Author: Dennis

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"assistive technology" adobe expert

Assistive Technology, Captivate, and Accessify

Browse Assistive Technology – learn about all kinds of Assistive Technology for different types of disabilities.

Tips on Adobe Captivate Accessibility

What to do with Accessify? – Give Ian some ideas! (By the way, check out the Accessify post Interview with Accessible Twitter creator Dennis Lembree.)

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expert interview podcast

Other Accessibility Podcasts (and UX)

Information & Design is a usability and user experience company based in Melbourne, Australia. Its web site offers a fine list of User Experience Podcasts, which includes a few on accessibility, including the following:

  • Web content accessibility guidelines V2.0 – an interview with Shawn Henry
  • Accessibility: an interview with Dr. Sofia Celic
  • Web accessibility guidelines: an interview with Gian Sampson-Wild

PS:
There are also interviews with Steve Krug, Jakob Nielsen, and Luke Wroblewski.

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interview testing webaim

WAVE now available in Spanish

WebAIM recently announced that their free web accessibility evaluation tool WAVE is now available in Spanish. It’s a great tool for testing web sites, and there’s even a Firefox toolbar plugin!

WebAIM plans to translate the utility to more languages possibly Portuguese, German, Japanese, Thai, Turkish, and Russian. They are seeking volunteers to help; if you are interested, please contact WebAIM.

By the way, you can read a recent interview with Jared Smith of WebAIM from totallyaccessible.com.

WAVE logo

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audio captcha

CAPTCHA Alternatives and Articles

Seems like there’s been more talk about CAPTCHA lately (stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”). Most of us dislike the use of CAPTCHA in web forms. And all of us (I hope) can certainly agree that it’s poor in usability, and often times not accessible–even for any human user; see Top 10 Worst Captchas. Even so, it’s still way too common on the web. Damn spammers are forcing developers to implement this poor technique.

Fortunately, the collective intelligence of developers across the world have created many alternatives to CAPTCHA. Here are some great ideas from WebAIM’s article Spam-free accessible forms:

  • Detect spam-like content within submitted form elements.
  • Detect content within a hidden form element.
  • Validate the submitted form values.
  • Search for the same content in multiple form elements.
  • Generate dynamic content to ensure the form is submitted within a specific time window or by the same user.
  • Create a multi-stage form or form verification page.
  • Ensure the form is posted from your server.

Here are some other articles about the (in)accessibility of CAPTCHA and other resolutions:

Example of impossible CAPTCHA:

Categories
heading screenreader video

Video: Importance of HTML Headings for Accessibility

In the YouTube video Importance of HTML Headings for Accessibility, the user “gringochapin” (who is blind) demonstrates browsing a web page by its headings using a screen reader (JAWS). He demos a few different pages including a good and poor example. This is an excellent example of how proper headings is important for web accessibility. Ironically, there are no captions for this video.