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Software Interest Group
The UA Math Department Software Interest Group (SWIG)
is a self-organized informal group, consisting of faculty members,
visitors, staff, and graduate students, whose goal is to promote and
advance computer and software literacy among the members of the department
through meetings, talks, and discussions.
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For more details, and talks in past semesters, consult the full schedule of talks.
Past topics can (and should) be repeated occasionally. In addition, here are some topics people might like to hear about:
To give a talk, please contact swig@math.arizona.edu.
The issue of web accessibility gained much awareness in recent years. And rightfully so. The WWW is the greatest public open source of information in the history of communication and it should be made accessible to everybody. This includes people with disabilities. There are 45 million disabled persons in the US alone and many times more in the rest of the word.
Wondering how to ensure your webpages meet UA and federal requirements (RA 504/508, ADA, etc.) concerning accessibility? It's easier than you might think! The U of A Disability Resource Center (UA-DRC) provides useful information, examples, instructions, and pointers for doing it. The site is a good starting point.
For a quick overview of issues and resources check out the material from the SWIG presentation:
Curious to know whether your website passes the basic accessibility requirements? Just type in the URL of your page to the folowing on-line validation tool!
There are many validation tools on the web and they do check things differently. It is recommended to validate your web pages using more than one of these tools and to examine the appearence of your pages in a variety of browsers [graphical and non-graphical alike: e.g, Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Lynx, Mozaik].
Accessibility toolbars
For many popular browsers there are tool bars that one can attach to them that provide easy click-of-a- button validation tools and ways to help you designing accessible web pages:
Documents embedded in web pages
It is importnat that documents contained in your web pages like PDF files or powerpoint presentations be accessible too. Learn how to create accessible PDF files with Adobe and find out about tools that can create accessible documents from Microsoft Office Products.
[Added by SWIG:
Tips, tricks, and links from the math department computer support guys
The math department computer support's webpage resources page contains some simple but very useful tips on how to create well designed and accessible web pages in general, together with lots of links to many related resources on the web.]
