Web AxeThe 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:
Download Web Axe Episode 37 (Code Considerations for Accessibility)
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.
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:
In addition to a nice caption tag and summary attribute, you may know that a data table requires table header cells (TH) for the header rows and/or columns, and a scope attribute (see Web Axe episode 3, Data Tables). But what is there is more than one row of headers? This is called a complex table, and a different type of coding should be used.
Download Web Axe Episode 36 (Complex Data Tables)
A complex table:
id and headers attributesLinks:
Sample code (modified from WebAIM):
| Name | Age | Birthday | |
|---|---|---|---|
| by birth | Jackie | 5 | April 5 |
| Beth | 8 | January 14 | |
| by marriage | Jenny | 12 | Feb 12 |