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Sandra Earl

E-Access Blog » Blog Archive » Organisation in the Spotlight - W3C: Global St... - 0 views

  • One major new piece of work undertaken by WAI is the EC-funded WAI-AGE Project (http://www.w3.org/WAI/WAI-AGE/), a look at the implications of an ageing population for web access, given the older people are more likely to have disabilities and may also be less familiar with new technologies. “Demographics worldwide are dramatically changing at the moment,” says Andrew Arch, who works with Abou-Zahra on WAI-AGE. “The proportions of older to younger people are changing as well as the numbers. We’re living longer, and we haven’t got the support behind us. “Lots of things have got to change in governments and organisations - with an ageing workforce, you have to keep learning to stay accessible.”
  • The WAI-AGE project is partly aimed at finding out whether there are any significant new pieces of work needed to ensure web accessibility for an older population, Arch says. “We’ve looked at what research and user observation has gone on over the decade. There is a pretty big overlap between older people and others with disabilities - sight starts to decline, motor dexterity - and individually these overlap. But with older people there is often a lack of recognition that there is a disability there. For example some people might just say they can’t remember so well, rather than that they have a cognitive impairment. Or people won’t see failing eye-sight as a disability, it’s just ‘part of growing old’. But they are disabilities, and often multiple disabilities.”
  • Having gained a grasp of current research the project returned to guidelines such as WCAG 2.0 to see if any changes might be needed. “A large proportion of the needs of older people are met by the new guidelines, but other things might need to feed into the guidance we will issue on implementing the guidelines, for example guidance on how people prepare content for older people.,” said Arch. “Many older people have not grown up with computers, and may not realise their capabilities, for example that you can magnify text in your browser.”
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  • This argument is a development of the age-old mantra from the accessibility sector that people with disabilities want to use the web in the same way as everybody else - “it is a human right recognised by the UN,” says Abou-Zahra. But he recognizes that businesses in particular will also  be interested in the additional business benefits, especially in the current financial climate.
  • “With commercial organisations the return on investment is often an important argument. Well, a few years ago, companies might have said ‘how many older people are online?’ but with demographics changing they know the answer. And with the current surge in mobile phone use there is another incentive, since accessible sites work better on mobile phones.”
  • Another change of style will be a greater separation between the core guidelines and references to specific technologies such as Javascript or browser types, Abou-Zahra says.
  • “WCAG 1.0 was too  technology-specific. Back then HTML was more dominant, and there was less use of multimedia, but today we have a flurry of technologies such as Ajax, so the first lesson we learned is don’t write for a specific technology. Also, in the days of WCAG 1.0 we had to exclude Javascript because it was not sufficiently standardised and  assistive technology could not handle it consistently, but now that has largely changed so you need to include it, to look at how any technology should be accessible. The requirements - such as tagging images with text - needs to apply to any technology you are using.
Sandra Earl

Accessibility in web design provides a high degree of usability - 0 views

  • The BBC has developed a script called Betsie, which will convert pages to plain HTML.
  • There can be a fine line between enabling and excluding technology. All it takes is some careless HTML, the addition of a few unsupported images and some multimedia frills, and entire web sites can disappear from view for substantial numbers of users.
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 - Victor Tsaran: "Introduction to Screen Readers" » Yahoo! User I... - 0 views

  • YUI Theater’s newest video is a 27 minute Introduction to Screen Readers by Victor Tsaran, an engineer here at Yahoo! and our Program Manager for Accessibility.
Sandra Earl

YUI Theater - Karo Caran and Victor Tsaran: "Introduction to Screen Magnifier... - 0 views

  • With the goal of better understanding how people interact with the Web via various types of Assistive Technology (AT) — and what that might mean for developers and designers — Karo Caran takes us on a 16 minute overview of screen magnification software (in this case ZoomText) and how it is used by partially-sighted users to interact with the Web. Karo shows you the basic toolkit and then applies those tools to some typical web sites to give you some perspective on how she uses magnification software while she browses the web.
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.
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