Latest Accessibility News on Accessify

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

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.

So, there was a radio piece about the new Tesco Access site. It didn’t paint an altogether pretty picture (to use a visual term for a no-visual topic!):

I would say this site technically is probably accessible, it probably does meet most of the triple A compliance requirement. What they’ve not done and what they’ve forgotten to do is do basic usability testing. That wasn’t the only problem I found. I also found, for instance, if you inadvertently hit the return key it takes you to a place you don’t want to be, so then if you use alt left arrow to go back you get timed out. Speaking to other visually impaired people over the weekend there were also issues when you go to check out. What strikes me Gary here, more than anything else, is it just hasn’t been properly user tested.

The full transcript is here. But is that really a true reflection? Emphasis added is mine

The first guest, Tom, was on-air as a customer ? but actually was not a customer but a journalist who was also involved with creating accessible web sites. Indeed he blatantly advertised services at the end of the interview which was thankfully cut. However Tom had recorded himself blundering about the new Tesco Access site using a screen reader (called ?JAWS?) that he didn’t know how to use. People who know how to use JAWS have no problem with Tesco Access but his failure to know even basic key combination spoke volumes. At least he admitted he found new key combinations as he tried the Tesco Access site! His interview was hostile to Tesco ? he had spent a week and a half trying to find the Tesco Access site despite the fact that it’s the first link from the home page but only for vision-impaired customers who have their screen reader read it out to them (it’s presently hidden from sighted use but can be reached directly by accessing www.tesco.com/access as it has for the last six years).

Quite by chance, I was discussing the various ongoings at Tesco with one of their contracted developers on Thursday night who, quite by chance, was working with an ex-colleague of mine at Nationwide. Both had been pushing 100-hour weeks to get things right with Tesco of, so I’m pleased to see that Tesco’s IT Manager felt able to express his feelings about this and redress the balance somewhat.

Having listened to many people talk about JavaScript libraries at this year’s @media, one thing that didn’t seem to crop up was the topic of the accessibility of these libraries. I’ll freely admit that I have almost zero hands-on knowledge of the various libraries - I’m simply aware that they exist and that for many tasks they are a real time-saver (I’m still a roll-yer-own, no matter how awkward kinda JavaScripter!). I do, however, hear anecdotally that many of these libraries create some inaccessible code which really need not be there. But anecdotes are really only any good for the dinner table, so here’s what I’d like to ask:

• Are you using a JavaScript library?
• Are you accessibility-aware?

If the answer to both of these questions is "yes", please drop me a line and please state the obvious stuff (like name, contact etc) but more importantly what JavaScript library you use most and what you perceive to be the key accessibility issues. I would like to build up some decent stats on this, so please do take a moment to add your feedback, no matter how trivial you may think it is. The aim? Well, perhaps colectively we can help to remove some of the accessibility issues in the current libraries rather than complain about what’s wrong, but we need a place to start. And this could be it!

Just a brief note to say thanks to the other panelists at the WCAG 2.0 presentation that I was on at this year’s @media conference. It was quite a nerve-wracking experience trying to make a subject as dry as WCAG documentation something that would be informative and in places entertaining - and even more so in that tricky post-lunch slot!

I have to say that overall the feedback I received was good. If it were just friends coming up and saying that, I’d take it with a pinch of salt, but some complete strangers came up to say this later in the day which obviously meant more to me. However, the panel was not without its faults, which I’d like to address here too:

• Were we prepared? Yes, we had tried our best to prepare and had spoken about the plan-of-attack on Skype and I’d put together a running order and some suggested tasks for us to cover. However, one member was fairly incommunicado in the immediate run-up to the conference which made it a little tricky to co-ordinate.
• Had we read the guidelines? All of the panel had read the core documentation, one was on the working group and all of us had read some (but not necessarily all) of the associated documents. We admitted this on stage, and this has bothered some people attending (well, I know one person who was bothered by this). For what it’s worth, though, I think it proves the point that the guidelines are not working - if we, the supposed ‘experts’, find it a trial to read in its entirety, then we are all doomed!
• Problems with the slides? There was a problem with one of the slides where it kept on advancing to the next slide. This happened after taking one of the slides that was prepared by one panelist in Open Office and pasting back into PowerPoint. I noticed there were issues with those slides and changed them (literally copying to a text file and copying back to a new slide) but one snuck through. Apologies for that - it caught us off guard, but wasn’t a show-stopper!
• Making assumptions? It’s difficult to know exactly what level of knowledge people were/are at. Did we assume too much level of knowledge of WCAG? Or too little? Reading comments on some blogs it could be either! It’s the usual "you can’t please everyone" problem.

I hope that the people attending found some useful stuff there (and I really wish that we’d had a moment to address the new Quick Checklist publicly on the day, rather than waving a print-out up front) and that the feeling was more positive than negative, but for those who found it as dry as the topic we were discussing please accept my apologies. I’ll do a bit of juggling half-way through or something (it’ll be a damn site easier than memorising WCAG 2.0, hah!).

The slides, and links to some transcripts are available here.