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Vernon Fowler

WAT-C Web Accessibility Tools Consortium - 0 views

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    "The Web Accessibility Tools Consortium [WAT-C] provides a collection of free tools to assist both developers and designers in the development and testing of accessible web content. The consortium is a collaboration of some of the world's leading accessibility practitioners, founded by Accessible Information Solutions (Australia), Infoaxia (Japan), The Paciello Group (USA), Wrong HTML (Japan), and Juicy Studio (UK). Our goals are to develop new tools, improve current tools and expand the range of browsers, operating systems and languages in which our tools are available."
Vernon Fowler

Joe Dolson: Accessibility And WordPress: Developing For The Whole World | WordPress.tv - 0 views

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    This presentation covers accessibility topics including implementing best practice accessibility for theme and plug-in developers, discussing current progress and goals from the WordPress Accessibility P2 group, and addresses general principles of accessibility useful for every WordPress developer and designer.
Vernon Fowler

A comparison of common web accessibility problems - Web Accessibility - 0 views

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    "An accessible web site is one which can be used by all its intended visitors, taking into account their differing capabilities. Inaccessible web sites can pose significant barriers to people with disabilities. The challenge of developing web content accessible by everyone has motivated the evolvement of a number of techniques to address web accessibility issues. Unfortunately, web developers often lack sufficient knowledge about these guidelines and techniques to develop accessible web sites. This paper presents a survey of common web accessibility problems. Different studies and reports have been analyzed in order to summarize the most common web accessibility problems. "
Sandra Earl

Designing and Developing mobile web sites in the real world, part 2 - Opera Developer C... - 0 views

  • In tandem with the launch of their 3G mobile website, Siminn also launched a slightly lighter version of the same site - a 2G-optimized mobile presence to serve less powerful phones. Both sites are anchored to the same reservoir of information, but the 3G site makes less-restricted use of CSS, images, and other coding ornamentations.
  • The only distinction Siminn makes concerning the dimensionality of the user-experience is whether the device is 2G or 3G enabled. As stated before, 2G devices are sent to a slightly lighter version of the 3G site
  • This is exactly what Siminn are doing. By detecting the type of phone, they are presenting the customer with the most appropriate version of the page – either the 3G enhanced or the more basic design.
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  • e chose not to try and replicate the entire Icelandair website, but rather to cleave from it four or five of its most crucial elements.
  • This page contains the only form on the mobile site. In general, forms should be avoided because form input via a mobile device can be a tricky endeavor. However, there are certain coding practices that can simplify form input. For example, if your form field should only accept numeric input, then you should make use of the -wap-input-format property of WAP CSS. The Apple iPhone will automatically set the input to numeric if the name of the input element is set to certain values - phone or zip for example.
  • Mobile users only need to be shown news items that have some inherent urgency.
  • Much like your desktop browser recognizes a mailto: link as an email address, mobile devices recognize tel: links and phone numbers.
  • Do not assume that just because the UA string is not in your enumerated list of “Accepted strings”, it is not possible to view the site.
  • This is where you build in progressive enhancements to the website experience.
  • WURFL is an open source list of known phones and their capabilities. This can be put into a database and when a mobile device visits the your site you can sniff the UA, look-up the capabilities of that device (including screen-dimensions, default browser, etc) and serve them the best possible experience.
  • The RDF vocabulary is a standard across many mobile devices. Vendors that use this approach allow mobile sites to keep up-to-date with any new devices, without having to keep their own database of device types.
  • ou can find more details about standards support in Opera Mini/Mobile 4 here: Designing with Opera Mini 4 in mind JavaScript support in Opera Mini 4
  • There are a few basic coding items to avoid in the mobile web space. Chief among these, at least for now (now being 10/2007), is client-side scripting.
  • While it's tempting to try and port that elegant bit of AJAX from your conventional web to your mobile web, you will only create headaches for yourself.
  • ome browsers do support various levels of JavaScript, but as a developer you should not expect it to work across all devices.
  • retty heavy processor hog, so continuous scripting can drain a battery fast
  • mobile browser support for stylesheets varies greatly.
  • keep things simple.
  • most mobile devices default to their own font sizes and families regardless of styling. Thus, when working on the Siminn project we made no attempt to influence font size or family. In cases where we wanted a larger font, we simply relied on the generic XHTML heading elements.
  • he inclusion of font-size=smaller in the body tag worked as a kind of global reset for font sizes in every device we tested. With this little bit of code we were able to sufficiently reduce the default font size and thus more faithfully reproduce the design that we had been tasked with coding.
  • XHTML-MP - the mobile web subset of XHTML - is fully supported on most modern devices.
  • You can't read 2 books and several articles about mobile web development and cover everything. Much of the effort is trial and error. When starting out, emulators are a good way to get a rough idea of how the site will work. It gives you some feel for the navigation, architecture and flow of the site, but the look and feel varies from the emulator to the real device. The best thing you can do is get a few real phones to test on. I'm sure between yourself, co-workers and a few friends, you can manage to test your site on a good cross-section of the phones out there. Finally, there is some help. The W3C mobile web initiative does have a checklist to see how well your site is doing and so does dev.mobi - if you take heed of these two lists, your site should give a quality experience to most customers.
Sandra Earl

Thoughts around universal access on mobile from Accessibility 2.0 » iheni :: ... - 0 views

  • Yahoo’s! graded browser support helps developers framework what browsers and versions they should target on desktop. This got me wondering if we need something similar for mobile. Seeing as Chris Heilmann from Yahoo! was sat in the audience I thought I might direct the question at him during the panel (also mentioned over Twitter) and being the thoroughly top bloke he is he listened. I know many larger orgnisations will have this sot of information fed into the test plans but for the large majority of us we have to figure it out as we go along. Not only that it’s such a fast changing target that it’s impossible to keep up with on your own.
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    "Yahoo's! graded browser support helps developers framework what browsers and versions they should target on desktop. This got me wondering if we need something similar for mobile. Seeing as Chris Heilmann from Yahoo! was sat in the audience I thought I might direct the question at him during the panel (also mentioned over Twitter) and being the thoroughly top bloke he is he listened. I know many larger orgnisations will have this sot of information fed into the test plans but for the large majority of us we have to figure it out as we go along. Not only that it's such a fast changing target that it's impossible to keep up with on your own."
Sandra Earl

Tim Anderson's ITWriting - Tech writing blog » Adobe AIR: 10 reasons to love ... - 0 views

  • 3. Easy conversion of existing Flex or HTML applications. It’s the same basic runtime. In the case of HTML, AIR apps rely on WebKit, the core component in Apple’s Safari web browser.
  • 7. Rich design and multimedia. This is Flash, so ideal for highly customized UIs, animation, sound and video. Adobe is proving the point by creating a media player built with AIR. Existing Flash developers can easily use their skills to build AIR applications.
  • 4. Proprietary technology. AIR applications depend on Adobe’s runtime.
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  • 6. No model for commercial components. It is not clear to me how a component vendor could sell an AIR component while protecting it from unlicensed deployment. This may limit the availability of 3rd party components, with a corresponding impact on productivity.
  • 7. Schizophrenic development model. AIR supports either Flex development, or HTML applications which run in WebKit. The ugly side of this flexibility is that there are two SDKs, even two JavaScript virtual machines with different capabilities and characteristics. While it is nice to have a way to render HTML, I am not convinced that the web application model is worth it, given the complications it causes. After all, web applications run perfectly well in the browser.
  • Lack of UI standards may lead to annoying inconsistencies between AIR applications. We are used to this on the Web; now it is coming to the desktop as well.
Sandra Earl

YUI Theater - Doug Geoffray: "From the Mouth of a Screenreader" » Yahoo! User... - 0 views

  • he context is important for us on the frontend as we begin to confront the same challenges that desktop software developers have been addressing for many years.
  • Doug been a touchstone for us at YUI in the research and development of our Menu Control, a project that is helping us to lay a foundation for what is possible in terms of DHTML accessibility as YUI evolves.
Vernon Fowler

Command F5 Web Accessibility Project - 0 views

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    "Encouraging Accessible & Inclusive Design and Development"
Vernon Fowler

HTML_CodeSniffer - 0 views

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    HTML_CodeSniffer is a client-side script that checks HTML source code and detects violations of a defined coding standard. HTML_CodeSniffer is written entirely in JavaScript, does not require any server-side processing and can be extended by developers to enforce custom coding standards by creating your own "sniffs". To get you started, HTML_CodeSniffer comes with standards that enforce the three conformance levels of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, and the web-related components of the U.S. "Section 508" legislation. An auditor interface is provided by a bookmarklet to let you try out these accessibility checks on any web page.
Vernon Fowler

WAVE Help - 0 views

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    "WAVE is tool to help web developers make their web content more accessible. WAVE cannot tell you if your web content is accessible. Only a human can determine true accessibility. But, WAVE can help you evaluate the accessibility of your web content."
Sandra Earl

untitled - 0 views

  • The upsurge in VoiceOver could be explained in part by iPhone now providing VoiceOver support; all of a sudden there is a very real reason to switch to Mac if you can use a screen reader you are familiar with on both your desktop and mobile.
  • The upsurge in VoiceOver could be explained in part by iPhone now providing VoiceOver support; all of a sudden there is a very real reason to switch to Mac if you can use a screen reader you are familiar with on both your desktop and mobile.
  • It’s good to also see the free, open source NVDA on the up. They’ve worked hard to include WAI-ARIA support and are becoming a key tool for web developers when testing.
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  • We’re still faced with one massive problem with mobile access however and that’s the lack of an open, cross platform accessibility API that mobile screen readers can hook into. On desktop we have IAccessible2, MSAA and UI Automation (amongst others) but on mobile users are tied into one platform often only supporting one browser (such as iPhone, Blackberry RIM and others) so while desktop has opened up we find ourselves in a 1990’s type impasse with users left with little room to choose on mobile. Opera works well with VoiceOver but we have no way of telling if it works on the iPhone as it’s not supported. My hope is that with more users there’ll be more momentum behind breaking this stand off and opening up the market and ultimately giving users not only choice but portability between platforms.
  • It’s good to also see the free, open source NVDA on the up. They’ve worked hard to include WAI-ARIA support and are becoming a key tool for web developers when testing.
  • « Yay factor! Going global with standards and BBC Click on web accessibility Make video accessible, localised, mobile and searchable by captioning » Screen reader software usage shifts on desktop and mobile Nov 4th, 2009 by iheni WebAim released their 2009 Screen Reader Survey last week, a follow up from last years Screen Reader survey. Very good reading it makes too but of particular interest are results around screen reader choice on the desktop and increased screen reader access on mobile. For years it’s felt like screen reader users have mainly used IE on the desktop in combination with the major screen readers Jaws by Freedom Scientific and WindowEyes by GW Micro. It’s not that other platforms don’t support screen readers (we have Orca on Linux, VoiceOver on Mac) it’s just that IE seems to have dominated. As such what types of content and web technologies users can and can’t access has very much been driven by what the three software vendors Microsoft, Freedom Scientific and GW Micro have supported. This has made access to the open web a bit lopsided cutting down on choice for the end user, competition and by extension innovation. SVG is an example of a web technology that has possibly suffered by not being supported by IE and in turn by Jaws and WindowEyes. What’s interesting to see in this year’s survey is that Jaws and WindowEyes – while still the most used – have some stiff competition at snapping at their heels from open source, free screen readers (NVDA and  SAToGo ) and VoiceOver which is available with Mac: JAWS 75.2% Window Eyes 23.5% VoiceOver 14.6% System Access or System Access To Go 22.3% NVDA 25.6% While this year’s stats show little shift for Jaws and WindowEyes usage overall there is a significant leap forward for NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) and VoiceOver: Of the 1121 respondents, 74% use JAWS, 23% use Window-Eyes, 8% use NVDA, and 6% use VoiceOver. While several other screen readers were reported, these were the most prominently reported. The upsurge in VoiceOver could be explained in part by iPhone now providing VoiceOver support; all of a sudden there is a very real reason to switch to Mac if you can use a screen reader you are familiar with on both your desktop and mobile. This could also explain the increase of screen reader users on mobile reported this year with 53% of survey respondents with disabilities confirming they use a screen reader on a mobile device. This is up from 12% last year (although last year’s survey doesn’t distinguish disabled from non-disabled users). I wonder how much this is to do with the ‘iPhone Factor’ but also can’t help thinking that social networking has done for the mobile web what Kylie Minogue did for Agent Provocateur – everybody wants some. And for me at least 2009 feels like the year that we all sat up and paid attention to the potential of mobile for people with disabilities. We’re still faced with one massive problem with mobile access however and that’s the lack of an open, cross platform accessibility API that mobile screen readers can hook into. On desktop we have IAccessible2, MSAA and UI Automation (amongst others) but on mobile users are tied into one platform often only supporting one browser (such as iPhone, Blackberry RIM and others) so while desktop has opened up we find ourselves in a 1990’s type impasse with users left with little room to choose on mobile. Opera works well with VoiceOver but we have no way of telling if it works on the iPhone as it’s not supported. My hope is that with more users there’ll be more momentum behind breaking this stand off and opening up the market and ultimately giving users not only choice but portability between platforms.
  • We’re still faced with one massive problem with mobile access however and that’s the lack of an open, cross platform accessibility API that mobile screen readers can hook into.
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    "We're still faced with one massive problem with mobile access however and that's the lack of an open, cross platform accessibility API that mobile screen readers can hook into."
Sandra Earl

WebAIM: Accessibility of Rich Internet Applications - 0 views

  • WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications or ARIA) is a W3C protocol for enhancing and supporting accessibility of scripted and dynamic content.
  • ARIA provides accessible interactive controls (such as tree menus, drag and drop, sliders, sort controls, etc.), content roles for identifying page structure (navigation, search, main content, etc.), areas that can be dynamically updated (called "live regions" in ARIA), better support for keyboard accessibility and interactivity, and much more.
  • accessibility issues with rich internet applications can be characterized as: Providing the semantic structure of page areas and functionality (e.g., navigation, main content, search, etc.) Maintaining accessibility of content that is dynamic and may change within the page (e.g., AJAX content updates) Allowing certain non-focusable page elements to receive keyboard focus (e.g., setting focus to an error message within the page) Providing keyboard and screen reader accessibility with complex widgets and navigation elements (e.g., sliders, menu trees, etc.)
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  • WAI-ARIA provides the ability for developers to specify roles for document areas (and many other things).
  • ARIA is being implemented into many scripting libraries (such as jQuery, Dojo, YUI, and GWT). While developers can certainly implement ARIA into their advanced widgets and applications, using ARIA-supported libraries greatly simplifies the process of providing this level of accessibility.
Sandra Earl

Better Website Development: Disability Discrimination Act Dda Amp Web Accessibility - 0 views

  • There's been widespread speculation about the new legislation being introduced under the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), which will ensure that websites are accessible to blind and disabled users. Try to find specific information about it on the Internet and chances are you'll come up empty handed.The RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) and the DRC (Disability Rights Commission), two of the most renowned advocates for the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) and accessible websites, have no specific information about the laws and what websites specifically need to do in order to meet the legal requirements.
  • 2.2 (p7): "The Act makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members of the public."
  • 4.7 (p39): "From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services."
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  • The law about accessible websites came into force on 1st October 1999 (http://www.drc-gb.org/open4all/law/code.asp) and the Code of Practice for this section of the Act was published on 27th May 2002 (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/si/si2002/20020720.htm). This means that the majority of websites are already in breach of the law.Can you be sued?Well, probably. The RNIB claim that they've considered taking up a number of legal cases against organisations with regard to their websites. When they raised the accessibility issues of the website under the DDA, companies have typically made the necessary changes, rather than facing the prospect of legal action.The DRC has now published their findings from their formal investigation into 1000 websites. (http://www.drc-gb.org/publicationsandreports/2.pdf). If your website was included then you will have to start thinking about making it accessible to all web users in the very near future.
  • What do you need to do to comply?It's widely believed that if, or perhaps more appropriately when, a case makes it to court that the W3C accessibility guidelines will be used to assess a website's accessibility and ultimately decide the outcome of the case. The W3C is the Internet governing body and its web accessibility guidelines can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html.
Sandra Earl

InformIT: The Adobe AIR Platform: Software Revolution or Evolution? > The Adobe AIR Pla... - 0 views

  • Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system platform that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills in HTML, Ajax, XML, Flash and Flex to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications for the desktop.
Vernon Fowler

Don't Use The Placeholder Attribute - Smashing Magazine - 0 views

  • To recap, the placeholder attribute: Can’t be automatically translated; Is oftentimes used in place of a label, locking out assistive technology; Can hide important information when content is entered; Can be too light-colored to be legible; Has limited styling options; May look like pre-filled information and be skipped over.
  • Move the placeholder content above the input, but below the label:
  • Development Here’s how to translate our designed example to code:
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  • aria-describedby ensures that the p content will be described last, after the label’s content and the kind of input it is associated with.
  • By using aria-describedby to programmatically associate the input with the p element, we are creating a priority of information for screen readers that has parity with what a person browsing without a screen reader would experience.
  • The floating label effect, a close cousin to this phenomenon, oftentimes utilizes the placeholder attribute in place of a label, as well.
  • Content hidden by an on-screen keyboard. 3rd party keyboards with larger heights may have a greater risk of blocking important content.
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    Not only argues for not using the placeholder attribute but also describes an inclusive input hint and how to code it.
Vernon Fowler

Inclusively Hidden | scottohara.me - 0 views

  • sometimes content is for decorative purposes only, and it would be optimal to not announce this content to assistive technology.
  • don’t use aria-hidden on focusable content
  • Purposefully Hidden from Assistive Technology
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  • using aria-hidden to hide content specifically from screen readers
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    There are various techniques to visually hide content in our web interfaces, but are you aware of the different effects they have on the accessibility of that content? While it would be nice if there was a single, native, solution for hiding content, there are contextual benefits to the various techniques at our disposal. Since there have been many articles already written about these techniques, over the many years they've been in use, the focus of this article will be to highlight the ones that are most appropriate for modern web development. We won't just look at the code behind each of these techniques, instead we'll focus on why each technique has its place, using practical examples to demonstrate their purposes. But before we talk about how to hide content we should ask ourselves a question… Why are we hiding content?
Vernon Fowler

Don't Rely on Default Browser Error Messages - Intopia - 0 views

  • Another issue is that the messages are temporary. As soon as you put focus on the input with mouse, keyboard or touch, the message disappears. People with cognitive impairments will find it difficult to use these, and I think anyone trying to fill in the form while they’re distracted will have trouble as well. People who rely on the keyboard for navigation (which includes both sighted users and screen reader users) will also lose these messages as they move around the form.
  • If you’re confident of your error messages, you can remove the browser validation by adding the novalidate attribute to the wrapping form element, like this: <form novalidate>...</form>
  • You can style this with CSS, using the :valid and :invalid pseudo-classes
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  • Only the first error is noted with a message.
  • The rest rely on a change of border colour, which is, again, not evident to screen reader users.
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    "When I found out the major browsers were beginning to include error validation into their support for forms, I was pretty excited. Form validation is always a fiddly part of accessibility, so I'm always looking out for ways to make it easier for developers to do properly. I read MDN's form data validation tutorial and a CSS Tricks article on client-side form validation and immediately made some test forms. Sadly, I was disappointed with the results. The default error validation in browsers is almost completely inaccessible. I was hoping we'd get default "you've forgotten to fill this in" messages that could be customised. I might have been a bit too optimistic! Validation at the browser level has many of the same issues we find at the website level."
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