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Vernon Fowler

RGD Launches Best Practices Handbook at DesignThinkers 2010 | Access Ability - 0 views

www.rgd-accessibledesign.com/...andbook-at-designthinkers-2010

accessibility handbook best practices design graphic resources reading webdesign print

shared by Vernon Fowler on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Available in both printed and accessible pdf formats, the handbook is free to anyone interested in designing more accessible and inclusive communications. Covering print, web and environmental design, it offers ideas on how to do better design – what factors to consider, what questions to ask, and where to find more information.
Vernon Fowler

WebAIM: Alternative Text - 0 views

webaim.org/alttext

accessibility resources alt text images logos figure markup html

shared by Vernon Fowler on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Alternative text should not: be redundant (be the same as adjacent or body text). use the phrases "image of…" or "graphic of…".
  • Identifying the logo as actually being a logo (alt="Acme Company Logo") is not typically necessary.
  • If the fact that an image is a photograph or illustration, etc. is important content, it may be useful to include this in alternative text.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Decorative images do not present important content, are used for layout or non-informative purposes, and do not appear within a link. In almost all cases, spacer and decorative images should have null alt text (alt="").
  • In current practice on the web, many such images are given descriptive alternative text even though the images don't seem to provide useful content. Option C (alt="") would probably be most appropriate in this case because the image does not convey relevant or important content.
  • Alternative text should: presents the CONTENT and FUNCTION of the image. be succinct.
  • Decorative images still need an alt attribute, but it should be null (alt="").
Sandra Earl

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

dev.opera.com/...d-developing-mobile-web-site-1

accessibility mobile opera best practices reading

shared by Sandra Earl on 12 Oct 10 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • 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

Blind Access Journal: Window-Eyes 7.0: Releasing the Potential for Momentous Steps Forw... - 0 views

blog.blindaccessjournal.com/...0-releasing-potential-for.html

accessibility screen reader Windows Eyes

shared by Sandra Earl on 12 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • A screen reader simply enables a blind person to use the applications and operating system on a computer without sight by converting on-screen text into a Braille or spoken format. Intelligent screen readers like Window-Eyes deliver information in a linear format, interpret the active window, read complex web pages and perform many other advanced functions.
  • Although scripting is, by far, the number one enhancement found in this latest Window-Eyes release, other new features are noteworthy in their own right. Geoffray tells us that Window-Eyes is now 100 percent Unicode compliant. This enables access to foreign language text, certain PDF documents not previously readable, Microsoft Word’s smart quoting feature and any other situation where use of special symbols is required. Intelligent place markers may now be defined on dynamic web pages delivering quick access to a specific area of the page based not only on its virtual line number, but also on the text at the cursor. A new Eloquence speech synthesizer, access to the Firefox 3.0 web browser, support for the public beta version of Internet Explorer 8.0
Sandra Earl

Multiple form labels and screen readers | 456 Berea Street - 0 views

www.456bereastreet.com/...form_labels_and_screen_readers

accessibility forms labels JavaScript alerts

shared by Sandra Earl on 12 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Well, it turns out you can do that. From The LABEL element in the HTML 4.01 specification: The LABEL element may be used to attach information to controls. Each LABEL element is associated with exactly one form control. The for attribute associates a label with another control explicitly: the value of the for attribute must be the same as the value of the id attribute of the associated control element. More than one LABEL may be associated with the same control by creating multiple references via the for attribute. Sounds great, doesn’t it? A quick check in graphical web browsers shows that they associate multiple labels with the input field (as evidenced by the input field gaining focus when either label is clicked). But what about screen readers? It would be so useful if this would work… Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it looks like it doesn’t quite work as well as you’d hope. I mentioned this briefly in Use the label element to make your HTML forms accessible, but I think it’s worth bringing up again since full support for multiple labels would help us make forms more accessible to screen reader users while keeping visual designers happy. I am far from an expert user when it comes to screen readers, but I’ve done some limited testing with mostly disappointing results. Apple VoiceOver does not recognise more than one label element associated with a form control and reads only the label that comes first in the document’s source order. JAWS and Window-Eyes both do the opposite and read only the last label when an input field gains focus. The only screen reader of those that I tested that does handle multiple labels is Fire Vox. The exact results may obviously depend on user configuration and reading modes, and there may be other screen readers that get it right, but these results indicate that screen reader behaviour is too inconsistent for multiple labels to be a reliable technique.
Vernon Fowler

Why describe movie lengths in minutes, and not hours AND minutes? - Straight Dope Messa... - 0 views

boards.straightdope.com/...showthread.php

Video movie length time information

shared by Vernon Fowler on 27 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • 167 minutes is clearer in meaning Does 2:47 mean "2 hours, 47 minutes", "2 minutes, 47 seconds" or 2:47 pm?
Vernon Fowler

WebAIM: Usable and Accessible Form Validation and Error Recovery - 0 views

webaim.org/...formvalidation

validation accessibility usability forms errors aria

shared by Vernon Fowler on 16 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Errors on top
  • As one would guess, the "Errors on top" approach causes the error message to appear before the form. When presented, focus should generally be set directly to this error message. This allows screen reader and keyboard users to immediately access the error message without having to find it amongst the rest of the page contents. The message should also be visually apparent. Focus can be set to the message with client-side scripting using JavaScript focus() or similar, or the server-generated page can include an anchor name in the URI (e.g., http://myserver.com/form.php#errormessage) which will set focus directly to a named anchor or element id located at the beginning of the feedback message.
  • also helpful to inform the user as to the number of errors that were detected
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • provide a link within the error message that will set focus to the appropriate form control
  • Regardless of the mechanism used to identify and recover from form errors, aria-invalid="true" should generally be set on each invalid form control. This attribute causes screen readers to identify the control as being "invalid" or in need of attention.
Vernon Fowler

WebAIM: To ARIA! The Cause of, and Solution to, All Our Accessibility Problems - 0 views

webaim.org/...aria-cause-solution

accessibility aria

shared by Vernon Fowler on 16 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • this role is often used extraneously (<button role="button">)
  • aria-label can also override other important information such as link text
  • aria-expanded This can tell screen reader users that activating a button or link will cause content to expand and collapse below (e.g., an accordion), and also whether it is currently collapsed or expanded.
Vernon Fowler

WebAIM: Links and Hypertext - Link Text and Appearance - 0 views

webaim.org/...link_text

links hypertext link text accessibility usability UX webdesign

shared by Vernon Fowler on 26 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • links are more useful when they make sense out of context
  • In most cases, it is better to use human-readable text instead of the URL.
  • The alternative text should convey the content of the image and the function of the link. In most cases, the content of the image and function of the link are the same, so this text can be very succinct (e.g, alt="Products").
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • When images are used as links, the alternative text performs the function of link text.
  • on both mouse hover and keyboard focus
  • they are also accustomed to seeing tabs and main navigational features (oftentimes created as graphics rather than text) without underlining. In these cases, the linked items should be designed so it is apparent that the user can click on them to perform an action.
  • Authors should avoid non-informative link phrases such as: click here here more read more link to [some link destination] info
  • adjacent links should have adequate whitespace (such as link CSS margins) between them to minimize users inadvertently clicking the wrong link
  • an alphabetical index may use each individual letter of the alphabet as a link
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