The new Panther e-mail service, Zimbra, is not fully compatible for those with disabilities.

Chat Chatterji, assistant vice president in Information Technology Services, has said he is confident it will be soon.

“In general our email systems are ADA compatible or can be accessed in a method that would qualify with the ADA guidelines,” Chatterji said. “But in general, if you are asking if the new Panthermail Web interface is compatible, we don’t think so.”

Chatterji has said he has asked for clarification from Zimbra, the new e-mail enterprise software system that’s being introduced to campus, for an emphasis on ADA compatibility.

While Chatterji does not believe the new email system is ADA compatible, Ryan Gibson, Eastern’s Webmaster, says Eastern’s website is ADA compatible, but it could be better.

Although Eastern’s webmaster, Ryan Gibson, said they are working on making the site more ADA (American with Disabilities) compliant, the current site is not fully up to that level.

“Right now, our site is not 100 percent ADA compatible,” Gibson said. “We recently submitted a report to the IBHE and basically they asked us, ‘Do you know what are you guys doing about ADA flexibility on your Website and other forms of digital media?'”

While adding the Eastern logo to many of the sub sites on www.eiu.edu may have helped navigation, it is navigation for the disabled that is giving Gibson and his team problems, and is one of the main reasons the site is not up to where Gibson would like it to be.

“But then you start talking about navigation on a site as well, it becomes very, very important, what you use to navigate,” he said. “They don’t want to have to go through their mouse over each piece of item. That’s where we’re not, not quite there yet, where we’re not doing a good job, in navigation.”

Making a site compatible for the disabled consists of having a screening reader that reads the text in the site and all of the images have an alt tag. If a screening reader was where the Eastern logo is on the site’s left hand side, it would simply say that this would be a logo of Eastern Illinois University, so if a person has a visual disability it could be read to them.

In order to help the disabled, Gibson is looking on getting tools that would be something like a content management system, which would eliminate a lot of the guess work from the developer.

Gibson looks to not only enhance the site for the disabled, but for everyone.

“I don’t like to just corner it for ADA accessibility, we’re really making it accessible for things like cell phones, PDAs, all the different devices that connect to the Web,” he said. “I don’t look at it as something that we have to do; it’s something that we want to do and it’s making the site more accessible for the entire university.”

Gibson has said that the site does meet the letter of the law, but would like to be within the spirit of the law, taking the sites to the next level.

“In the future, hopefully within the next year, we hope to tweak the infrastructure and make our site 100 percent ADA compliant as well as in general more accessible,” Gibson said. “We got a plan in place to make our site more compatible, that this is something that we need to be doing, and that this is going to make us more accessible for everyone.”