Web Accessibility

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.

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.

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.

Liquid layouts get rid of the dreaded horizontal scrollbar

Liquid layouts allow you to make full use of the area available in the viewport, showing more or less content, depending on what will fit at any given moment.

Liquid layouts essentially allow users to choose the line length, or number of text characters per line of text, that is most comfortable for them to read.

WinBraille 5 Free WinBraille 5 Free includes the most commonly used braille editing functions. It handles most document types like office, pdf, and e-mails. Vista and XP support Office 2003 and 2007 support Supports import of Duxbury files

As stated by renowned accessibility expert Shawn Lawton Hewitt, Web Accessibility simply means that people with disabilities can use the Web.  More specifically, Web Accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with the Web.

It is important to understand one aspect that most experts agree on – an individual web site can never be perfectly accessible to everybody. This has to do with the sheer diversity of disabilities as well as the potential overlap of multiple disabilities. But a systematic approach like implementing the WCAG guidelines can go long way in accommodating a very large number of people.

I’ve been using this for years and can’t understand why it isn’t available in Mail’s GUI. Here’s what to do: Quit Mail.app Open Terminal.app Enter defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE and press enter (toggle it back by changing TRUE to FALSE) Open Mail.app View an HTML message and marvel at the readable plain text The catch is that this only works for messages that actually contain a plain text alternative, which far from all HTML email does.

Specify the minimum font size Apple Mail uses for HTML messages As a fallback for the messages that do not contain a plain text alternative it is useful to make sure that the text at least has a readable size: Quit Mail.app Open Terminal.app Enter defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13 in the Terminal window and press enter Open Mail.app View an HTML message and marvel at the readable font size You can change the font size to whatever suits your eyes. Apply both of these and you should be able to read most of the HTML email that you receive.

An online resource of open source, royalty-free assistive technology tools, accessible and usable at any time and across the world, is to be launched next year by a consortium of more than 30 US and European IT and disability organisations and leaders, the European Commission e-Inclusion conference heard this month.

Cal State University, with its 23 campuses and 250,000 students, has signed contracts with Moodlerooms and ANGEL, according to Campus Technology. (I’ve known this was in the works for some time now, but I guess it just went official.) These are statewide pricing contracts; individual campuses still get to choose whatever system they choose. Still, it’s a big deal for both vendors, as well as for the Moodle community. Word on the street is that both Moodle and ANGEL got particularly high marks because of their strong accessibility; California has strict accessibility laws and regulations.

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.

Christian asks what would be the open-source equivalent of AIR? XUL says Ian. Christian says that AIR is built on HTML, CSS and JavaScript so once the player gets keyboard access it will be quite accessible. Ian responds that he looked on the Adobe site for accessibility info on AIR and the fact that he found nothing scared him.

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.

We considered a few approaches, but decided to grow our new widget out of Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR. This is firstly because these tools met our requirements to work cross-platform and deliver the desktop experience we wanted, and also because they linked up with in-house skills in the team which manages them, making them simpler to manage.

BBC Future Media & Technology's pilot widget application BBC LiveUpdate uses the Adobe AIR runtime, which is dependent on users downloading and installing a plugin to their desktop, but which unfortunately does not currently support screenreaders (or other software which relies on the Microsoft Active Accessibility layer for assistive technologies). We're working with Adobe to make tools built with AIR more accessible than current products wherever possible and are committed to delivering accessible services. As this is a beta product, there are also other limitations in how much we have been able to establish accessibility support in the following areas:Colour contrast cannot be alteredText size cannot be alteredLacks consistent alt textLacks Title attributesIs not entirely tabbable.

Captivate has a number of accessibility features in version 3 and 4 although there are some issues that Adobe is working on.

Ensure that the “enable accessibility” checkbox is checked under the File > Publish settings in order for accessibility to be exposed to assistive technologies.

Slide Accessibility Text Each slide can contain accessibility text. This can be added by going to the slide properties, activating the Accessibility button and entering text in the text field.

Distance education is not only appealing to people in full-time employment, but it can be empowering and accessible to students with a wide variety of disabilities. I’ve had students who are blind, visually impaired, hearing impaired, physically disabled, as well as a whole host of learning disabilities including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyspraxia, dyslexia, and other mental disabilities.

In Boagworld podcast episode 130, I discovered that in order to help test web accessibility, Paul Boag wears glasses (that he doesn't need) and gloves and attempts to navigate through a site. Excellent idea!In order to better understand [the elderly's] experience I have bought a pair to ski gloves and some reading glasses (I don't need reading glasses). Every now and again, I surf the site I am designing wearing both the glasses and gloves. The glasses make the screen hard to read while the gloves hamper my use of the mouse and the keyboard. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to select something from a drop down menu wearing ski gloves!

Personally I have several reasons for advocating Web accessibility. First of all an idealistic one: I want everybody to be able to use the Web. I am not disabled (yet), so I can (and am often forced to) muddle through sites that are badly built, but a person with a disability may not be able to. Since it is possible to build sites that almost everybody can use, I don’t see why we shouldn’t. Then a few reasons that some may call selfish: I do not have any problems related to motor skills, but I have a really hard time using dropdown and flyout menus, especially hierarchical ones, as well as phony Flash or JavaScript scrollbar imitations. Accessible sites in general either do not contain such obstacles or provide ways around them. Despite having no substantial eyesight problems, I find reading tiny text (below 11px is tiny to me), low contrast text, and reading any size high contrast, light-on-dark text to be very straining. A website designed with accessibility in mind is less likely to cause legibility problems for me. I like being able to use my keyboard to navigate websites. Accessible sites are keyboard friendly since they do not force people to use a mouse.

Some people call me a validation fanatic, and maybe they are right. I do want every HTML document I create and all the sites I build to be valid and remain valid. Validation is an integral part of quality assurance to me