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articles expert firefox twitter

Improving Twitter Accessibility

I admit I’m hooked on Twitter, but unfortunately, like many web sites, it’s not very web accessible.

Thanks to Gez Lemon of Juicy Studio, you may now implement a Focus Twitter Greasemonkey script to help with web accessibility, specifically keyboard use. With the script, the user is now able to view the Favorite, Reply and Delete links for each tweet in the timeline on the focus event (in addition to on current mouseover event, which obviously requires a mouse).

In order to use the script, you have to install Greasemonkey which is a Firefox add-on, so it obviously requires the Firefox web browser.

Learn more about it in the Juicy Studio article Twitter Focus.

UPDATE (Feb 3)

  • The script was broken due to Twitter changing code on their site, but it is now fixed.
  • I (Dennis) am working on an Accessible Twitter web site and hope to launch it within a couple weeks!
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expert motor podcast testing visual

Paul Boag wears reading glasses and gloves

In Boagworld podcast episode 130, I discovered that in order to help test web accessibility, Paul Boag wears glasses (that he doesn’t need) and gloves and attempts to navigate through a site. Excellent idea!

In order to better understand [the elderly’s] experience I have bought a pair to ski gloves and some reading glasses (I don’t need reading glasses). Every now and again, I surf the site I am designing wearing both the glasses and gloves. The glasses make the screen hard to read while the gloves hamper my use of the mouse and the keyboard. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to select something from a drop down menu wearing ski gloves!

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expert law nfb

NFB vs. Target Lawsuit is Settled!

Big news! The NFB versus Target lawsuit is settled! As expected, there are good points and bad points to the settlement. You may read an excellent summary of the settlement by Jared Smith of WebAIM in the blog entry Target lawsuit settled. Some of the wins from the lawsuit are:

  • Target will pay NFB $90,000 for the certification and first year of monitoring and then $40,000 per year thereafter.
  • Target’s web developers will receive at least one day of accessibility training, to be provided by NFB at a cost of up to $15,000 per session.
  • Target will respond to accessibility complaints from web site users.
  • Target will pay damages of $6,000,000 to the class action claimants, or at most $7000 per claimant, and will pay $20,000 to the California Center for the Blind.

If you’re really interested, you may read the actual NFB vs. Target Settlement from the Northern District of California. (I find it ironic that the HTML title of this page doesn’t pass accessibility guidelines; it says “Untitled Document”.)

Addendum:
Here’s a press release from NFB from last year (October 7, 2007) with more background on the lawsuit:
Court Ruling Says California Disabled Rights Law Applies to the Web

Addendum:
More on this subject from Accessify, Bruce Lawson, and Access Matters:

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event expert podcast validation

Podcast #65: Top 10, SXSW, Nikita, and Joe

Dennis and Ross discuss a variety of topics including web accessibility news and events, a top 10 list, SXSW 2009, Nikita the Spider validator, and our friend Joe Dolson.

Download Web Axe Episode 65 (Top 10, SXSW, Nikita, and Joe)

Chatter

News

Top Ten Tips?

Ten Top accessibility developer tips from Epic (UK)

SXSW Panels 2009

Nikita the Spider

Joe Dolson

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expert standards

Supporting Standards that Support Accessibility

In his article/post Supporting Standards that Support Accessibility, Joe Dolson examines the (non) relationship between web standards and web accessibility. He makes the excellent point that following web standards is not the same as providing web accessibility, although generally standards are beneficial. Joe discusses examples of where standards can actually make a negative impact on the accessibility of a web page, and where rarely used code can be beneficial.