FREE Accessibility Report

Get a FREE accessibility report from Headscape, a new media development house that offers a full range of new media services. Simply enter your details on their website and they will email you a breakdown of any potential problems on your website. Mind you, this is a company and at the end of the day they need to make money to stay afloat, so they are doing this for free in the hope you will use some of their services. But if they are good, have accessibility in mind and finish the job then why not?

Personal Digital Assistants and Disabled Students Workshop

3rd April 2003 - York, UK

This workshop will examine the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and issues that arise for disabled students. Emphasis will be placed on how PDAs can benefit disabled students, and issues of usability and accessibility will also be covered. The workshop will also report on how the Internet, VLEs and other technologies can be accessed using PDAs.

Practical applications of PDAs in an educational context will also be looked at; each delegate will receive a PDA and a range of software that can be used for education. In addition a set of workshop materials will be provided for each delegate should they wish to run a similar workshop in their own institution.

Registration Form

RNIB Accessibility Consultancy

The RNIB is a huge accessibility advocate in the UK that is constantly campaigning for large corporations to make their website accessible. They are always being asked by both individuals and businesses what can be done to improve the state of the Internet as it stands so that more and more people have access to it. For corporations that are serious about getting accessible, the RNIB offer the See It Right Campaign where you can display their logo if your website is approved by them. They are also now running accessibility audits so if you want them to audit your website for you then get in touch with them.

Accessible tables the LIFT way

LIFT is a product offered by UsableNet that makes checking a site's accessibility - and then fixing it - a much less painful procedure. As I've mentioned before on this site, the trickiest problems relating to accessibility appear to be forms and tables. LIFT offers a neat way of dealing with both, and Macromedia now has a Flash demo showing how the tool works within DreamWeaver MX (LIFT is also available for Front Page). Worth a look if you're serious about getting your site into shape.

Homeland protection site - a much visited 508-compliant site

Ready.gov is one of the latest US government sites to go live, and it's proven very popular - in its first 24 hours it had 2.5 million visitors. The site is aimed at giving US citizens information about how to prepare in case of a terrorist attack. The strapline: "Don't be afraid ... be Ready". Oh, and did I mention that it's section 508-compliant?

Related link

• Homeland opens Ready.gov home page [Federal Computer Week]

Disabled Web-users flex their muscles

There's a nice little article in the Toronto Star about web accessibility which covers the basics about what accessibility is about and how blind/visually impaired people are, ironically, helping business leaders to see the light. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Though he sees only shadows and light, Larry Marcotte is leading RBC Financial Group employees out of the dark. His job: adapting software code so that visually-impaired call centre workers can interact with their monitors using a talking screen reader called JAWS.

Marcotte, who was in a car accident that all but obliterated his vision at 13, helps JAWS understand some of RBC's oldest systems - systems that were designed long before developers realized blind people would ever need to use them. When he's not writing code, the 54-year-old IT consultant likes to surf the Web. Often, he finds elements of a company's site that JAWS, which translates on-screen text into synthesized speech, can't interpret."

New review on this site: TopStyle 3.10

The behemoth Cascading Style Sheet editor gets an update ... and a full review on this site. Find out how TopStyle 3.10 Pro is embracing accessibility by including hooks into Bobby and other web page validators.

Accessibility and the Project Management Life Cycle

Over on UsabilityNews.com is an article that I wrote especially for them - entitled 'How Nationwide tackled Accessibility - The Whole Story'. For those who are managing web projects and need to consider the accessibility implications, this should make for useful reading.

If you have any comments on the article, please feed them directly back to UsabilityNews.

One for Valentine's Day

Seeing as it is Valentine's Day, here's a link to an accessible 'Blind Date' Flash game brought to you by the RNIB. It does require Flash 6 Player though, folks ...

Netscape Developer Central gets accessified

Netscape's developer resource DevEdge has had a complete re-working - gone are table-based layouts and in is a swanky new CSS design. The site has also been given a good accessibility make-over, passing Bobby A status (or WCAG Priority 1). There are some slight errors that stop it from passing the priority 2 and 3 tests, but it's a marked improvement - and given the audience for the site, it's a case of leading by example.

Accessibility training online

There is little in the way of organised training for web accessibility, so when you see an opportunity, you should seize it!

News reaches us of a major new training event: an online course from WebAIM. Training will include real-time audio discussions, streaming video, simulations, tutorials, text chats, and an interactive discussion group. Registration details for this online course are here.

Meanwhile, The Making Connections Unit have a new article entitled 'Making Websites Accessible', which covers such things as how to get online, how to plan your website, how to design your website, how to maintain an accessible website and where to get further help.

It's a non-technical introduction for people who have yet to start putting together a site, and reads very well. Good work, Jim!

Comments system added to site - beta feature

Please note that the comments link at the foot of each post is a new feature and is sort of undergoing beta test. The comments are provided by enetation.co.uk, which is a free service and as such the comments server may not always work. Please don't report bugs on this just yet!. Thanks

New pop-up tool added to accessify

Following the tutorial 'The Perfect Pop-Up', comes the Pop-up Window Generator - a tool to quickly let you generate a link to a pop-up window that is both accessible and XHTML-compliant.

Please note: the tool is built using JavaScript, not server-side scripting. It does not work under Netscape 4, as it uses standards-compliant code (something that Netscape 4 is somewhat averse to).

Are you a structural engineer?

I spotted this on WebAim's discussion list and thought it perfectly captured what it is to be a designer of an accessible web site:

"... In other words, one designs a page first to maintain a specific informational document structure across different platforms, visual, and non-visual, and then somehow, one adds the gloss of presentation, (visual, aural, text) afterwards. This is not necessarily trival, because this structural view of information tends to be the opposite of the way most people natually think when designing a web page, and is a habit that may be difficult to learn. A designer of accessible Web pages needs to think like a structural engineer, rather than like an interior decorator and landscaper."
Terence de Giere, http://www.degiere.com/

UK Government to get tough over Web accessibility

Found in New Media Age's online magazine, newmediazero, is this story about the UK government's latest plans to enforce web accessibility:

"The Government is preparing to launch the UK's first legal crackdown on companies that fail to make their Web sites accessible to blind or partially-sighted Internet users.

The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) will begin a formal investigation into online service providers next month, which could produce the country's first test case of disability law applied to the Web.

The government body's legal team is currently formulating its strategy and is weighing up whether its investigation should focus on individual companies or particular industry sectors.

If the investigation concludes that certain Web sites breach the 1999 Disability Discrimination Act, the Commission's statutory powers allow it to serve notices ordering them to cease operation."

The story in full can be found here, although you may have to register on the site to view this content.

Related links

• Disability Rights Commission
• Disability Discrimination Act
• RNIB

How accessible is Safari?

There's a new article added to this site today - a piece that looks at Apple's new browser offering, Safari - just how how good is its support for web accessibility? This is one that I'd appreciate feedback on!

Accessible Mapping Tools

Do you often create online maps and then have difficulties converting into an accessible format? According to a report in Yahoo Finance, Corda technologies may be able to help. The company is claiming Section 508 compliance in the maps produced using OptiMap 5, as this quote shows:

One of the most notable aspects of OptiMap is that for Federal Government agencies and those doing business with federal customers, OptiMap charts are fully Section 508 compliant, providing the ability to have the full descriptive text of the map available to the visually impaired through an audible screen reader. OptiMap is the first and currently the only product to make online maps fully accessible for the visually impaired.