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"assistive technology" conference law

Web Accessibility Conference (Nov 11-14, Boulder, CO)

The University of Colorado-Boulder is hosting the 11th Annual Accessing Higher Ground Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference, November 11- 14, 2008.

The main topics include:

  • implementation and benefits of Assistive Technology in the university and college setting
  • legal and policy issues, including ADA and 508 compliance
  • campus media and information resources, including Web pages, accessible

The web site describes the event as:

Disability Services at the University of Colorado at Boulder presents Accessing Higher Ground: Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference for Education, for Businesses, for Web and Media Designers

Categories
acrobat adobe

Acrobat 9 and Accessibility

As you may know, Acrobat 9 has recently been released. Fortunately for all, making PDFs accessible is even easier than ever.

There’s some good information on the Acrobat 9 accessibility FAQ page, and many accessibility features are explained. Here are the highlights:

  • Acrobat has an OCR text recognition feature that allows you to apply OCR to the scanned pages.
  • The form tools in Acrobat 9 Pro and Acrobat 9 Pro Extended allow you to automatically recognize form fields in PDF files and Microsoft Word documents.
  • Several tools can create tagged PDF files automatically, including: Microsoft Office applications when Acrobat is installed; the most recent versions of Adobe FrameMaker®, InDesign®, LiveCycle Designer ES, and PageMaker®; the Web Capture feature in Acrobat.

Podcast on creating accessible PDFs

[update June 6] Refresh Detroit’s next meetup will feature a presentation on this topic. Acrobat: Features, accessibility, and version 9 – June 18, 2008

Categories
stats

Five Most Common Accessibility Errors

In the blog post Web Accessibility – The Power of Five, E-Access Bulletin Live reports on a web accessibility study completed by the Society of IT Management (Socitm). The study cites the five most common web accessibility errors, which reportedly make up 76% of all website accessibility failures.

  1. no alternative text for images
  2. inappropriate use of JavaScript
  3. errors in simple data tables
  4. errors in complex data tables
  5. use of features with a lack of accessible alternatives
Categories
articles cognitive screenreader

Writing for Accessibility Article

In his article Writing for Accessibility, Joe Dolson explains that accessible copy is more than making non-textual elements available, it’s also about the main content! He continues to explain how tone and puncuation are very sensitive and important issues when writing for accessibility. Joe suggests:

  • Keep your sentences on the short side
  • Avoid excessive parenthetical statements
  • Avoid excessive subclauses
  • Read the sentence without giving any particular emphasis to the terms and see how easy it is to understand the statement

Related links:

Categories
guidelines wcag

WCAG 2.0 published as Candidate Recommendation

Today the WCAG 2.0 has been advanced to Candidate Recommendation status. This is a big step in the long W3C guideline development process. What this means is that most people agree on the technical aspects of the much needed update to WCAG 1.0, and we can start using WCAG 2.0 as a guideline as it’s “Ready to Test-Drive”.

In the words of WCAG:

We are excited to announce that Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
(WCAG 2.0) was published as a W3C Candidate Recommendation on 30 April 2008. The Candidate Recommendation stage means that there is broad consensus on the technical content, and W3C invites you to implement WCAG 2.