Here’s a great article from Accessibility 101 that provides 101 tips for developing an accessible web site. Many are basic, but many are not as well known. Anyone can learn a little something from this list.
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Author: Dennis
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UN Audit of Web Accessibility
The United Nations commissioned a report on web accessibility with very disappointing results. Only 3 home pages from 100 web sites achieved Single-A accessibility from the WCAG 1.0 guidelines (the lowest level of web accessibility compliance). The sites were chosen from 20 countries in 5 categories (Travel, Finance, Media, Politics, and Retail).
Also, here’s a blog post about the issue along with a lot of discussion at 456 Berea St: 97% of websites are still inaccessible.
Dennis and Ross discuss various techniques on coding for web accessibility (in follow up to Podcast #34: Design Considerations for Web Accessibility). Topics include:
- Progressive Enhancement
- Code order
- Semantic code
- Scalability
- Navigation
Download Web Axe Episode 37 (Code Considerations for Accessibility)
News
- Microsoft homepage redesigned; now it is a CSS layout but still HTML 4.01.
- Screenreader Emulator Firefox Extension
- Web Accessibility News Video
Links
- CSS Layout templates (Glish)
- “skip-to” links (Web Axe)
- Accessible Tableless Forms (Web Axe)
- In Search of the Holy Grail (CSS Layout article from A List Apart)
So you would like to test your web site for screenreaders. It may not the final test, maybe it is. Maybe you don’t have screenreader software, or the resources to hire testers, or the time. What do you do?
Here comes the Fangs Screen Reader Emulator for Firefox 1.5 to the rescue. It’s by Peter Krantz of Standards-Schmandards. It’s yet another valuable Firefox extension for development. Fangs will open a new window with a text sampling of what a screenreader would “say”. It also has a tab for a basic headings list and a list of links. Very nifty.
[Fangs] renders a text version of a web page similar to screen reader output. Helps developers find accessibility issues fast.
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Web Accessibility News Video
There’s a great news segment on web accessibility from the BBC, and available in a video clip. It explains the difficulties of non-accessible web sites pretty well. Check it out: