open the code. Some so we can move things around, chose from different themes, and make things easier to get to and hopefully easier to understand. And we try to follow as many web design principles as we can. If we put video in, we make sure it''s captioned. If we put any graphics, which we do we have the JAN logo available through Wikipedia, what we put with that logo is alternative text descriptions, sometimes text. It will allow you to do that, and also it allows you to do a few things to make it a little bit more accessible. With slide 15 we have a screen shot of the JAN blog. A couple of things related to the blog. A blog is a very time consuming installation. No, that''s not just your IT department telling you that. It''s especially time consuming if you want to make it accessible. You can get on to a site like Word Press, which Word Press is probably the most common type of word generator, and you can set up your blog on their server. Well, what does that mean? It means you''re using their architecture to run your blog. Essentially, you can''t really get in behind the source code to make those things as accessible as if you pull it off on to your own server. So Slide 16, it took the network administrator and me several days, which is kind of a long time for us, to be able to pull off our blog and install it on our own server and make it useable and more accessible. Our blog is written in something called PHP, which stands for Personal Home Page. PHP is a very difficult code to work with. Especially when you''re trying to incorporate accessibility features. There are times when PHP does not agree with accessibility modifications. Once we were able to pull it off on to our server then we could get behind the source code to make those changes that we needed to make. If it''s running on Word Press''s server, you''re not able to do that with as much effectiveness. So we had to find a way to pull that over or we''d have had to design it from scratch, which is even more time consuming, because Word Press is a good blog product. Once we were able to get more control, we could control some of the accessibility features. Then we were able to track our page requests and we were able to blend our famous JAN blue with the theme of the blog. So we were able to do things related to marketing as well as accessibility and reporting. So it''s not all about accessibility, but certainly accessibility is what drove us to make those other changes. It does attract a great deal of Spam, lots and lots of Spam. We have to clean it out probably once a day. Probably should do it more than once a day. We do get some interesting comments, of which we can control. And we do get accommodation questions. Different types of questions we''ve had, questions to fragrance sensitivity, questions related to how to set up an ADA policy, and sometimes someone will want to get in and say hey, I like this publication, or hey, why don''t you have a publication on this all very interesting to hear from our consumers. We also use it for current events and follow ups for webcasts. In November we had 173,536 page views. And within our directory it was ranked 14th. So we find a lot of people read our blog, but not a lot of people post to it, at least for us. So with slide 17, I just wanted to share a couple of postings that I pulled rather quickly. Someone said I''m at a public university and we have a student with asthma requesting accommodations but she refuses to tell us what the triggers are for her asthma. Can we require her to get this information from her healthcare providers? Now you think she would e-mail us or call, but maybe the quickest way to access our services was to post to the blog. Then she was able to get additional comments from other users. Another comment that was posted related to our publishing of our Educators with Disabilities publication. And the user said this article is very informative. In fact, you have let me know what will be the solution for ailing problems. It was very useful for me, as I also suffer from low back pain and cannot stand for long hours, and in fact, I am a teacher. So it''s very interesting the different types of comments that we probably would not have received if we didn''t have that venue and if we didn''t try to make it accessible. Slide 18 has a screen shot of JAN''s MySpace page. There is not a lot happening with MySpace unless you''re a high school student, which to be honest, I''m glad those days are behind me. I find it a little easier to work with from an accessibility standpoint than Face book, but it gets hardly any traffic. So essentially, I''m doing it for myself. Slide 19, just to hit a few of the high points related to MySpace. It does have very flexible terms of service. And you say well, what does that mean when it comes to accessibility? Well, it means you can get in and make some modifications that you can''t necessarily do on some of the other social networks. It just like other social network sites, has very cluttered source code. That''s what goes on behind the scenes, and that''s what often interferes with the use of assistive technology. For example, if you log in with a screen reader to read a MySpace page it reads a lot of gibberish, and it reads a lot of commercials that exist behind the scenes. So you have to read through five minutes of junk that we might skip over because we''re used to it. If we have vision, we can immediately skip over that. But if you use a screen reader it can be very confusing. It''s also just a little too easy to do audio on MySpace. Again, why would that be a problem? Well, there is an issue we discussed earlier of using audio and music that is programmed to run when you log into the site. MySpace is what we call inaccessible CAPTCHA. C-A-P-T-C-H-A. That''s usually in all caps. It stands for, and I always have to look this up, Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Basically, these are those tests we have to do to prove that we are not a computer accessing a certain part of a site or registering an URL or user name. This is where we see a line of oddly shaped letters and numbers and we have to repeat this into a text box. Now we''ve seen an increase in using more and more audio CAPTCHA as an alternative. Without an audio option if you have any type of visual perception issue or no vision these are inaccessible. If you have one of those, whether it''s audio or text CAPTCHA then it will significantly cut down on Spam and also increase accessibility. So if you use a CAPTCHA you probably want to offer an audio and a text version. There is less accessibility information available for MySpace. Basically, we''ve had it up since January. And we''re sad, we only have 15 friends. As you can tell, Linda and I are not very popular. If you have a MySpace page we could certainly use your friendship. So moving to Slide 20, this is a screen shot of our Face book page. Our Face book pages seem to be quite popular. To reach different areas of Face book we have an organization page as well as a personal page. Now both of those pages are always jam pages. They link back and forth directly. So what we paste on one goes to the other. And Slide 21, you can''t really track page requests, but you can track how many fans and friends we have. And at the end of November we had 267 fans and friends. We''re very happy about that. We''re a little bit more popular in that venue. I don''t feel so lonely I guess. A couple of comments I pulled. Notice, I don''t pull any of the bad ones. So don''t get excited because I don''t share any of the bad comments. Thank you so much for the recent training regarding recent events and job accommodations. I had no idea JAN was on Face book. I now plan to tell each of my clients, certainly an interesting type of marketing tidbit someone nicknamed Cricket said I like this opportunity to share resources. I''m a selective placement program manager, extremely new and need resources. Different people from different groups are able to find us in these various venues. Slide 22 one of the frustrating things about Face book is that they redesign very often. If you don''t have something that reads the code behind what you see, you may not see that they do that. And if they redesign often what does that mean for somebody who uses a piece of assistive technology. Well, what worked last week may not work this week. It''s another learning curve. And again, if you can see the page on Face book you may not notice these changes. So if you''re going to engage in those changes expect people with disabilities are not going to access your area. Not only people with disabilities, but other people that get frustrated when things change consistency. Again, hopefully Face book allows eventually more access to the source code behind the scenes so we can get behind what the end user sees and we can edit more of that source code. At this point though, the code remains very cluttered and we don''t have a lot of control over that. If you''re using assistive technology, again, you can skip over those areas, but you have to know where they are. Face book does allow you to link to other features so that you can make other areas more accessible, such as an RSS feed or the blog or even Twitter. Another interesting part of Face book is that they now have a partnership with the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). They''ve been working together now for over a year to do things like allow users to adjust the text size. Also, now they offer an audio version of that CAPTCHA that we were talking about. And the chat feature in Face book, I''m not sure if anyone out there has used that, but it''s now accessible for Jaws. Huge improvements. Before you would chat, and if the person on the other end was using Jaws that person wouldn''t be able to chat back with you. So Face book is making some strides with that partnership, and whether it''s Jaws or another type of screen reading program, certainly more accessible. Face book also now has keyboard short cuts available, and you can attach captions to different pictures, or they call them skins. You can put five or six pictures in a skin and it looks very pretty. It scrolls through. Kind of slow where a picture comes in and another fades out. And now you can attach captions to these. So I really think Face book is trying to make some improvements, and my guess is that AFB will make sure that they do. Slides 23, next, lets talk a little bit about Twitter. We use Twitter probably once or twice a week just to give out information on what we''re doing, where we might be, and what documents might be available through JAN or another agency or funding agency. Slide 24, Twitter is a micro-blogging site, and you have 140 characters or less to say something very important as you can imagine, difficult for some people. There is an application called Accessible Twitter. We don''t use Accessible Twitter but we do have some people on staff that can access our Twitter using Accessible Twitter. What that does is allow administrative alternative to twitter.com. In other words, it''s a way for an administrator to more easily post tweets and control a Twitter account. One of the features that is more accessible with Accessible Twitter is that it gives you an easy way to read tweets. I''m not sure how many people out there know what it means to read tweets. But if we put out an announcement from the JAN office and one of the organizations or people who subscribe to our tweets wants to repeat it they don''t start from scratch. It''s proper etiquette to retweet. If you''re using just Twitter rather than Accessible Twitter to do that, it takes several steps. And it''s a very inaccessible process. If you''re using an Accessible Twitter it''s one of the automated features that comes with the application. It''s right there in front of you. You don''t have to go through ten steps to retweet one of what your users posted. So for more information on this you can go to Accessibletwitter.com. This version of Twitter also makes it easy to reply to messages. If you ever use Twitter once in a while you might want to privately reply. It''s a little more difficult if you''re using assistive technology to do that. Accessible Twitter makes that really easy. It''s right there in front of you. Accessible Twitter is free, but it is an alpha version. The last time I talked with the designer of this he was working on a new version. The old version is still available, of course, but I think he and his team are working on some new updates that should be out in the next few months. There''s also something called Greasemonkey. Basically it first came out on the open source environment, and it was used in what we call LINUX. We use it as an add-on to the Firefox browser. A lot of people in our office use Firefox. It''s an add-on that creates scripts that can affect a page that you view. We use it to design keyboard short cuts for people who want to access our Twitter site. If I''m on the road and all I have is my Blackberry, yes of course I can post to Twitter. But I''d say most of the people I work with would not want me to be doing that. So for some in the office who run that from an administrative standpoint, if you use the Greasemonkey add-on to Firefox it makes it much easier to reply to, to delete, and to favorite things in Twitter. So this is an interesting type of free add-on. There''s also something called JAWTER, J-A-W-T-E-R. This is also under revision. Basically, your screen reader becomes a Twitter client. So anywhere you are in Windows it will update your tweets if you use a screen reader. I''m not so sure I want that, as it will be going all day. But it''s a pretty Accessible Twitter client and it allows you to attach hot keys to different things you want to do in Twitter on a frequent basis. So these are the three primary add-ons that we''ve worked with. And they also increase the accessibility for someone wanting to be an administrator of a Twitter site. It is difficult to track page requests. At the end of November we had 286 followers, and as of this morning we had 302. So it''s very exciting. Even though it is difficult to track page use we do something called Tweet Burner to create our tiny URLs. We call these Twirls. A lot of our URLs are very long. If we have a very long URL how are we going to post that to Twitter, it will take up our 140 characters. That''s why you see organizations and people who create those tiny URLs, we use Tweet Burner, and when we create that Twirl we''re able to log into an accessible page and it tells you how many people have accessed what you posted to that tweet. So check out Twirl. And with Slide 25 we introduce our Second Life virtual office. Wonder how many people out there are familiar with Second Life? Usually when I ask this in a presentation I used to get one person. Any more, I get two or three saying that they''re familiar with it. You can download it to your computer and you can create an avatar, and that''s your person or your 3-D image that represents your organization or your company. And once you create that avatar you can either wander around aimlessly. However, you can buy or barter for property and set up your business or organization. So this is an increasingly used social networking venue. And we''re going to discuss the different aspects of our office. This is a picture of it up here. And we also have a picture of our JAN avatar, and Linda''s going to give you a little bit of detail on what they look like later. Our JAN-atar, or JAN avatar, her handle is JAN Xomotron. X-O-M-O-T-R-O-N. This reminds me of the days when my dad taught me how to use a CB radio. So Linda''s going to give you a tour of the office here in a few minutes. But before we get into that tour let''s go to Slide 26 and talk about the world of Second Life. As I said, Second Life is an interactive 3-D virtual world. It was developed by a company called Linden Lab out of San Francisco. Interesting story behind this, Linden Lab is a privately-held American Internet company that''s best known as a creator of Second Life. Has about 300 employees world wide, and even though the company''s main headquarters is in San Francisco they have offices throughout the U.S. and the UK. And the company also employs many remote workers. It''s been around since 1999. Second Life I think is currently in its seventh year. They have several high-tech veterans that run that company. Former executives from eBay and Disney and Adobe and Apple certainly, they are familiar with accessibility. And the platform is unique because you''re able to own intellectual property rights to the content that you create within that virtual world. There are also ways to make money and market your product in Second Life. The reason JAN got involved in Second Life was because we saw where this is going to really become a social networking venue that people in companies are going to use, and we wanted to figure out how we can make ours as accessible as possible. We''ve attended job fairs and done presentations and attended other events just to see how companies and people are using this venue. And I don''t know if Second Life will be around forever, but the engine that drives it is probably going to be around a lot longer than you and I are going to be around. So I think the engine that drives the 3-D world will grow. If we on our end are able to make our presence accessible I think that will do a lot as this grows exponentially to make that world accessible to people who use different types of technologies. If we don''t catch up now before it gets even bigger it''s never going to be accessible. So if you have a presence there, if your company or organization is thinking about having a presence, have them research the accessibility on Second Life or have them contact JAN. You need to try at the very beginning to make it as accessible as you can. It is a platform where businesses, non-profits, and entrepreneurs can develop a virtual presence. You can buy and sell anything in that world, and you can buy and sell virtual hair, virtual clothes, virtual anything. It does function with something called Linden dollars. What you do is you take real money and you trade it for Linden dollars. That area is not as accessible as I would like. It''s hard to use assistive technology to take your real money and trade it in for the virtual Linden dollars. And to be quite honest, if I were running a business what would be the one area I would make accessible first? That would certainly be any area that involves money. Linden Labs is working on some of those accessibility issues. Interestingly enough, it functions with its own time, Second Life time. This is really Pacific Time. So it''s very, very confusing when you''re trying to schedule anything. And we do have collaborations I would like to mention. There''s a group called Virtual Ability. This is a non-profit out of Colorado. It''s http://www.virtualability.org. This site assists people with disabilities in organizations with how they get around in that environment when they''re first coming into the virtual world. And they do all that for free. They do run the Virtual Ability Island, which Linda is going to show you a little bit about here in a few minutes. And they just help with getting you to know what you''re doing and some of the accessibility features that are available for that environment. There''s a group called Tech Soup which some of you may have heard of. They''ve been around for a while. This is the same place where non-profits can get discounted software. This group oversees a non-profit commons which is on the Virtual Ability Island. With the non-profit commons there is what we call four SIMs, S-I-M-S. These are property areas. Two are just general. There''s one environmental SIM, if you have an organization going green when it does something related to the environment and you''re non-profit you can get on the environmental SIM. There''s also a health commons SIM, which is where we are. Again, this is on the Virtual Ability Island. In the course of our endeavors we''ve also worked with Virtual Helping Hands, which has also been around for a while. This is a non-profit. They can be found at http://www.virtualhelpinghands.org They provide Second Life mentors for people with disabilities just getting engaged in this area or if you''re an organization just trying to learn your way around. They also oversee Wheelies, which is an accessible nightclub for those of you who are interested in Second Life. We actually did a radio show that was broadcast in Wheelies. And we certainly don''t monitor the JAN avatar''s after hours activities. Slide 27 this is a screen shot of Virtual Ability Island. It is gorgeous. It has palm trees, sunshine, and the grass is always green and you never have to mow it. It''s certainly a place we would all like to work. There are different accessible signs that help you get oriented to the island. These are done just like alternative text is done for web sites. There''s a certain way to do it, but you can add text to any of the images that you have control over. These signs, accessible signs help you get oriented to the island and to learn who''s there, how to do this, what to download, and what accessibility features are available. These signs, again, can be designed with alternative text that makes them accessible. Slide 28 you can also design accessible note cards. These are basically text cards, not images. You can give away virtual T-shirts or download landmarks. There''s a lot of space in Second Life. If you say to somebody we''re on the island in this SIM in this section it gets very confusing. So thank goodness we can bookmark that. And with that, we will go to Slide 29. Linda, you want to take over from here?
Sure. I just have to say that when we first got into all the social networking stuff I couldn''t believe that we were seriously going to get into Second Life. Which I honestly thought was just a fantasy life for people who didn''t really like their real life. Well, I have to admit, I was wrong. Second Life is an amazing communication tool for businesses and organizations. We''ve done several presentations already in Second Life, and our audience consisted of people from all over the world. So it''s an amazing way to connect with people. It takes a while to find the right place and get set up, but once you do it is truly amazing. The slide that you''re seeing now, Slide 29 as Beth mentioned, shows the JAN avatar sitting on a bench. And first of all I just want to say she looks strangely like a combination of some of the people who work here. I think Beth was involved in picking her wild, curly, unruly hair, because it looks just like hers. This bench was actually where the JAN avatar lived when we first got into Second Life. Basically, we were homeless and roamed around during the day trying to figure out how things worked. Well, we finally wandered on to an island called Virtual Ability Island, which as Beth mentioned is a non-profit group that helps people with disabilities get into and use Second Life. And they helped us also. They provide services such as referrals, mentoring, and training. And on Slide 30 you''ll see the JAN avatar standing next to a virtual card that explains our services. We started out by just walking around Virtual Ability Island handing out this card to anybody who was interested. And while we were there we met some groups that worked in the disability field, and we got some leads on some space that we could rent. On the next slide, Slide 31 is a picture of the JAN avatar outside the JAN booth that we finally were able to rent. This booth was located outside Wheelies, which Beth mentioned is an accessible Second Life nightclub which was very interesting being parked right outside the nightclub. Our avatar got hit on a few times by people that had been drinking too much in Wheelies. So that was really interesting. She had to run a few times to get away. The people at Wheelies rented us booth space while we waited for our office space. In our roaming around we had located another island for non-profits and got on a waiting list for a really nice waterfront office. Finally, as you see on Slide 32 we were able to establish an office in the non-profit commons on the health commons island. From our office we''re able to track how many visitors we have and how much media is distributed. Since opening our office we''ve developed partnerships with other groups interested in disability issues, Beth mentioned some of those earlier. We provided presentations mainly on JAN and accommodations and ADA issues. And we''ve shared information on making virtual space accessible, like we''re doing today with you all. On Slide 33 is a picture of our beautiful waterfront office in Second Life. And I''m going to give you just a brief overview of what you''ll find if you visit the office. If you''re actually in Second Life, things are moving around; our avatar is walking around and can show you the stuff. But for now, those of you following along on the slide, you''ll notice our JAN avatar standing at the door to the first floor of our office and right inside is a JAN rug. The rug that has JAN on it this rug is what allows us to count how many visitors we have. It houses the software that tracks the visitors. On the rug you may be able to see our office cat. He''s an orange tabby cat named J. J., and this was something that I lobbied for and we finally got our office cat after much searching. He''s very cute and friendly, and he doesn''t need a litter box, if that tells you anything. So we think he''s the perfect office pet. If you visit our office he''ll meow and rub on your leg. He''s very cute. You might not be able to see all the way in the office, but we have what''s called a landmark dispenser that Beth mentioned earlier just inside the door. And like she said, you can create a bookmark so you can find our office and you can get back to it very easily in the future. We also have a fragrance-free sign asking visitors not to wear fragrances while visiting us in our JAN office. This, of course, is symbolic to promote awareness of fragrance sensitivity. As far as I know there are no actual smells yet in Second Life, at least we haven''t been able to find any. All of the signs in our office that have text information can be clicked on so that you can receive information in a note card that you can take with you. We also have an information desk just inside the office that has a virtual T-shirt dispenser, like Beth mentioned. We have JAN T-shirts. You can''t take them with you. A lot of people ask us if you can take them out and wear them in real life. But right now they''re just virtual T-shirts that your avatar can wear. We have an explanation of the JAN services we provide, we have a way to e-mail a JAN consultant if you''re in there and nobody''s available, and a way to contact our JAN avatar if she isn''t currently in the office. Also you''ll notice we have a second floor that doesn''t have a roof. That''s because it doesn''t rain in Second Life, what I was told, or if it does rain you don''t get wet. So either way you''re fine in our open-air second floor. To get to our second floor you can ride our teleporter from the first floor, or you can just fly up. So you can see some accessibility issues are very easy to overcome in Second Life. I think the avatars can fly if you can figure out how to control them. I think Beth once landed ours in the ocean and couldn''t get it out for a while. But luckily they don''t drown. Took us a while but finally got her out. But you can fly around once you master the technology. Once you get upstairs in our JAN office you can view the JAN bookshelf and some of our most popular publications. If you click on one of these publications from Second Life you actually open up the page on our web site that actually has the full publication for you to view. We also have a table and chairs that automatically pop up. You can''t see them right now, but they pop up if you come in and you want to sit and read, or if you just want to chat with our avatar or somebody else, it pops up as many chairs as you need. We can also do presentations on the second floor with our virtual projector, which we don''t have up right now. But if we do a presentation for you it pops up also. As I said earlier, this all seems pretty strange. At least, it did to me when we first got into this. If you want to learn more and you want to come and see our office you have to get yourself an avatar, is my understanding. So if you don''t already have one get yourself an avatar and come visit using the URL on this slide, which is www.JAN.wvu.edu/sl , for Second Life, /office. And with that I''m going to turn it back over to Beth.
Thanks, Linda. Slide 34 we move into some of the accessibility modifications that we can make for our office or users can use to log in. There are other additions to Second Life that can help with accessibility. One is called Text SL, available at Textsl.org. This is specific to Jaws. It''s a Jaws adaptation that creates a Second Life client. However, just as we talked about web site accessibility, when Text SL reads what is on the screen it is dependent on how the owner of these objects programmed the object. For example, cards and the cats and the avatar and the chair, those items really need to have something programmed to describe them so that these accessibility features will work when someone''s trying to navigate around the office. So it''s really dependent on whoever is programming these objects. It''s important to name the objects as identifiable names instead of just the term image or just the term object. Virtual Helping Hands, which we talked about before, has an open source assistance dog for Second Life. His name is Max, the virtual guide dog and he''s really cute, but he''s not as cute as our cat J J. The mission of the virtual guide dog project is to ensure that those who are unable to use the standard interfaces with Second Life have equal access to the virtual world. For example, those who are visually impaired, totally blind, print impaired, or mobility impaired. Max is a screen reader for the chat that can work in conjunction with transcription or what we know as captioning. Max is a client that provides text in local chat and converts it to voice. And you can find more information on Max at virtualguidedog.com. As with the tips we discussed for web site accessibility you can create accessible signs, Power Points, transcripts and audio files for events. And we want to make sure that whenever we have an event we offer those alternatives of accessible Power Points, transcripts, and audio files. Slide 35 just like in the physical world, JAN attempts to increase the accessibility of the virtual world. Here we are demonstrating that sign that Linda talked about that covers our fragrance-free policy. There are also ramps in some areas of Second Life. And we also have our teleporter, which is that disc that we can move on to that will teleport us from the first floor to the second floor and back. Slide 36 here we have a door that we leave open for accessibility. We can do that in the virtual world because if somebody comes in and steals something we have it in our backup of bookmarks and objects. Certainly, I don''t believe there''s a high rate of theft in the virtual world. We just leave those doors open so anyone can come in. And it increases, again, the accessibility. We also have an accessible bench where we can provide technical assistance. Slide 37 and with that we move into YouTube and away from our Second Life office. One of the things that we hope to do with our Second Life office is to be able to stream our YouTube into that office so you can get to know the people who work here at JAN. We actually have this posted to our YouTube channel, which includes additional videos. Since posting this in April we''ve had 2,409 YouTube views. Certainly has not gone viral. But we enjoy it, nonetheless. All right, here we have a picture in the upper left-hand corner of Eddie. Eddie is one of the consultants here at JAN. Eddie was born without arms, and he is one of the stars of our YouTube. Bottom right-hand corner, we have Liz Mary. Liz Mary oversees our Spanish translation program. And on to Slide 38 a couple of things that we did with our YouTube, what we did was to show how JAN works and we took kind of an assistive technology focus, showing how some of the employees and some people in-house use assistive technology in order to be able to do their jobs during the day. We kept it to around five minutes. We took the raw footage in high definition. Not pleasant, when you look at yourself in high definition. So I don''t recommend whoever is in charge of doing the YouTube, don''t look at yourself. We took that, again, in high definition so our YouTube is available in high definition. We converted that to what''s called a Windows Media File, WMV. We chose limited outside sounds and we combined those sounds with visuals so that someone could see or hear, that person would know what was going on, on the screen. We used an Adobe product, CS 4, and we purchased some conversion software to include accessible Adobe Flash designs. And we were able to convert this to video AVI, which is one of the top ways that YouTube likes to show video. We did research captioning and the best practices related to captioning. And what we decided to do was do open captions, so our captions show all of the time. And we use an outside vendor to create what''s called an XML file. And once we have that XML file we were able to combine it with our video file and our audio file. And we brought it all into one file, and then we were able to up load it. I think it took us about four months from beginning to end. We chose not to do audio description, but our script is an audio description of what''s happening on the screen. So what we chose to do was do the audio description as part of the script. And it took a good bit of tweaking and testing in YouTube. For those of you who don''t know, you can post a video to sand box without risking that it goes viral or is accessed by any outside person, so just a few tidbits on how to make your YouTube accessible. Slide 39 just to kind of go through a review. On these social networking sites we certainly have some work to do, and employers, as Linda was saying in the beginning, should be cautious about using one of these to disseminate information. Certainly, you want to use multiple ways to be able to disseminate any information that you''re sending out. And as you do this, try to increase the accessibility with those social networking sites that you are using. Again, just to summarize, there''s much cluttered, jumbled code that goes on behind the scenes. We have a lot of unlabelled links and forms that we can''t control. We have what''s called overlaying forms, which can be confusing for assistive technology. A lot of commercial ads, which I seriously doubt we''ll ever get rid of. It''s difficult to create user accounts, in other words, to start up a page or a site. All of these accessibility issues really depend on the AT knowledge curve, who controls the server, and the designer of the social network pages. We can find ways to provide labels for links, alternative text for objects, captions for media, and effective ways to communicate for what we as an organization can control similar to the web site design accessibility, but also different. Slide 40 these sites are growing at rapid rates. They are popular with some disability groups. For example, Second Life has a relay for life that raises money for the American Cancer Society. There is some resistance, this is too new or your employees are just playing. Having control over these sites, of course control is always good and bad. And with that, we really need to increase public awareness. And I think for us what has been a surprising side benefit is many of these endeavors have been an internal morale booster, especially the video taping of the YouTube. So some interesting side benefits to that. And with this we''ll move to Slide 41 and Linda will be happy to take all of your questions.
All right, thanks Beth and Linda. Operator, if you wouldnt mind, informing our participants on how they can ask questions at this point, pleases.
Ladies and Gentlemen, if you have a question at this time please press the star key and then the 1 key on your touch tone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key.
All right, while we''re waiting for the questions to get started one that was submitted electronically to us here, and the question wanted to know if you could give some examples of how employers are using these different types of social networking sites.
I think -- I think both of us probably have a different take on this. What I see is employers are trying to recruit using the social networking sites. It''s cheap and a lot of times it reaches a large venue. And we''ve had some questions come in related to how employers should not be using social networking sites. Sometimes employers will do a little bit more investigating, I think, than what they should related to accessing YouTube or Face book. A lot of times that has to do with applicants and maybe some current employees. Linda, you want to comment on that?
We were at a conference that Beth and I did a similar presentation to this one at, some employers in the audience were telling us that with international companies they''re using some of these tools to do training of their employees so they can do training for everybody at the same time. So I think that''s the kind of big issues with accommodations. And like Beth mentioned, recruiting and online applications, and then just internal communication is something that we''re hearing a lot about too. So another big thing with the economy the way it is and people not being able to send people to training or attend meetings face-to-face, we''re also hearing about different ways that they can conduct meetings. Some of them are using platforms like we''re using today, but some of them are starting to look at doing that in Second Life as one example. So we''re hearing more and more about it, and as the accommodation questions come in we''re getting questions about how to do the accommodations.
Also we recently had a question asking if an employer could get rid of a TTY and replace it with Twitter. So that''s exploring different options as the electronics keeps evolving.
Exactly. And we also have an accommodation question about someone with alcoholism who wanted to do counseling for treatment through Second Life meetings. So that was coming from the employee initiating that one. So we haven''t had a lot of those, but that was an interesting one that we just got.
Very good. Operator, can we have our first question, please?
The first question comes from caller.
Go ahead with your question, caller
Good afternoon. My question has to do with people whose only real means of communicating is more tactile-oriented. What is on the horizon, technology-wise, for people that cannot visually follow along or auditor ally read or hear things.
My questions with that, and it''s merely a guess, and again Linda may have more to add on to this, is I think how this is going to evolve is you''re going to be able to step into your virtual suit, your virtual suit at the end of the day. And you''ll be able to navigate around and actually have touch and feel. And I think that will evolve out of the gaming industry.
Thank you.
All right, can we have our next question, operator, please.
At this time I''m showing no further questions.
All right. We''ll go ahead and get to another question that was submitted electronically. And this goes back to your, Beth, your discussion about CAPTCHA. And the question has to do with if you could talk about the number of social networking sites that are using CAPTCHA, and what someone who encounters that, that using assistive technology, what they can do to get around the CAPTCHA block.
I actually think the majority of sites where you have to register for something or provide an e-mail; I think most of these sites are using an inaccessible CAPTCHA. I wish I could say something different. I have seen a trend start to evolve where sites are going to where they offer an audio version of it. My hope is that someone is able to navigate to an e-mail address and contact the web site to find an alternate way to be able to register an e-mail or set up a site through that CAPTCHA. The only thing I can hope for related to that is publicity from organizations like us, enable some of those changes.
And now the sites that are using those, are they providing an audible CAPTCHA, which I know aren''t always the greatest, because those are many times difficult to understand. But at least it''s one option.
Most of them are not.
Okay.
Again, I''d like to say something different. And a lot of times a person who needs access has to get someone to help them with it.
All right. Okay, operator, do we have any questions in the queue at this time.
We do have a question from caller
Hi. Thank you very much, first of all, for this very informative information and training. I really appreciate it. My question is you have mentioned JAN provides accommodation information for people with disabilities who are entrepreneurs. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
We have a team here that takes calls really from anybody with a disability who wants to start a small business clear through people who already have a small business who are just trying to tweak it in some way. And we provide consultation over the telephone as well as sending out information. But they help people who are just initially exploring ideas, who already have an idea and are looking for funding, who already have the funding but may need to set up a corporation, asking questions how to do that. We either talk them through those types of issues or we refer them to local resources that are help them on a one on one more intensive basis than we do. So really any issues they have related to small business, they can contact us and we can either help them or refer them on. We don''t actually do the funding, but we have a lot of information on funding resources that they can tap into.
So I can just call your main number and then be connected with those people?
Absolutely. Just call and tell them you''re interested in small business issues and they''ll get you to one of the members of that team.
Great. Thank you very much.
Sure. You''re very welcome.
do we have another question?
I do have another question. The next question comes from caller
Go ahead with your question
I had a question about data available about the speed of the end user''s Internet speed. I''m a source code writer, graphic designer, web designer. And I was working on a web site for a non-profit agency, and I was limited in some of the code that I wrote and the rich multimedia because my employer was saying that you know, not everybody in the demographic that they serve might be able to afford high speed Internet and there''s still people on dial up. But I disagree. Do you know of any data that would be referred to? Because I think by now pretty much everybody has, you know, some type of high speed if they''re on the Internet.
We used to have some information related to the digital divide. I''d have to go back -- which is I think what you''re referring to. I''d have to go back and see what has been updated in that area. Certainly, rural West Virginia has high speed Internet, I might also disagree. But we could do some research related to the digital divide. We have some resources and organizations that we work with. But I just haven''t asked for that recently.
Okay.
You''d like to e-mail me directly you can certainly do that. It''s Loy@JAN.wvu.edu.
Okay. Thank you.
Sure.
All right, thanks for your question. And Beth, as a follow-up to that, you talk about the issue of you know, individual assistive technology that they may be using, the impact on that if someone doesn''t have the, you know, latest version of their screen reader or, you know, screen enlarging software, whatever type of assistive technology they may be using with regards to, you know, web design and accessing some of these sites.
I can say what we have tried to do is to keep anything accessible three versions back. It is an issue, it''s an issue when you use style sheets, and its an issue when you use video. You want to of course try to make your sites look good. But at the same time you''re screening out people who cannot update their accessibility. So what we try to do in-house with our assistive technology is keep three versions back and make sure whatever we''re working on will work back three versions before the most current. That''s our rule of thumb. I''ve never seen anything scientific that says whether that''s the right thing to do or you''re reaching the majority of people that you want to reach, just kind of an internal rule of thumb that we have developed.
Very good. Operator, do we have our next question, please?
Shows no further questions at this time.
Okay. Just want to do a kind of -- got a question submitted electronically, a follow-up on -- a follow-up on the question about how employers are using the different things that you talked about. And if someone wanted you to talk about the obligations for an employee to, you know, in some of these instances make known, you know, the need for accommodation to, you know, access a particular platform that is being used by the employer. And if you could also talk about the importance Linda, you touched on this earlier but the importance of on the front pages of these web sites employers having a policy and contact information if they''re using these, or a way for individuals to be able to contact the employer if they''re having trouble accessing a particular platform.
Yeah. Just in general under the ADA it is the employee''s responsibility to request an accommodation. But when you''re looking at an employer deciding to use some of these networking tools, in some cases employers already know about the disabilities of their employees. If the employer already has knowledge when developing the use of these tools the employer should go ahead and incorporate accessibility for those known limitations that employees have. For example, if you know that you have several employees who have vision impairments who are working in other states and you''re planning to have a meeting via Second Life or some other format you need to go ahead and consider their needs because you know what they are. But in general, if an employer does not know what limitations employees have or what needs there are then it is the employee''s responsibility to let the employer know that an accommodation is needed.
And I tend to think when it comes to making information available it''s the employees organization''s responsibility to provide alternate ways to access that information. I don''t see it as any different than offering a telephone and TTY. You offer two different ways in order to be able to communicate. Now we offer chat function as a third way to be able to communicate. The more ways that you offer so that somebody can either get large print or Braille or accessible PDF or large print or audio versions of materials, putting that basic e-mail address on the homepage so that someone doesn''t have to search for it is really the best way to increase the accessibility of whatever you''re providing.
And I think Beth''s making a good point there, because some of these -- some of these ways of using these tools involve strangers applying for jobs or trying to get information from the employer for some reason, and the employer has no way of knowing what the limitations are. So that''s where this general accessibility and the rules that Beth just mentioned come into play. You really need to make sure that you''re not denying access totally because you''re only doing something one way and it''s inaccessible to a lot of people. When you''re talking about current employees and holding meetings you''ve got a little more leeway because you know the limitations or you know that an individual can request an accommodation. So the general accessibility is important all the way around, but especially important for the job application process.
Okay, excellent. And Beth, if you could, someone submitted another question electronically. If you could again explain what CAPTCHA is, what it stands for, what the acronym stands for. Sorry to make you go back on that one.
Like I said in the presentation I always have to look it up. Never remember that. Hang on one second here.
I tried to memorize it for you, Beth slide 19?
This is -- it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing -- T-U-R-I-N-G -- test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. And you know, I''m getting a little bit of age on me, so I''m never going to remember that.
That''s one heck of an acronym. Very good, Thank you. Thank you. Well, Beth and Linda I want to thank both of you for an excellent presentation on an emerging topic that we''ll see increased use of these types of sites going forward as employers and businesses find different ways to market themselves on these types of sites. So we appreciate your information, and both Beth and Linda''s contact information is available on the ADA audio conference web site. The archive from today''s session, both the audio archive and the text transcript from today''s session will be posted to www.ada-audio.org after the first of the year. I hope that all of you will plan to join us in the New Year, 2010, on January 19. Our next session will be service animals, unraveling the different best practices. So if you have additional questions about the ADA audio conference series you can contact us at 877-232-1990 or visit the audio conference web site at www.ada-audio.org. Again a big thanks to Beth and Linda and the folks at JAN for their presentation today. To all of our participants, thank you for joining us all year long. We''d like to wish everyone a safe, healthy, and happy holiday season, and we hope to see all of you back here in 2010. Thank you very much.
Ladies and Gentlemen, that does conclude the conference for today. Again, thank you for your participation. You may hold to disconnect. Have a good day.