Author: Dennis

Categories
administrative aria expert interview podcast standards

Podcast #71: Gez Lemon Interview & ARIA

Download Web Axe Episode 71 (Gez Lemon Interview & ARIA)

[transcript of podcast 71]

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

News Links

Categories
adobe aria basic wcag

Five Layers, Questions, Adobe Encourages, Great Basics

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
Categories
cognitive design usability

7 tips for designing for older users

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.

  1. Make obvious what’s clickable and what’s not. (Please don’t mess with the underlines!)
  2. Use radio buttons rather than dropdown menus. (Unless you have over, say, 8 options.)
  3. Stay in one window.
  4. 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.)
  5. Include a site map and link to it from every page. (Also good for SEO.)
  6. Keep your language simple.
  7. Appear trustworthy.
Categories
law review

Site of Section 508 Testing Company Not Compliant

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

Categories
law video

Web Accessibility Video

I’m not sure of the motivation or sincerity of this video on YouTube, but it does outline three valid points on why your web site should be web accessible.

  1. Ethics; it’s the right thing to do.
  2. Enlarges your audience; competitive advantage.
  3. It’s the law (possibly, depending on country/state).

I’ll add a number 4, which the video mentions, and that’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Not sure if this company even realizes that better accessibility usually translates to better SEO.

Also, the video is illogically named “Documentation Usability Tips” ‘Website Usability’, which itself is not accessible since it doesn’t correctly describe the content of the video.