This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. As mobile devices have been taking over…
Three bits of news from the W3C this week related to browsers and accessibility. Well, two about browsers and two about accessibility with one of them acting as my cross-over reference.The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG)…
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that three law students and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) are suing four law schools in California claiming that the online application system is not accessible to students who are blind (Blind Students Sue Law Schools Over Online Applications). Specifically, the online…
I might have posted this last week, considering this was scheduled to happen on Thursday, April 21, but then the time shifted from 10am to 1pm, and then no notes went up.Judy Brewer, Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was scheduled to appear (testify) before the US House Judiciary…
Image of the captions in use on President Obama’s speech about the Chile earthquake. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now then you may have noticed my post back in November titled YouTube Will Automatically Caption Your Video. In that post I talked about YouTube leveraging Google…
This image is borrowed from the WebAIM article on Cognitive Disabilities.In the blog post Definitions of “Cognitive Disability” by John Rochford, we can see that it’s not so easy to define the term “cognitive disability.” Given how often this term appears in accessibility statements and requirements for web sites, the…
With HTML5 on the horizon, it is becoming far easier to embed video on a web page than it has been. Sure, you can drop some code copied from YouTube, but you have little control over the HTML or the video output. Once you do have your video, you also…
For those of us who make a living working with organizations to help make their web sites accessible to users with disabilities, we’ve got it easy — the client wants to hear our recommendations. As users, however, all too often we stumble across an accessibility issue and don’t know what…
Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D. wanted to write an article about why it’s harder to read text set in all-caps than text set as mixed case. The argument for this has centered around how people read words — recognizing a word shape from its letters, whereas an all-caps word has no unique…
There is an article over at Practical Ecommerce titled Accessibility: How Many Disabled Web Users Are There? by Joe Dolson. It is refreshing to see more traditional sites dealing with accessibility, especially when it can so significantly affect their bottom line. As an indication that the author gets it: I…
There is an interesting article over at the WebAIM blog titled JAWS Ate My Tables.The article describes how JAWS (version 10 in this case), a screen reader, decides whether an HTML table is used for layout purposes or as a data table. It turns out that JAWS does not lean…
Trenton Moss over at Webcredible has posted an article, Accessible online video for keyboard-only users. The concepts within are very simple, but require developers to take an extra step or two, which may account for why we see so few sites with these features implemented.One key issue is that developers…