The University increasingly relies on its websites to communicate with students, faculty, staff and the community. Conventional websites are graphics intensive, presenting achallenge to individuals who use alternative web client devices such as screen readers, PDAs, and cell phones.

In contrast, text-only websites are far more accessible and easier to navigate for these individuals. However, creating, testing, and maintaining parallel websites can be timeconsuming and costly for our webmasters and IT organizations.

Automatic Text-Only Rendering

The CSUN Web Access solution features LIFT Text Transcoder from Usablenet, a software company that specializes in web usability solutions. This server based application automatically creates text only versions of conventional web pages. Websites with a text only option provide greater access to all members of our education community. The automatic conversion occurs on demand, so creation and maintenance of a parallel site is not required.

No Programming Required

To add text only pages to your website, you simply create anew link that points to the LIFT server, and the server takes care of the rest. The LIFT Text Transcoder supports accessibility annotations, allowing you to easily add more power to theTranscoder and specify how certain features of your website should be transcoded for accessibility. It also supports unique user preferences. People visiting a site can customize theresulting view to suit their needs – without compromising the design or usability of the site.

A Robust UNIX Based Server Operating System

The CSUN Web Access Solution is running on a UNIX-based server operating system that offers a complete suite of standards based networks services.

Deploy in 10 Minutes

Any CSUN website can utilize the LIFT Text Transcoder. Simply create a link on your pages and direct it to the Transcoder. The resulting link immediately opens up a text mode with your website.

To allow LIFT Text Transcoder to generate on the fly these text-only pages you only need to create a new link on your pages and have that link point to the LIFT Text Transcoder. It will work on static pages, dynamic pages (e.g. asp, jsp), on pages produced by a Content Management System or pages pulled out of a database; on pages with any sort of web content and even forms.

Visitors of your website will be able to follow such text-mode links, and then be able to navigate through your website in text-mode. They will be able at any time to switch back to your real web pages (i.e. without using LIFT Text Transcoder at all).

The text-mode link should look like in this example:
 

<a href="https://tt.csun.edu/tt/https://www.csun.edu/some/page.html" title="text-only page produced automatically by LIFT Text Transcoder">Text only</a>

where https://www.csun.edu/some/page.html is the URL of the page containing the text-mode link (i.e. the one that you are editing).

If you decide to put the "text-mode" link in more than one page, and having to specify each time the actual URL of the page to be transcoded is a hassle (like when you use templates for the page heading that are shared among a large number of pages) then you can adopt the following mechanism.

The "text-mode" link should look like this example:

<a href="https://tt.csun.edu/tt/referrer" title="text-only page produced automatically by LIFT Text Transcoder">Text only</a>

LIFT Text Transcoder will use the Referer request-header field (as defined by the HTTP protocol) to get the URL to process.

Works With Your Web Content

The LIFT Text Transcoder works with static pages, dynamic pages (such as those that are ASP and JSP generated),and pages produced by content management systems. It also supports cookies and HTTPS, as well as online directories and library services – all in an ADA-friendly format.

Contact Details

Chris Sales (chris.sales@csun.edu)