Google Wave

Overview

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. (Please Note: Google Wave is still in early preview release).

A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, and maps.

What is a Wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Google suggest that the product is well suited to organising events, group projects, photo sharing, meeting notes and interactive games.

A captioned video outlining the features of Google Wave can be found at YouTube.

Benefits

Google Wave aims to replace technologies like email and instant messaging.

Email and instant messaging were designed to mimick traditional mail and phone calls. According to Jared Smith, email continues to pose a relatively significant accessibility issue to users with disabilities - 'This is primarily due to its dual-threaded nature – meaning that messages can have replies, but the content of replies often takes an entirely different form. The response text of a particular e-mail might be top-posted, bottom-posted, or intermingled throughout the original message. This complexity is compounded by the fact that participants can join or leave the e-mail discussion at any point.

Google Wave does a wonderful job of addressing these issues by presenting the conversation in a way that does not rely on threads or quoted replies.

Google Wave has taken note of the latest social media technologies including, blogs, wikis and collaborative documents.

Google Wave suggests that many web-sites today are disjointed and that the Internet would benefit from a single communications tool that would make communication and collobaration really simple.

Your friends and contacts can use text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web.

The entire history of a conversation can be viewed or replayed. Conversation participants can join or leave along the way without losing context, history, or content.

You can instantly see what others are typing into the Wave.

You can easily drag and drop desktop content like photos and documents directly into the web browser.

Google Wave supports language translation allowing an Australian user to chat easily with their Chinese friend.

Google Inc. is committed to accessible products.

"Google is committed to improving the accessibility of its products. Our desire for simple and inclusive products, and Google's mission to make the world's information universally accessible, demand products that support assisstive technologies and provide a useful and enjoyable experience for everyone, including those with physical and cognitive limitations." Corporate Information - Google User Experience.

Pitfalls

Given Google's recent commitment to accessibility for all, the development of Google Wave is of particular interest to users and developers alike. Regrettably, a number of online commentators are stating that the current release of Google Wave is "totally inaccessible", including Jared Smith, Léonie Watson, Jeremy Keith and Dennis E. Lembrée.

Jared Smith, in particular, sets out a comprehensive list of access issues with Google Wave, including:

Alternative text is not provided for any images.
Roles, states, and other accessibility properties are not defined.
There is no document or heading structure or semantics.
Form elements do not have labels or titles.
Keyboard focus indication is hidden, making keyboard navigation nearly impossible.
Most interactive elements are not in the tab order or do not respond to keyboard activation.
Keyboard focus is often trapped, requiring the page or browser to be closed to resume keyboard navigation.
The application becomes unusable and unreadable when text size is increased only slightly.

This is disappointing news given the widespread consensus that it is always better to implement accessibility at the outset of an innovation. Equally, an accessible service often equates to a successful launch. Read more about this at the Social Media Accessibility Review.

Media Access Australia understands that the Google Wave has yet to be formally launched, and like Jared Smith recognises that the system has the potential to be one of the most accessible tools on the web.

Request an Invitation

If you would like to request an invitation for Google Wave, complete the Google Wave submission form.

Additional Options

Media Access Australia maintains a number of articles that will help you find a number of accessibility options in your computer and operating system, assistive technology software, and web browsers.

Computers and Operating Systems, including buying accessible computers, turning on accessibility features in Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.
Assistive technology software
Web browsers and broadband

Share this site:

Additional Information

Latest news

Dr Scott Hollier continues to keep us up to date

While settling in to the Media Access Australia’s new Perth office, Dr Scott Hollier continues to keep you up to date with the W3C.
HTML5 media player accessibility: the potential and the reality

In last month's W3C update I outlined some of the benefits of HTML5 that the W3C believes will have a significant impact on how people will use the web. As multitouch, tablet and portable multimedia devices become more popular the promise of drag-and-drop functionality and standardised video could have a great impact on our productivity and entertainment needs.

In terms of accessibility, there are two key areas that HTML5 has the potential to deliver: the ability for people with disabilities to use its new features, and effective communication between assistive technology and the web browser. This month we’ll look at the first one, and discuss the evolution of browser-AT interaction, WAI-ARIA, in forthcoming reports.

Accessible media players

One of the biggest issues for people with disabilities in implementations of current web browsing is video integration. For people who are hearing impaired, this means the availability of standardised caption techniques. For people with vision and mobility impairments, the biggest issue is keyboard navigation to actually play and control the video. With so many video formats and integrated players, simply playing a video can be an uphill battle.

While the new video standard offers great promise of improving and standardising captions, the W3C believes the huge step forward for web accessibility is the accessible embedded media player.

How does it work?

Currently websites like YouTube are difficult to use for people with vision and mobility impairments because the buttons in the video player, such as ‘play’ and ‘stop’, can’t be selected with the keyboard alone. Although solutions have been developed, they are non-standard, difficult to find, and it’s unlikely that the website a person with a disability wants to use will have an accessible player feature.

HTML5 basically provides new commands such as <video> and <audio> which can create and label the buttons in a way that allows keyboard shortcuts to access them, and screen readers to tell the user which buttons are available. This means a person who has a vision or mobility impairment can easily use the keyboard to start, stop and navigate around a video, and people who are vision impaired using a screen reader will also have words such as ‘stop’ and ‘play’ read out to them when the keyboard focus is on the buttons.

Can an HTML5 accessible media player be put on my website now?

Given that many web browsers support HTML5 to some degree, the answer is both yes and no. It can be done, but because HTML5 is still an evolving standard and both browsers and assistive technology products handle HTML5 commands in different ways, it’s hard to create an accessible media player that will work for everyone.

Having said that, there is an excellent guide published by Terril Thompson that provides many tweaks and hacks that can get a customised HTML5 accessible media player up and running.

How are the browsers and screen readers going with HTML5?

In terms of the web browser implementation of HTML5, Opera is leading the way and has enough functionality to support a standard accessible media player. Firefox 3.6 and Safari both work to some degree but still need some development, while Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome do not currently provide any support for HTML5 keyboard or AT accessibility. Microsoft has indicated, however, that more work will be done on this for the release of Internet Explorer 9.

As for screen readers, the best result for Windows users is to use NVDA with Firefox, and Mac users should consider the built-in tools of VoiceOver with Safari. JAWS for Windows currently doesn’t support many of the HTML5 commands.

Where to for HTML5?

The release of the HTML5 standard is currently one of the W3C’s highest priorities, and all the browser development organisations of Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Google are heavily involved in the W3C. Although it will still be many months, possibly years until the standard is officially completed, the browsers will continue to evolve and accessibility will continue to improve.
Is the new Apple TV accessible?

Steve Jobs has announced the second generation of the Apple TV, a device that streams media to your high-definition TV. For people who are blind or vision impaired, the burning question is: Is it accessible?

W3C with Dr Scott Hollier

Keep up to date with the latest in web accessibility

Newsletter Subscription