Latest Accessibility News on Accessify

I little while back I posted on my personal site how a recent update to Bloglines had caused it to stop working for me at my place of work. The title was Bloglines Is Broken (for me, at least), but it turns out I wasn’t the only one having issues. In doing the update the ‘wizard behind the curtains’ had also managed to break access to the service for screen reader users, as noted on Blind Access Journal. I wasn’t alone!

The good news is that the people at Bloglines (or Ask.com, depending on how you view it) do listen to its audience, and the navigation tree in the left pain - I mean ‘pane’, sorry, Freudian slip! - is now working properly for screen reader users.

I have to say that I am encouraged by Bloglines’ approach to this. It’s not taken them long to address this, really. Many other companies would sit on it for months or even years by which time its affected users would have long gone. I’ve also been impressed with the proactive approach taken by the software engineers at Bloglines who have got in touch with me to keep me informed of progress on my issue (and they’ve assured me that there will be a non JS-reliant version of the subscriptions tree forthcoming).

A little victory for accessibility, but the larger battle continues - I am sure that this won’t be the last ‘improvement’ to a web-based service that inadvertantly breaks access to key functionality to some of its audience but if a few other companies would take a leaf out of Bloglines’ book, it’d be a good thing indeed.

There’s a great post over at Accessites about the various camps in the world of web accessibility entitled The Great Acceessibility Camp-out. Who are the two camps?

1. Camp 1 - those who believe that accessibility is not just “solely being a physical or mental inability … [but also] include users with slow connections, old monitors, legacy equipment, and anything that puts a barrier between the user and the content they seek, not just poor eyesight or blindness, corrupt motor skills, or dyslexia”
2. Camp 2 - those who believe that “web accessibility is about ensuring that people with disabilities are not discriminated against”

Whichever camp you are in, it can’t be harmful to accessibility as a whole. As for me - which camp am I in? I don’t need to set up camp - I bring my own with me

This little dev tool seems to have gone down quite well, so I thought I should let you know about a small update to it. As it has been requested a few times, I’ve added in the following options:

1. Choose the doctype for the generated markup
2. Choose wether indents in the generated markup use a space or tab

I’m resisting the urge to add too much more in - it was deliberately kept simple - but one other feature that’s been requested is an option to include comments after each closing div to state which div is being closed down. I actually tried to do this but got in a bit of a pickle trying to get it to work. The good news is that I’ve had an offer to ‘have a poke around and get that working’ for me, so this may be added very soon.

You can find the Markup Maker here. As before, please add all comments here.

This is another of those little tools that I put together primarily for my own use but you may find it of great use, hence it’s gone into the Accessify toolbox.

Markup Maker takes a simple list of page ids that you enter and converts it to a valid XHTML document. It also creates the shell of the CSS that you need so you can start to apply styles/layout etc.

If you like the tool, please do link to it, Digg it or add to del.icio.us

If you have any comments or questions, please add them to my personal blog (just trying to keep comments in one place)

Enjoy!

Exciting developments! Patrick is going to be a very busy (and jet-lagged boy) by the time he’s finished @Media 2007 - it’s going global. The teaser’s online already. I’ve already offered my services as a person who can (genuinely) say all the following in Cantonese:

• most of the colours and shades of colours (dunno about hex colours)
• “I’m very full/I’m very fat”
• “Do you want a beer”
• “Good morning/afternoon, how are you etc”
• “Don’t wee inside the house or you’ll get a smack!”

I’m sure you’ll agree that with such a wide vocabulary I should really be flown out there to help with the event Well, I can but hope!

An email recieved by the WaSP Accessibility Task Force:

I am an Intermediate skilled Website Developer who is seeking out information on doing what I can to make my websites as completely accessible as possible.

I’ve begun searching and reading articles regarding this. The thought occurred to me that it would be great to have these different “reader” software so that I could test my websites once they were reasonably finished. Then I realized the software I wanted is probably quite expensive.

So another thought occurred. What if there are disabled active volunteers who would be willing to review your website with their software? Obviously, it would be a request after one is confident that they have done everything they could rather than while the website is being built.

So I’m hoping this has already been thought of. I would appreciate any response regarding this idea and how practical or valid it would be.

I have to say that, personally, I do not know of anyone who is willing to do this for free and I’m not sure if that’s a reasonable thing to expect, to be honest (given that the software is expensive to buy and it must be more difficult for a blind person to seek gainful employment than a sighted web developer). I don’t mean for this to come across in a harsh way - it’s admirable that the sender wanted to check that the sites are accessible beyond running the pages through an automated validator.

I know that there is the Usability Exchange, which puts developers/companies in touch with disabled end users for this kind of thing, but it’s not a cheap service. So, is there something in between? Or do you know someone who’d be willing to run a few tests as requested in this email? Add comments and I’ll pass ‘em on.

In the accessibility world, a lot of us bemoan that fact that despite the various different pieces of legislation and the guidelines around web accessibility, there are very few examples of any company or organisation ever really being screwed for not complying. Sure, there was the Sydney Olympics case and there was the … uh. Um, nice weather we’re having, isn’t it? Anyway, the point being that we as an ‘industry’ (if that is the right term) have been saying for years that if you mess up on accessibility you could be sued, but the longer it didn’t happen, the more people thought it was a case of ‘cry wolf’.

I certainly don’t want companies to be unfairly vicitimised or for individuals in these companies to be picked out for criticism just to prove a point, but likewise the legislation is there for a reason. One company has just found that, in the US at least, the legislation may yet have an affect - in California, the Target.com case has entered a new stage. In this case, the plaintiff is ‘all blind Americans’ - it’s a class action with Bruce Sexton, a college student, the NFB (National Federation of the Blind) and NFB California as named plaintiffs - and the case has resurfaced because Target’s request for the case to be thrown out has been rejected.

The NFB’s press release suggests a victory for the plaintiffs, but it’s not a clear victory:

Explaining the ramification of the ruling, Mazen M. Basrawi, Equal Justice Works Fellow at Disability Rights Advocates, noted that: “the court clarified that the law requires that any place of public accommodation is required to ensure that it does not discriminate when it uses the internet as a means to enhance the services it offers at a physical location.”

It doesn’t say “the ADA must include web sites” but rather (paraphrasing here) “it should not exclude outlets other than the physical premises”. This is a bit more woolly than the press release might have you believe.
So, the case is not over yet. Target may not have had it thrown out, but they have not yet lost the battle overall. Regardless, there’s a lesson for any US web site owners who may have uttered statements like “Ah, they’re just full of hot air - no-one’s ever actually been sued for this” in the past. I imagine that the big retailers’ legal departments are, right now, preparing some fairly detailed question sheets for their web teams to find out just how vulnerable they are.

WaSP ATF issues an invitation to AT vendors:

When the Accessibility Task Force (ATF) was formed, we received feedback from designers and developers about their desire for better standards support in assistive technology.
Today, we announce the launch of the ATF’s Assistive Technology Initiative. We are issuing an open offer to assistive technology vendors to work with WaSP (and other groups where appropriate) to help ensure that assistive technology can benefit from a web standards-based approach to web development, design and programming.
By working together:

• we will provide resources to examine and address perceived shortfalls in current assistive technology
• we will help with developing test suites for use in assessing/addressing these issues
• we will share our knowledge and expertise and help AT vendors share their extensive knowledge of their users with web developers and designers around the world

Web standards have always aimed to make the web a better place for all people, regardless of ability, and we hope that our collective efforts will help fulfill that promise.
We have begun the process of delivering this open invitation to Assisitive Technology vendors at conferences, trade shows, and industry exhibits, and will continue to invite those involved in building AT software and hardware to collaborate.
To work with us contact us: wasp@webstandards.org

One of the first books I read about accessibility was Constructing Accessible Web Sites, published by Glasshaus. It was a fantastic book at the time but then something bad happened - Glasshaus publishing went under, pulled down by its parent company. This was a bad thing because, at the time, Glasshaus was putting out some of the best tech books money could buy, with web standards and all that good stuff as part of the package. Fast forward a few years and the book has been revived by Friends Of Ed. It’s now called Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance. To my mind, it’s not the sexiest title, but I can completely understand why it’s called that (it’s going to appeal to a great many corporate types who’ve heard about PAS78, DDA and the like). The author list is largely unchanged, but new names added to the Roster include Richard Rutter, who has contributed a chapter on Accessible CSS, Christian Heilmann, who’s covered accessible JavaScript and Accessify’s very own Patrick H Lauke who provides a case study of a site make-over (converting a university site to an accessible, all-singing, all-dancing site).

I’ve merely scanned through the book, for now - it’s on a pile of 3 books to read and review - but first impressions are that this is a must-have for anyone serious about understanding web accessibility, even if you bought the previous version (this looks to be a fairly major re-write).

Due to various writing commitments (none of which, rather evidently, include this site right now!) I have a backlog of emails to respond to which just keeps on growing. I managed to work through a few of them today and noticed a couple of requests for plugs on the site that, while overdue, I though I should share anyway (just in case you hadn’t heard):

• Web Accessibility Toolbar for Opera - the link pretty much says it all. The teams from Web Accessibility Tools Consortium, Vision Australia and The Paciello Group have ported the useful toolbar that they built for windows/IE. (Congratulations to Steven, also, who’s making the move over to The Paciello Group - and London - in the near future. Any chance of an exchange deal, Steven?)
• Ability panels goes live - The site blurb reads “ABILITY is a group of online panels for people with disabilities, their family members. advocates, and other stakeholders. Participants in our research have the opportunity to make their voices heard by participating in groundbreaking Market Research, Mystery Shopping, Surveys, and other specialized studies.” The company behind this venture are looking to recruit people with disabilities nationwide in the US. Want to get involved?