Does this page look plain and unstyled?

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

Subscribe to Accessify's RSS Feed   

Latest Accessibility News on Accessify

IE7 Monkeying With This Site?

I received some feedback to say that Accessify is “horribly broken” in IE7 but, alas, I have no way of checking this for myself or fixing because:

  1. I am a Mac owner/user and have hardly any space left on my hard drive to install something like Virtual PC (which could help me to resolve the problems)
  2. I am unable to install IE7 on my work PC because of various corporate security issues (regarding what a user, such as me, can get access to using a browser that hasn’t been hobbled in many ways prior to company-wide rollout!)

So, I’m kinda stuck - and asking for your help. If you are accessing this in IE7 and everything looks right to you, please let me know (it could have been a stray bug on a certain page, but the words “horribly broken” don’t sound all that nice, do they?!). But if it looks wrong and you think you know why this is the case, please drop me a line (email to lloydi_admin at this domain) and attach any relevant screen shots that you think may help.

If you want to be really helpful, perhaps you could try some of the other page styles on offer to see how they fare in IE7?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can let me know where it’s going wrong here :-)

WCAG 2.0 - What You Can Do Right Now

One of the comments I read after our WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 panel is that it would have been good to have a “what you can go back and do at your place of work now” type summary. Well, I agree that this is often a good thing to do and so I’d like to retrospectively offer a few suggestions on that basis:

  1. Go read the core documentation now. Ignore the preamble if you can - although you may need to familiarise yourself with some of the new terminology. If you stick to reading the core part of the core document, you may be surprised at how much you understand and how it’s not as bad as it may have been painted to be
  2. Keep an open mind - don’t believe everything that you read on the web about WCAG 2.0, instead form your own opinions (step 1 here is essential for this)
  3. Register at Accessify Forum. There’s a great starter for discussing all accessibility matters and certainly a lot less daunting for a relative beginner than registering for the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) mailing list
  4. Make sure your site still stands up to WCAG 1.0 - it’s still the only referenceable accessibility guidelines from the W3C. If your site is still good to go with WCAG 1.0, when 2.0 is finalised you’ll have a lot less to do
  5. If you work in a team, ask your developers or your management team what they know about accessibility. Do you need to do some education on a general level (without mentioning documentation or version numbers)?
  6. Take a look at the new WCAG 2.0 Quick Reference. Try it out, put in some realistic baselines and see how it works for you
  7. Finally (for now at least), remember that you have a very short time now left to comment. The deadline was extended for final comments (as posted here) but that deadline ends on the 22nd. That’s three days from now. Yikes! Find out how you can comment here.

Recent Comments

  • steve faulkner — You learn something new every day, I have always pronounced it with a "ch" sound rather than a "ss"....
  • Henny — Thanks for your post Ian and comments. Lambrecht, you're right in observing the similarity of th...
  • Ian — Mike, duly corrected! I would have put money on it that it was pronounced 'patchy yellow', thinking ...
  • Mike Paciello — Thanks for the headlines. One note -- our company name is pronounced "pass - ee - ello". ;-)...
  • Lambrecht RĂ©gine — I see some advantages compared to the famous ...

Site Navigation

Outside reading

Migrating from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0
Roger Hudson provides a through transition guide from WCAG 1 to WCAG 2
Beyond CAPTCHA: No bots allowed
James Edwards (aka Brothercake) provides a useful run-down of the problems posed by using CAPTCHAs
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.

View all Accessify bookmarks on del.icio.us



This page is styled using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you can read this message, the chances are that your browser does not properly support CSS or you have disabled this yourself. The content on this site is perfectly readable without style sheets, though; it just doesn't look quite so fancy.

site statistics

This site is partnered with MIS Web Design and Top4Office for Copiers and Digipro for Photocopiers. Web design by Swindon Internet & PR Services.

How you can help support this site: Learn web design from the creator of this site, or help him by requesting some PR Photography