Author: Dennis

Book: Universal Design for Web Applications

Post author By Dennis
Post date February 5, 2009
1 Comment on Book: Universal Design for Web Applications

Universal Design for Web Applications is a recently published book (by O’Reilly Media November 2008) which sounds very promising. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s received favorable reviews. Topics include:

How do you sell accessibility?
W3C documentation
Web page structure and design
Forms
Tables
Videos
Scripting and WAI-ARIA

There is an excellent review of the book by Accessify, which ends by stating:

I can definitely see my copy being lent to various colleagues in the coming months as I try to get them up to speed with modern web development techniques and how they relate to the world of accessibility.

WCAG 2.0 Checklist from WebAIM

Post author By Dennis
Post date January 28, 2009
No Comments on WCAG 2.0 Checklist from WebAIM

WebAIM has recently published a valuable WCAG 2.0 Checklist—objective recommendations, or techniques, under each Success Criteria item for each Guideline. Like WCAG 2, the Guidelines are organized under the four principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. WebAIM is asking for feedback on the list.

In WebAIM’s words, the checklist is described as:

a simple checklist that presents the principles and techniques of WCAG 2.0 in a more user-friendly, understandable format

articles expert firefox twitter

Improving Twitter Accessibility

Post author By Dennis
Post date January 22, 2009
2 Comments on Improving Twitter Accessibility

I admit I’m hooked on Twitter, but unfortunately, like many web sites, it’s not very web accessible.

Thanks to Gez Lemon of Juicy Studio, you may now implement a Focus Twitter Greasemonkey script to help with web accessibility, specifically keyboard use. With the script, the user is now able to view the Favorite, Reply and Delete links for each tweet in the timeline on the focus event (in addition to on current mouseover event, which obviously requires a mouse).

In order to use the script, you have to install Greasemonkey which is a Firefox add-on, so it obviously requires the Firefox web browser.

Learn more about it in the Juicy Studio article Twitter Focus.

UPDATE (Feb 3)

The script was broken due to Twitter changing code on their site, but it is now fixed.
I (Dennis) am working on an Accessible Twitter web site and hope to launch it within a couple weeks!

roundup

Web Axe 2008 in Review

Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties (my computer’s power supply failing), the podcast for this post will not be done. -Dennis

Current News

Index of Government Guidelines for Web Sites
Adding a Map to Your Web Site, posted December 1st, 2008 by Mike Cherim
Accessibility testing tips and tools presentation
Inaccessible Recruitment Websites “An Emerging Scandal”
Screen Reader Survey

Main Segment

WCAG 2.0 finally official! WCAG 2.0 Published as Final Recommendation!
In February, Joe Clark (now retired from web accessibility ) released the final update to the WCAG Samurai’s errata. Also see The WCAG Samurai Errata are now available.
ARIA advancements; ARIA momentum and Internet Explorer
WebAIM’s WAVE 4.0 toolbar and translation project.
In November, Dennis’ first conference presentation, Ajax and Web Accessibility.
MyClientTime (previously TimeTracker) is launched! An accessible web application designed to track and report sessions between professionals and their clients.
Web Axe was nominated for “Podcast of the Year” in .net magazine’s 2008 Best of the Web awards. Boagworld won.
You can now donate to Web Axe with PayPal. See sidebar button.
WCAG 2.0 Theme Song Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Podcast Highlights

standards wcag wcag2

WCAG 2.0 Published as Final Recommendation!

Post author By Dennis
Post date December 12, 2008
No Comments on WCAG 2.0 Published as Final Recommendation!

Yes, it’s now official! At last. WCAG 2.0 has been officially published as a final Web Standard “W3C Recommendation” on December 11, 2008. For more, read the W3C blog announcement A New Era for Web Accessibility: WCAG 2.0 is Finalized.