Category: accessibility

W3C overview document for fixing accessibility barriers in existing websites

This is a good overview at the W3C: Improving the Accessibility of Your Web Site. It’s easy reading and clearly written. It would make a good starting point for a classroom discussion on retrofitting for accessibility.

Auditing your website for accessibility

A couple of articles by my friend David Moore at iCubed provide a plan for evaluating a site for accessibility. David’s done this professionally in the the U.S. and in Ireland, and the article gives excellent advice about what to look for and check. David’s tips go hand in hand with the W3C overview I mentioned above.

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How Mike Cherim solved the Accesssite.org problem

The folks at accesssites.org strugged with the problem I talked about several times here in which their showcase page was unreadable by Safari 2.0 on Mac OS X (Tiger). It was indeed baffling and the resolution is still a little baffling to everyone involved. Mike documented it all here. Beast-Blog.com | Mike Cherim’s Professional and Personal Web Log | C.H.U.B. – Comment Hyphenation Ugh Bug

It turns out to be comments with two nested hyphens in them that caused the problem, but the weird part is it only affected the showcase page and not other pages coded the same way. Mike would like any others who’ve had a similar problem to let him know, as this does not seem to be documented anywhere else within Google’s range.

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Make Firefox into a self-voicing browser

Knowbility had a booth set up at SXSWi with working examples of JAWS and other demos. A fellow named Charles Chen was at the Knowbility booth too, giving away software that makes Firefox self-voicing. Information and download CLC-4-TTS here. CLC-4-TTS is a cross OS compatible (Windows, Mac, Linux) collection of JavaScript functions that can be used for transforming Firefox into a self-voicing browser. This software is open source and is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL.

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Now you can get access to a disabled user

UsabilityExchange: “By connecting content providers directly with disabled end users we provide an environment in which accessibility and usability issues can be resolved quickly and easily.”

You can register to have your sites tested by users with various disabilities and get feedback. A UK site, so the laws affecting accessibility may be slightly different from those in the US, but a valuable service.

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A Public Apology to Access Sites

I had given “the mean mouth” to Access Sites a couple of times recently about their Access Sites Showcase page. It turns out that my normal setup on Mac OS X with Safari 2 is the rare combination that had a problem with the page. Most people were seeing a perfectly readable page with a white background.

Here’s what I heard from the Access Sites folks, “We did test extensively on other platforms, other browsers and operating systems, and UAs like Jaws, Lynx, etc., knowing full well that people would be giving us the eyeball (plus we do care and try to do it right anyway), but it is possible we missed something. Based on your reply we took 240 screenshots today and it seems as if we may indeed have an issue on the Macintosh OSX 10.4 using Safari 2.0.”

So the short version of the story is that they will indeed tackle this one and I’m sure they’ll have it fixed ASAP. My job, now, is to issue this public apology to the folks at Access Sites for sending out harsh words in their direction.

I once again encourage all my readers to prepare and submit accessible work to them for consideration in their showcase. My original thought when I first heard of the site was what a great idea and I still think it is. Not only a great idea, but accessible to everyone, even Mac OS 10.4/Safari 2.0 (and every other device out there in page rendering land).

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Yep, it’s still unreadable

A Stunning Design & Amazing Accessibility Showcase | Accessites.org: Web Showcase On Feb 27 I said this would change fast to something a person could actually read (as in accessible content). Since it remains unreadable, I’ll withdraw my prediction that it’s going to become accessible content. I no longer encourage anyone to participate in this, to submit a site or to worry about their criteria. I guess they didn’t read their own criteria.