Combating e-discrimination in the North West - final report

The Combating eDiscimination in the North West project examined over 100 websites advertising job opportunities both regionally and nationally, and found the vast majority to be largely inaccessible. Professional standards, such as using valid W3C code and adhering to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, were largely not followed. The project also conducted interviews with both public and private sector web professionals, and focus groups of disabled computer users, to draw a broader picture of the accessibility of jobs websites. Interviews with leading web development companies in the Greater Manchester region, showed that there is a view there should not be any additional cost in making websites accessible, as the expertise to create a site professionally should be in place from the start, and that accessibility will follow from applying professional standards. However, through the process of trying to create a website for the project, with such a company, it was found that following professional standards is not sufficient to catch all the potential problems, and that user testing is an essential adjunct to professional practice. The main findings of the project are, thus, that: • Most websites in the job opportunities sector are not following professional standards of web development, and are largely inaccessible • Professional standards of web development need to be augmented with user testing to ensure proper accessibility

Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services

One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS). WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296 WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs. Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for 1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure

Technology Changes Everything: Inclusive Tech and Jobs for a Diverse Workforce: Pierce Memorial Foundation Report

This document serves as the final report to the Pierce Foundation for funding to support the design and implementation of a 1.5-day Forum entitled “Technology Changes Everything: A Forum on Inclusive Tech and Jobs for a Diverse Workforce” conducted in NYC on October 26-27, 2017 at Baruch College. The conference idea was conceived to address the need to raise awareness across a number of distinct areas where technology is currently impacting employment outcomes for people with disabilities. The topics ranged from one as straightforward as the critical need for attention on equitably integrating individuals with disabilities into the rapidly exploding tech sector workforce, to the much more nuanced and complex application of algorithmic screening and job-matching tools increasingly used in online job applications and selection processes. Other topics focused on were equitable access to entrepreneurship opportunities, inclusive design in technology-based products and services, and the growing targeted focus of technology sector and tech-intensive industries in affirmative recruitment and hiring of individuals with Autism

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

Offers strategies for realizing Knight's 2009 call for e-government and openness using Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies, including public-private partnerships to develop applications, flexible procurement procedures, and better community broadband access

Content Accessibility of Web documents. Principles and Recommendations

The paper is an overview of issues related to the accessibility of Web sites, of European initiatives and recommendations in the field, of future solutions, such as developing Web 2.0 accessible applications with WAI-ARIA. As part of the Pro-Inclusiv project was included a set of accessibility recommendations to design web sites, recommendations presented in the paper.Web accessibility, users with disabilities, standards and recommendations