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…
Having stumbled across the article “10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit, I can see that the suggestions are pretty obvious, and the number 10 is probably more arbitrary than based on some natural break in severity. However, there are some things in the article I have been repeating for…
If you were paying attention any of the last few years, you may have noticed that the 24 Ways web site is set up to run as an annual advent calendar for web geeks. Each day the site posts a new article dealing with some aspect of the web, ideally…
Boxes and Arrows has an article titled “Four Key Principles of Mobile User Experience Design” written by a former academic mobile UX (User eXperience) researcher. As the author transitioned to private sector he felt that when mobile UX was discussed it was too driven by the gee-whiz factors and not…
Three years ago YouTube/Google added the ability for video authors to add captions to videos. Over time support for multiple caption tracks was included, the expansion of search to consider text in captions, and even machine translation support for the captions (see my other post about machine translation risks).Even with…
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. WebAIM is a non-profit organization within the…