Web AxeHere’s a great blog series on ARIA techniques from Marco Zehe (@MarcoInEnglish) of Mozilla. The content is well over a couple years old now, but still very relevant and useful. Goes to show how leading edge Marco and Mozilla are!
Open Web Camp 4 took place last Saturday July 14, 2012. Turned out to be another great event organized by John Foliot (@JohnFoliot) of San Jose, California. This time, OWC was held at PayPal headquarters in San Jose (was held at Stanford the previous three years). Although the event covers different area of web development, several sessions concentrated on accessibility and others included accessibility as part of the content.
After helping with registration, I arrived a few minutes late to “HTML5: All about Web Forms” by Estelle Wyl (@standardista). The talk was a bit rushed, but packed with great information. Next, “Surf a GB with Glenda’s Thumb” was pretty interesting as Glenda Watson-Hyatt (@GlendaWH) demonstrated challenges of using a computer with a motor disability. She also asked attendees to try a web-surfing exercise while simulating a mobile impairment (by using only non-dominant hand with rubber band around fingers).
I regretted missing “Getting Your CSS Under Control” by Jonathan Snook. But instead I attended Denis Boudreau’s very relevant presentation, “Social Media Accessibility: Where Are We Today?“. This session was actually a replacement for Molly Holzschlag’s presentation; she couldn’t make the event due to TSA nonsense.
I finished the conference by attending “Unhiding The Truth Behind Hiding Content for Screen Reader Users” by Victor Tsaran (@vick08) and then a “game changing perspective” talk by Glenda Sims (@GoodWitch), pictured below.
The event was free in the past, and this year there was only a small $10 registration fee; the value is tremendous! In addition to the sessions, a t-shirt and lunch was provided to all attendees. And lunch was enjoyed by many outside in the nice Northern California weather by the pond on the beautiful PayPal campus. A nice time. I look forward to an OWC5 next year.
Related links:
I was fortunate enough to attend the Google I/O conference again this year (last year’s I/O blog). It was again held at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, California. The opening keynote was a smash hit, and in addition to product announcements, featured skydivers wearing Google Glass!
On the second floor, it was a pleasure to meet Phil Strain (@pstr) in person; we’ve followed each other on Twitter for a couple years. He now works for Google and was helping out in the accessibility developer sandbox (booth). He demonstrated the latest ChromeVox. Also at the sandbox, Peter Lundblad demonstrated to me the braille output support using a new Nexus 7 tablet and a Humanware braille display.
Google announced the release of Android Jellybean (4.1) to be released through over-the-air updates to the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S and Motorola Xoom in July. The announcement came with several Android accessibility enhancements including:
Making Android Apps Accessible with T.V. Raman, Charles Chen, Alan Viverette, Peter Lundblad. Session description:
Android 4.0 introduced platform-level accessibility APIs so that you don’t have to be an expert to make an app that’s accessible to people with disabilities. Come learn how APIs for accessibility make your job easier. We’ll provide code examples covering touch exploration, speech synthesis, multiplatform support through use of a DPAD, magnification for low vision, braille, and more.
Advancing Accessibility for the Web with Rachel Shearer, Dominic Mazzoni, Charles Chen. Includes announcement and demo of the new Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools. Session description:
This session will help you learn through code samples and real world examples how to design and test your web apps for complete accessibility coverage. We will review APIs such as the Text-to-speech (TTS) API, tools like ChromeVox and ChromeShades and how Google products implement solutions today for users with disabilities.
I gave feedback in the form of a comment for the article 15+ Tips to Improve Web Accessibility of a Website. But, yet again, my blog comment was not published. The article is not bad, just needed some clarifications. So since my comment wasn’t approved (after several days), here it is:
Great points, although 4 have to do with forms. Some clarifications:
- For alternative text on images, decorative images should have empty value (alt=””) and linked images must have alt text describing target of link.
- Relative sizing in CSS not as important as it used to be. [Most browser do page zoom by default and all browsers but IE can zoom text set in pixels.]
- CSS vs table layout doesn’t have any direct impact to accessibility.
- Use ABBR tag for acronyms as well as abbreviations (acronym tag is deprecated).
- For skip links, see end of this article for JS fix for functionality on some browsers: http://terrillthompson.com/blog/161
And now that I think about it, the article overlooks pretty basic techniques such as data tables, captioning, and ARIA. For a more complete list of tips, see my 25 Ways To Make Your Website Accessible.
As you may have heard, the results of the fourth WebAIM screen reader survey are now available. The survey provides valuable information on about screen reader users such as primary screen readers used, browsers used, and reasons for use.
WebAIM reports that problematic items have changed little over the last 2 years. The top ten are:
Conclusions from the survey include:
Here are a few great analyses of the survey: