"accessibility" in Weblog

456 Berea Street have written up what appears to be the definitive guide to marking up data tables. Luckily for me I’ve never been lumbered with the dubious honour of coding massive tables but I thought I knew pretty much everything about it. Nope, I was wrong - I had no idea that there was a ‘header’ attribute. I doubt I’ll ever use it but still… The rest of the article is a great how-to.

I came across MIT’s Web Accessibility Guidelines while I was looking for information on colour contrast earlier on and I was struck by one of their ‘Audience for Accessibility’ entries: ‘Technology or bandwidth challenged’. I like that! I think they’re missing search engines from their list but I’ll definitely be adding ‘Technology challenged’ to my advantages of accessibility spiel.

I was quite excited about the $80,000 of fines that were issued by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to Ramada and Priceline for the inaccessibility of their websites. It seemed like things were finally moving… As it happens though, they appear to have been let off lightly. Very lightly. In Web accessibility litigation: it?s not what we want Matt May has taken the time to analyse the terms of the settlement and write up his findings.

These companies’ve been allowed to flag items from the accessibility guidelines that they consider too hard to implement… Points flagged include: ‘contrast between background and foreground’, ‘avoid deprecated features of W3C technologies’ and ‘logical, device-independent event handlers’. These are bread and butter issues that any developer should be able to sort out. What happened?!

The Future of Accesskeys from Derek Featherstone of WATS.ca makes for some interesting reading… I decided a while ago that accesskeys were poorly implemented - I approve of the UK government’s accesskeys system as an attempt to standardise keyboard shortcuts but it’s quite limited in it’s scope and therefore not incredibly useful. Derek’s article highlights the replacement of accesskeys in the XHTML 2.0 spec with ‘access points’. This means that the user can define their keyboard shortcut for ‘contact’ and that combination will work on every site that implements that access point. It’s consistent, simple and very far off in the future! At least it’s there though… In the meantime, it would appear that the W3C has reached the same conclusions as a number of web developers and dumped access keys. That’s that then. Long live access points.

On the day the DDA ammends come into full effect here in the UK it seems fitting to post an accessibility link…

This one’s a little obtuse but yesterday I was asked if I knew of any good website accessibility statements. To my surprise, I couldn’t think of any so I went looking. One of the first I came across was on DiveIntoMark. It may be a bit long but it looks to me like it covers just about everything. It’s clearly written, logically laid out and provides links to just about everything you could need to access his site. I’d like to see his long list of acronyms put last on the page but that’s a minor criticism. Overall I think he’s done a great job! Hence the link.

It looks like accessibility is about to hit the news again, with New York State Attourney Eliot Spitzer announcing settlements with two major travel web sites. He has ruled that ramada.com and priceline.com should ‘implement a range of accessibility standards authored by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium’. The companies will also have to pay a total of $77,500 between them to cover the cost of the investigation.

Dynamic page elements - cloak and dagger web design is a great summary of the current state of javascript on the web… Where did it come from? What is DHTML good for? When should you use it? And have a look through the bibliography at the end. There are a load of great links relating to DHTML best practice and the legal/accessibility repercussions of doing so.

Flash, DHTML Menus and Accessibility explains the use of the much-neglected wmode property of Flash movies. Turns out that it can be used to hide decorative movies from readers as well as allow the use of normal CSS positioning and z-index stacking. Could be handy…

These came up on CSS-D today and I thought it might be worth gathering these Image Replacement Methods together into one place. So which is best? Not sure.

Accessible I, Accessible I Revised, Incutio, Mr Clay, Gilder Levin Ryznar Jacoubsen

The National Institute for the Blind has announced the shortlist for it’s annual award for accessiblity. It’s well worth looking through the entries to see how people are applying accessibility in the real world. You’d expect companies like Screenreader to invest in an accessible website but Nationwide is definitely a surprise. It’s good business sense and it’s nice to se people are paying attention.