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.
Author: Dennis
Download Web Axe Episode 71 (Gez Lemon Interview & ARIA)
New Song!
This episode premieres the new Web Axe theme song, check it out! Created by Jeff Ensign.
Gez Lemon, ARIA expert
Gez Lemon is a world leader in the web accessibility profession and its community. He as an Accessibility Consultant for The Paciello Group, a company devoted to accessibility in technology. He maintains a popular blog Juicy Studio in which he’s written many excellent articles and innovative scripts. Gez is a member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force (ATF). He’s become an expert in WAI ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). You may also follow Gez on Twitter (or Accessible Twitter) @GezLemon.
Related Links
- Introduction to WAI ARIA
- ARIA Best Practices
- Web 2.0 Accessibility with WAI-ARIA FAQ
- Paciello Group Blog
- How Can I Validate (X)HTML + ARIA? (DTD for ARIA)
- Juicy Studio Accessibility Toolbar
- ARIA for Google Calendar, Finance and News
- Focus Twitter Greasemonkey script
News Links
- View the slides 5 layers of web accessibility.
- IBM & IEEE to host Accessing the Future conference in Boston, MA on July 20-21, 2009.
The 5 Layers Of Web Accessibility
Great slide deck on Slideshare. In addition to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Dirk Ginader adds “CSS for JavaScript” and ARIA.
Is Your Web Site Accessible?
Great questions a web designer and developer should continually ask oneself.
Adobe encourages the European commission to use WCAG 2.0
Boring, but important.
Accessibility Basics
A great beginning-level article from Opera. Topics include:
- What is accessibility?
- Designing with accessibility in mind
- Interoperability requirements
- Features of an accessible web page
- Standards for accessibility
Although the article from webcredible is titled “7 tips for designing for older users“, the strategies are great for plain old usability and accessibility. Here is a summary with some comments.
- Make obvious what’s clickable and what’s not. (Please don’t mess with the underlines!)
- Use radio buttons rather than dropdown menus. (Unless you have over, say, 8 options.)
- Stay in one window.
- Implement the shallowest possible information hierarchy. (And forget 3 or 4-level cascading menus; they are also difficult to navigation with our without a mouse.)
- Include a site map and link to it from every page. (Also good for SEO.)
- Keep your language simple.
- Appear trustworthy.
NTS Corp (National Technical Systems, Inc.) is a company in which offers testing services. They claim that they offer testing for web sites ??? to Section 508.
http://www.ntscorp.com/services/ComputerElectronicProducts/TestingServices/WebsiteTesting/WebAccessibility
- Not readable without CSS (logo)
- No label on search input field
- No skip links
- Headings