Category: accessibility

Accessible sites showcase

Mainstream Web Accessibility: A Worthy Pursuit | Accessites.org The mission of this new site: “We want to showcase and provide awards-recognition for certain websites – and the developers and designers who make them – which shatter the misconception that accessible web sites are boring and basic. It’s not so and we intend to prove it, or rather, we’ll ask others to furnish the evidence for us. Specifically, we’re looking for sites that meet or exceed our expectations.”

They already have some sites posted that meet their criteria, but it’s almost impossible to tell you anything about them because the color contrast on the page makes the text unreadable. I predict this will change fast!

Knowbility accessibility training conference

Access U Home Knowbility training is absolute gold in accessiblity. I’ve promoted the idea of bringing Knowbility training to my fellow professionals where I live. So far my efforts to bring a traveling Knowbility show here have failed, but now there’s hope. Now Knowbility offers a two day training conference called Access U for all web professionals. It’s in Austin, Texas in May. Go. Learn. You’ll be glad you did.

Accessible Image Replacement

Mike Davidson — sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. It is described in this article by Mike Davidson. Many of the wow web designs on sites such as CSS Zen Garden rely heavily on image replacement. Not all image replacement techniques are accessible, however, sFIR is a step in the right direction.

Accessible PDFs

Very interesting report on a briefiing. Read all the way down the page. About half-way down many specific tips, tools, and techniques come into the discussion. isolani – Web Accessibility: RNIB Media Briefing on Accessible PDFs

Here’s a sample: “When assessing the accessibility of a PDF, ask yourself these series of questions:

  • Is the PDF a scanned image?
  • Is it intended to be a form?
  • Is the PDF tagged
  • Are the items properly tagged?
    • Verify the reading order
    • Add proper tagging (e.g. to figures and tables)
    • Add alternative description to graphics
  • Have I missed something? Run an accessible checker and make the recommended and appropriate repairs suggested.”

Accessibility Tutorial on Wise-Women

I mentioned this article of mine earlier as a presentation I made to a Macromedia users group. Now it has been reprinted at Wise-Women: Tutorial: Achieve Accessibility with Dreamweaver It is the same information (minus some hands-on examples in Dreamweaver I was able to do in a presentation) so if you read it earlier you don’t need to repeat the effort.

Screen Readers and source order

Here’s another valuable test case, this one regarding the effect CSS layout has on what is read by screen readers, at Access Matters – Blog Archive – Screen Readers and CSS Layout. The short version of the results: “Current versions of the three leading screen readers speak page contents in the exact order the content is coded in the HTML source. CSS positioning is irrelevant.”