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Tools, wizards, articles and tutorials on Web Accessibility for the conscientious web developer

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Archive for August, 2007

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

Making PowerPoint Presentations Accessible

Just a quick mention for something spotted today at RNIB’s Web Access Centre Blog: Reading and presenting with PowerPoint if you are a screen reader user. Some good advice here, nothing too surprising - much of it is equivalent of how you’d treat HTML pages. I have to say that this is not a format that I’ve ever bothered to look into in terms of making accessible. Heck, I use Keynote on the Mac for my presentations, which renders my presentations much less accessible, but the next time I have to export my deck of slides to PPT format, I’ll have a fighting chance of making it more accessible using these tips.

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

AJAX AtMedia - To Include Accessibility

AtMedia AjaxIf you’re going to run a 2-day conference on AJAX and JavaScript, it’s got to be a good thing if you have the inventor of JavaScript speaking, right? But this AJAX, that nasty enemy of accessibility, right? Shouldn’t we, as the accessibility community, be holding protests at the front gate? Well, no … we have a man on the inside! His name’s Derek and he’ll be doing his best to make sure that those attending get the message about accessible JavaScript/AJAX.

Being serious, though, there are no shortage of conferences bandying the AJAX word around, but the speakers at this gig really are top-notch and I know that many of them, aside from Derek, are also very knowledgeable about the worlds of accessibility and standards in general, so this bodes very well.

Early bird registration is on now (ends 31st August).

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

…and my slides (and audio) from the Real World Accessibility Workshop now available as well…

Presentation slides (in various formats) and an audio recording from my session at the Second Real World Accessibility Workshop at the Barbican, London, 8 August 2007 are now available - a transcript of the audio should follow in the next week or so.

HTML offers many features and attributes that can make your sites more accessible…but only if they’re used wisely. Can there really be “too much accessibility”?

See the Too much accessibility: Good intentions, badly implemented page for further details.

Monday, August 13th, 2007

My Slides from Real World Accessibility Now Available

Round two of the Public Sector Forums organised Real World Accessibility was a blast, just like round one. For the most part, it was a straight re-run of the presentations we gave at the first event, although Patrick and I decided to change our slides completely for this event (mine was entitled Accessibility Cock-ups in the Wild).

Increasingly, I’m using pre-recorded screencasts in my slides – it takes a bit longer to record examples in advance but once I have them, there’s a nice little library of resources to make use of in future presentations. On the day itself, I don’t have to worry about things like flaky internet connections, me fumbling over a control or JAWS timing out on me at a critical moment. The downside to this approach is that the file sizes become very large. I use Keynote on the Mac and with the embedded movie and audio files, the presentation came in at 85mb. This makes it impractical to supply in download format, or at least not without a little care and attention.

But doesn’t the subject line say that the slides are available?

Enter Skitch, a handy little screen capture tool on the Mac that’s currently in Beta testing but is, without a doubt, one of the slickest little pieces of software that I’ve used in years. It makes the process of capturing screenshots and annotating (and then sharing the results) an absolute doddle. So, to get around the issue of the multimedia, I’ve used Skitch to capture the key frames and described the action on screen simply – it is enough for people who attended to get a reminder. (For those who did not attend, well, you’ll have to catch another presentation from me in the future.) Keynote may be Mac only, but it does export to a number of common presentation formats, so here’s the list right here:

Site Navigation

Outside reading

Jeremy Keith does an excellent write-up of the Accessibility 2.0 conference (which I was unable to attend)
Sharepoint and Web Accessibility
Bruce Lawson describes the disparity between Sharepoint/MOSS developed web sites and the level of accessiblity that the tool offers to users (summary - it really is not good!)
How does a screen reader user really hear your web site?
Interesting post on Beast Blog about how a screen reader user - a real one! Not one of those fake web developer tester types! - uses the tool to read a web page. A few surprises were waiting in store for author Mike Cherim.
Web Accessibility Toolbar now available in simplified Chinese
The Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C) release a simplified Chinese version of the Web Accessibility Toolbar.
Web 2.0 vs Web Accessibility
1-day seminar in London, 25th April, brings together experts in the field to discuss/demonstrate the accessibility issues faced by web 2.0.
Leading accessibility technologists form new alliance to fix problems
The Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), comprising (among others) Adobe, HP, Microsoft, Novell, and from the assistive tech industry Dolphin, GW Micro and HiSoftware forms to work together "to create and harmonize standards for accessible techn
Fieldsets, legends and screen readers
An excellent run-down of how fieldsets and legends can improve accessibility and how the various screen readers cope with this useful markup.
CAPTCHAs explained - WacBlog
Another really good post on the RNIB\'s Web Access Centre blog explaining captchas, why they\'re bad for accessibility and what the alternatives may be.
Making WCAG easier to read
Derek Featherstone has created some fancy style sheets to make reading WCAG documents a little easier on the eye.
Top Tips for the title attribute
Ann McMeekin provides a set of simple tips regarding when - or rather when not to - use the title attribute. \'Cos sometimes you can try *too much* to be helpful
California court tilts towards mandating web accessibility
Outlaw.com reports (on behalf of The Register) on the Target California class action lawsuit, digging a little deeper into what Target have been doing of late to address matters.
Screen Readers and display:none
Juicy Studio, aka Gez Lemon, investigate some quirks whereby screen readers announce content that they should not be. Perhaps this could be used for good rather than evil?
Google Developer Podcast: The status of accessibility on the Web
An interview with Google research scientist TV Rahman (and Hubbell, his seeing-eye dog!). Lots of talk about CAPTCHAs and accessibility, but no sign of a transcript for this interview as yet.
Transcript of Shawn Henry's talk from Jun 5th 2007 in London on RNIB's Web Access Centre Blog
Virtual worlds open up to blind
"Online virtual worlds could soon be accessible to blind people thanks to research by students at IBM in Ireland" states BBC News

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