"accessibility" in Weblog

I’ve just done my Building Better Webapps presentation at the Spring Experience in Miami. I it went pretty well, as far as I can tell, but I realised that there were a whole bunch of links I wanted to give out that weren’t on the slides. For anyone who’s interested here they are, and for anyone who dragged themselves out of bed on a Sunday morning to come see me speak: Thanks, I really enjoyed it! Many thanks also to all the Spring folk who’ve made my weekend thoroughly enjoyable.

Introduction

Don’t bet against the internet

Web standards

Progressive enhancement

Graded Browser Support

A-Grade Browser Support Chart

HTML

HTML Mastery Links

CSS is Worthless

Microformats

Bill Gates: “We need microformats”

CSS

Div Mania

Modular CSS

A CSS Framework

Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids

CSS: Specificity Wars

Specificity

How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup

hasLayout

Javascript

A DOM Ready Extension for Prototype

The JavaScript Library World Cup

Notes on JavaScript Libraries

Javascript and Accessibility

AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work?

Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers

FlashAid

Bringing new life to applets with Ajax

Web 2.0: Is Converging Towards the Desktop Good?

Unobtrusive Javascript

RailsConf Presentation Slides and Example Code

Hijax

The Enron Explorer

Firstly, I’d like to say a big ‘well done’ to Ryan and Gill Carson for organising the workshop. Everything went swimmingly! I did have a little too much coffee though and remained skittishly hyperactive all morning.

I was really impressed with Joe’s speaking style. He was both confident and eloquent, speaking for the entire day without referring to any notes. This meant that he could take audience polls and just skip the sections that people already knew, making the day more relevent and useful.

While I’m on the subject, I was surprised by the generally high standard of knowledge displayed by everyone in attendance. I was expecting a lot more beginners questions but what we got were tricky requests for help related to real projects, which everyone benefitted from.

I was already familiar with most of the material Joe covered but that was the best part for me - everything I know about everything I do on the web is self-taught and having someone who REALLY knows his subject validate what I’ve been doing was a fantastic relief. His pragmatic approach to accessibility problems in the real (commercial) world was very reassuring, and the advice he gave us matches what I’ve been telling my clients for a couple of years now. You have to do your best but an attractive design is an equally important factor in a site’s success or failure. A great site should be both attractive and accessible, and with semantic HTML, good CSS and a lot of common sense, there’s no reason why anyone can’t have both.

One interesting tid-bit that came out of the accessible Flash section of the seminar was that even the JK Rowling site, held up by Macromedia as a shining example of what can be achieved, has fallen down when tested on real people with accessibility needs. Interesting… I’d like to see some facts and figures on that one.

Oh, and I’m a little late on this news now but I’ll post it anyway… Joe Clark has been ostracised from the WCAG2 working group. Yep. He’s out. He didn’t seem awfully fussed about it though, to be honest! Joe is very outspoken, and isn’t exactly known for his tactfulness, but there is no question that he knows what he is talking about and I am sure that the working group will be worse off without him.

Anyway, it was a great day and I found it very useful. Highly recommended.

Carson Workshops have a few good things coming up…

The first I heard about was Malarkey’s CSS for Designers course with Molly Holzschlag on the 17th Nov, here in London.

Then I got an email this morning from Ryan Carson about the Joe Clark’s Sharing the Secrets of Web Accessibility one on the 1st September. Joe REALLY knows his stuff and word is he’s a very accomplished speaker so it should be a great course…

The most interesting thing Joe’s agenda, for me anyway, is the section on images. For most sites it’s easy enough to figure out how to convey an image’s information in a dozen words but I was consulting on a clothing site for Tesco a while back and I really had to think about it. The alternative text had to do as good a job of selling their clothes as the photos, and that’s really tough. I don’t think the agency building the site took my advice in the end but I’d be very interested to see how someone like Joe would have tackled the problem…

The learning disabilities part should also be interesting as it’s often overlooked, being so hard to comprehensively accomodate.

A few weeks back I emailed Bob Easton of Access Matters to suggest that he post a quiz about javascript support in screenreaders. Bob got back to me quick-as-a-flash to say that James Brothercake had asked exactly the same thing just a couple of days before. Many many emails on, and after a lot of hard work from James and Bob, there is a test up to help answer that question: How Do Javascript Operations Affect Accessibility Part 1. Props to James for an ingenious method of automating the tests, and many thanks to Derek Featherstone for his input as well.

I had a slightly drunken conversation with a really really good Flash chap a few months back,who told me that Flash could be made extremely accessible… If you get right down into the bowels of the application. He discovered all sorts of things buried down there to help you to hook up your app to Microsoft speech assistants and all that, but none of it is documented. Well, apparently JK Rowling has spent a bit of her considerable fortune making her Flash site accessible to all. And an impressive feat it is! Sounds like it took an awful lot of work though. And maybe a little magic.

Bob Easton over at Access Matters has written up the results of another of his fantastic quizzes, testing whether screen readers really do benefit from good semantic markup and CSS for layout. As test subjects he’s taken 4 radically different Zen Garden designs and run them through JAWS, Windows-Eyes and IBM Homepage Reader. He’s found failings in some old image replacements methods but apart from that, everything works as expected. Very, very good news!

My mantra for accessibility has been “make the source semantic and logical” for a couple of years now, after doing a bit of testing on screen readers and text browsers When Joe Clark called for testing of CSS layouts, I got a little worried… Did I do enough testing? It’s a relief for Bob et al to come to the same conclusions as me indepentantly.

Unobtrusive Javascript is the old big thing. AJAX is the new big thing. Both are BIG right now. But a rather crucial question seems to have been missed… How do the various accessibility devices actually deal with Javascript?

Prompted by an interesting article by Derek Featherstone: JavaScript and Accessibility, I posted a question to Bob Easton over at Access Matters. I’m not sure whether I’ll be part of it yet but hopefully there will be some interesting test results forthcoming.

The rest of the discussion on JavaScript and Accessibility is facinating, with Brothercake explaining the importance of the question incredibly well.

Bob Easton has launched a new blog called Access Matters, devoted to discussing best practice in accessibility. He’s kicked things off with a subject close to my heart: ALT text for custom list markers - always a favourite. I’ve added it to my Bloglines and I’ll be popping back regularly.

I’ve not played this properly yet but ICS’ UA-Chess game looks like it could be pretty interesting. It’s been designed to work with Microsoft’s IE Speech Add-on along with a host of other accessibility-related input devices. Accessbile Flash has been around for a while but this is the first time I’ve really seen it used…

I use Webbie when I need to test pages in a text browser but I’d never bothered to read it’s website before. After an overzealous cleanup of my computer I had to go and redownload it last night and in doing so stumbled across their background document: Blind people and the World Wide Web. It’s a great introduction to how people with sight disabilities use the internet and is well worth a read.