Categories
audio caption

Why Captioning Sucks

As you may know, captioning is required for accessible audio/video presentations. The Open & Closed Project (from Joe Clark) explains the downfalls of captioning on the new web site Captioning Sucks! Reasons cited are as follows (and you’ll have to go to the site to fully understand!):

  • Not enough of it
  • They don’t listen
  • It’s hard to read
  • The wrong kind
  • The fox is watching the hen house
  • There are no standards
Categories
cognitive webaim

Cognitive Accessibility Survey

Cognitive disabilities are the least recognized in the world of web accessibility (as opposed to visual, auditory, and motor). The goal of WebAIM’s Steppingstones Project is to “help web developers consider issues of cognitive disability in their designs”. To assist in this process, WebAIM is inviting people to complete its Cognitive Disability and Web Accessibility Survey. It takes about 10 minutes.

Categories
pdf podcast standards wcag webaim

Podcast #62: Web Accessibility News

Dennis and Ross discuss a variety of recent web accessibility news and events.

Download Web Axe Episode 62 (Web Accessibility News)

HTML 5 and Accessibility post — comment from Laura Carlson of Web Standards Group with great info and links.

WAVE toolbar and blog available

Reference Card for Accessible PDF Creation from Word from the Adobe Accessibility blog by Andrew Kirkpatrick (Download Reference Card)

For Review: UAAG 2.0 First Public Working Draft

Joe Clark has released the (final?) update to the WCAG Samurai’s errata. Also see The WCAG Samurai Errata are now available.

Moving WCAG 2.0 to the next stage (W3C March 2008 Update)

Radio New Zealand Interview of Shawn Henry, February 2008

Are Lists Becoming the New Tables?

IE8 announces change in “version targeting”:

CSS Globe, 11 Good Accessibility Tips

SXSW panels of note:

The Digital Bus – a blog about digital marketing

Categories
standards

HTML 5 and Accessibility

HTML 5 is under development, and I thought I’d point out some proposed changes that directly affect accessibility, namely, the removal of certain attributes:

  • accesskey attribute on a, area, button, input, label, legend and textarea
  • longdesc attribute on img and iframe
  • target attribute on link
  • summary attribute on table
  • headers, axis and abbr attributes on td and th
  • scope attribute on td

Key Links

Categories
disability stats

Most web design companies ignore disabled people

In a report from the UK, where web accessibility is more widely practiced than in most other countries, 75% of Local web design companies ignore disabled people. Unfortunately, I’m sure that percentage is much higher here in the United States, where accessible web sites are still limited to not much more than some government and education sites.