Roger Hudson, Russ Weakley and Peter Firminger presented this comprehensive paper at the OZeWAI 2004 Conference:

The aim of this paper is to offer some ideas on how websites might more effectively meet the needs of people with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties. The paper will look at three issues:

• How the presentation of page content can be modified to make it more accessible.
• Design of site navigation systems.
• Tailoring content to the needs of different audience groups.

Read the article over at webusability

When people think about accessibility of web content, there's a tendency to concentrate on people with visual impairments. People with cognitive impairments and learning difficulties are often overlooked.

This article by Roger Hudson, Russ Weakley, and Peter Firminger, examines the types of problems visitors may encounter when using the web, with insightful and practical suggestions on how to develop websites that are inclusive for people with cognitive impairments and learning difficulties.

Read the article over at Juicy Studio.

It's now easier than ever to test Web site accessibility. IBM Home Page Reader 3.04 - a new version of the popular talking Web browser - has arrived. Originally created to help users who are blind or have low vision access the Internet, Home Page Reader also gives Web developers and designers the tools they need to test the accessibility and usability of Web sites.

Download it today and experiment with Home Page Reader's new functions, including:

• Ability to read accessible, tagged Adobe Reader 6.0 PDF documents and accessible Macromedia Flash Player 7 content.
• Inclusion of a desktop reader with keyboard navigation and speech output for a number of Microsoft Windows applications, including the Windows desktop and selected system applications such as:
  • Help
  • Control Panel
  • Notepad
  • Media Player
  • Settings
  • Start Menu
  • Taskbar
  • Windows Explorer
  • WordPad
• Improved features for users with low vision, including the highlighting of controls and images in the Graphics view as they are spoken and simple page magnification using either the Zoom setting within Home Page Reader or the Magnifier tool in Windows.
• Enhancements in accordance with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Specifications and Guidelines that can help Web developers increase accessibility of their pages
  • W3C HTML 4.01, WCAG 1.0 and UAAG 1.0
• Provision of a Developer's Help document that outlines helpful hints, tips and techniques for Web developers who use Home Page Reader to test their Web sites for accessibility. The document also offers suggestions for fixing accessibility flaws.

This document indicates which toolbar function (if any) is helpful in assessing conformance to the WCAG 1.0 Checkpoints.

The toolbar contains many functions for examining discrete aspects of a web page's content and code. These can be used as an aid for manual checking of many of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines' Checkpoints. None of the toolbar functions listed will tell you whether a page conforms to a particular checkpoint, but they will help you in assessing conformance.

Date: Thursday 24 February, 2005
Location: Wellington New Zealand

Jonathan is blind and has in the past provided web accessibility advice to a range of Government and private agencies. He will be demonstrating how web accessibility doesn't mean that web designers have to sacrifice innovation or creativity. He will also be demonstrating the kind of technology blind people are using today to surf the web, showing just what a difference an accessible web site can make to a blind person's independence.

Matt May of Bestkungfu and a little group called the W3C has written an article for Digital Web called Accessibility From The Ground Up. It's a 'primer for the web designer' (his words, not mine) that runs through the various things that designers need to get up to speed on. I have to agree with Matt's comment here:

The hardest part of Web accessibility, in my opinion, is the stuff between the angle brackets. You get your content from a dozen different sources, often with a dozen different voices. Some of it, like legal text, is irreducible. Changing it even slightly could alter it dramatically, if you were even allowed to do so.

So true. Once you have a basic understanding of how to make a page accessible it becomes second nature, just something you do without thinking (a state of mind some would describe as being 'unconsciously competent' ... yes, I've been on a training course!). Cutting out legal text and marketing nonsense, now there's the real challenge!

The article Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users Who Work With Screen Readers by Mary Frances Theofanos from the US National Cancer Institute and usability consultant Janice Redish (we mentioned it back in November) is now also available in HTML format.

You may be aware of net-guide, an Internet search engine designed to return only those web sites that are accessible to disabled web users.

Net Guide is produced by Internet consultancy Net Progress. Having received positive feedback from disabled web users, Net Progress has decided to lend even greater support to RNIB's Campaign for Good Web Design.

Paul Crichton of Net Progress wrote to his Member of Parliament, Liberal Democrat Tom Brake MP, to seek his support for the Campaign. Tom Brake's response was to table a parliamentary Early Day Motion (EDM) to canvass support for web accessibility across Parliament.

An Early Day Motion (EDM) is a petition that MPs can sign. EDMs allow MPs to put on record their opinion on a subject and canvass support for it from fellow MPs.

A complete database of EDMs is available on the web at http://edm.ais.co.uk. There you can read the current list of EDMs and find out which MPs have signed them.

Every EDM has a unique title and number. The EDM on web accessibility tabled by Tom brake MP is entitled 'net-guide RNIB Accreditation'. It is EDM number 461.

[...]

The last point in the EDM is the crucial one: "That this House... calls on web designers to take on the board the practical advice offered by RNIB for producing websites which meet the information needs of the blind and partially sighted, a requirement enshrined in Section 21 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1999."

For this to become a reality the Government must be encouraged to back initiatives that alert businesses, large and small, to the vital importance of accessible web design.

For the EDM to have maximum effect it needs support from as many MPs as possible, and this is where you come in.

RNIB and Net Progress are asking you to send a letter to your MP asking him or her to lend their support by signing the EDM and by writing to the appropriate Department of Trade and Industry Minister.

See the complete request from Julie Howell over at the Accessify Forum.

The Jodi Mattes Web Accessibility Awards were established in 2003, European Year of Disabled People, to celebrate the most accessible museum, gallery and heritage website. This year sees the awards opening to nominations from libraries and archives too.

The Awards will be for a museum, gallery, library, archive or heritage website which demonstrates active commitment to meeting web accessibility standards, involves users and develops practical and imaginative ways of making cultural and learning resources accessible to disabled people. The Awards are for websites developed in England.

The closing date for nominations is Friday 11 March 2005. Further information and nomination forms are available on the MLA website - paradoxically, only in Word and PDF.

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (ATAG 2.0) has reached Last Call Working Draft status. It will be under review until 18 January 2005.

What is ATAG 2.0?

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (ATAG 2.0) is part of a series of accessibility guidelines published by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The other guidelines in this series include the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG).

ATAG 2.0 provides guidelines for designing authoring tools that lower barriers to Web accessibility for people with disabilities. An authoring tool that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility by providing an accessible authoring interface to authors with disabilities, as well as enabling, supporting, and promoting the production of accessible Web content by all authors.

See Judy Brewer's reminder on the W3C WAI IG email list, which contains information on how to comment on the working draft.

This anonymous consultation will provide the European Commission with inputs for the drafting of a Commission Communication on eAccessibility; it is particularly targeted at:

• Users (of eAccessibility-enhanced products or services) and their associations
• Relevant industrial/business actors and associations
• Government and Regional agencies, Public Authorities
• eAccessibility experts and professionals

N.B. There is no objection whatsoever to having other interested parties also express their opinion.

Responses are welcome until the 12th February 2005. The timescale for the analysis of the results will be from mid-February until mid-March 2005.

Fill in the online questionnaire on the European Commission's site.

Joe Clark's new article on A List Apart, explores the use of CSS zoom layouts and their benefits to users with low vision. An excellent read, and in my opinion yet another nail in the coffin of table based layouts...

Patrick Griffiths just pointed out this exciting piece of news:

On the 9th and 10th June, well known web designers and accessibility experts including Jeffrey Zeldman, Doug Bowman, Joe Clark and a host of UK pros will be descending on London to speak about the hottest issues in web design.

From the conference site itself:

@media 2005 will bring together some of the world's leading web design experts to discuss the hot topics of web standards and accessibility. Delegates will learn how to make the highest quality web sites through the use of best practice techniques amongst likeminded, forward-thinking web makers.

Visit the @media 2005 conference site for further information and registration details.

HERA is a utiliy for designers and developers who want to manually check the accesibility of their websites or to verify any Internet page. HERA aids with the revision of checkpoints from Web Content Accesibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0).

To review some of these Checkpoints, HERA applies a series of stylesheets created by the Sidar Foundation to the page being tested. These revision styles identify and highlight elements that have to be reviewed, avoiding the complex work of analysing the HTML source.

Where it is not possible to apply a stylesheet to made the work easier, HERA gives some instructions for steps to be performed to check accessibility. It also allows to take note of the results of revision and to generate a final report with these results.

The JAWS Screenreader Adaptation project is aimed at making JAWS more compatible with Mozilla Firefox [...] so that users of JAWS and those dependent on low-vision tools have a browser choice other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. This project will result in a set of JAWS scripts that will enable JAWS to function with Mozilla Firefox in a similar manner to how JAWS currently functions with Internet Explorer. Building from barebones support for navigational functions, the project encompasses complex functions that allow for alt text reading, link recognition, and other advanced capabilities.

Two interesting extensions that add speech support to Firefox:

Foxyvoice

FoxyVoice is a Firefox extension that provides text-to-speech functionality using Microsoft Win32 Speech API. With FoxyVoice you can listen to the page being read; or browse on one page and listen to another page being read for higher degree of sensory overload. The soothing voices that comes with SAPI also makes FoxyVoice a competent virtual hypnotist.

Accessibar

Accessibar is a toolbar extension for the Mozilla browser which aims at providing various accessibility features for users who could benefit from them. These features primarily focus on the dynamic manipulation of the visual display of the web page in addition to the integration of a text to speech reader which can read out loud the browser's user interface as well as web page content.

As this extension uses the Java based FreeTTS engine, it works cross-platform. In addition, it offers a variety of other interesting features, such as the ability to select foreground/background colours, change text size and line spacing, and disable images.

The LD Web project was founded by UB Access. It has sprung out of UB Access' dedication, commitment, and belief that it is possible, through various techniques, to address the needs of people with learning disabilities.

LD Web is part of UB Access' continuous research and development into methodologies and techniques to help people with learning disabilities access data, understand and share information.

Although the information is a bit sparse at the moment, with only one case study and a few guidelines available, this site is interesting nonetheless and has the potential to grow into a valuable resources.

Gez Lemon created a nice javascript favelet to make hidden attributes of complex data tables (summary, headers, axis, scope and abbr) visible. Excellent stuff!