Web AxeThe next in our “Fixing Alt” series is the Mr. Twitter comic on Agent-X Comics. Here’s the alternative text for yet another comic which lacks it. The alt and title attributes are both blank. Sad.
So here the text description:
Image: Two men standing by wall with poster of man with sunglasses, mustache and bow tie. The poster reads “Mr. Twitter, the master of impersonation. Tonight only.”
Man 1: Why do they call him Mr. Twitter?
Man 2: Because he only does 140 characters.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
So I attended the first day of Google I/O 2011, my first time at a Google event. I was glad to hear a fair amount of talk about accessibility. There were at least 3 sessions focusing on the topic (see below) and a breakout area where you can talk with developers.
There was even an accessibility “Developer Sandbox” area which was great. I tried out the ChromeVox screen reader on a Chromebook with help from Google’s Rachel Shearer. I got a quick demo of the built-in TalkBack screen reader on an Android mobile device. Mika Pyyhkala and I were shown the LevelStar braille device running Android. The University of Washington showed off their mobile ASL Android project which used video chat technology.
Some tips for Android development from the sessions are:
contentDescription.The sessions specific to accessibility were:
More resources:
Tim Credo, Charles Chen, and T.V. Raman on stage at Google I/O.
A list of lists! Here are some great Twitter lists relating to accessibility.
Know any others?
UPDATED MARCH 2017
A large part of web accessibility is creating content which can be easily understood, and writing is often times an overlooked factor. Like coding a website, writing must account for a variety of user conditions and abilities. It’s tricky! Here are some great articles to help.
Some great advice from @Writing4Web. This was originally a 7-part series; the articles were restructured since.
Although accessibility checklists are important, testing for web accessibility requires more than that. Some testing requires tasks which can only be done by a human including testing with a screen reader. It’s best for a regular screen reader user to do the testing, but it’s also good for a developer or designer to do at least the basics (there was a big discussion on this last fall in Should Sighted Developers Use Screenreaders To Test Accessibility?).
Here are some good articles to help learn how to use a screen reader to test for web accessibility:
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