My esteemed colleague Patrick Lauke is a firm believer in not providing widgets on individual web pages to do things such as resizing text on a page - on the basis that it’s site-specific and doesn’t teach the user how to change the font size for other web sites that don’t provide these controls.
This issue pops up time and time again, and it has done again on another forum where the phrase ‘teach a man to fish’ has appeared once more. It got me thinking, maybe it would be best to show the user how to change the font size rather than simply describe it. With that in mind, I put together some video clips, joined them together in iMovie and did a voice-over to explain how it’s possible. Here’s the end result (actually, this is version 2, which takes on board some of the comments in this post):
I’m interested to hear your feedback. Is this useful? Could you see people wanting to embed this on their accessibility page?
So, if you like this, blog about it, link to it, embed it in your accessibility statement if you think it could be useful to the user.
And if people do think a video tutorial for this kind of thing is useful, what else could we cover off on the accessibility front, specifically how the user can change their browser without requiring site-specific page widgets (e.g. teach the user how to change background and foreground colours). Over to you for any suggestions you may have on that front.
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.
If 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.
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”?
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:
It’s taken me a while to get around to posting this here, but only because I wanted to make sure that I had everything in place. If you are already a subscriber to the Boagworld podcast, you’ll probably already have heard this, but a couple of shows ago they included a 14-minute audio clip of me using a screen reader demonstrating some common problems. But it wasn’t just audio, there was also a video to go with it (the audio was simply lifted off the screencast).
I didn’t post anything here just yet as I was missing one essential ingredient – a transcript. Finally I’ve got around to typing that out, so if you’re interested, here are all the links you’ll need:
I may be reading too much into this, and admittedly the source is one who’s quoting rumours, so it’s hardly a basis of a solid claim, but it still piqued my interest:
Rumors are starting to form about the upcoming JAWS 9.0 release. So far, Blind Confidential has only heard that it will do “revolutionary things on the Internet" … FS [Freedom Scientific] had included language about support for AJAX in JAWS in some of its 8.0.xxxx release notes but this was later removed so, perhaps, they have found a way to provide really cool access to some of the new dynamic web pages in a manner that would be meaningful to a screen reader user.
Everyone at this conference will have a working knowledge of Web accessibility. At this point, it would be hard to surprise you with the facts. But that’s just what this session sets out to do. We’ll explore the question of what the Web designer or developer definitely does not have to worry about in making sites accessible - and what the designer or developer should not have to worry about in an ideal world. Get ready for an entertainingly scathing indictment of browsers, screen readers, and so-called authoring tools. In a working environment where we always seem to be given one more thing to worry about, this session will give you a whole set of things to stop worrying about.
Controversial? Perhaps, but Joe’s thoughts certainly resonate with my own view on who’s responsible for web accessibility … it’s not good enough simply to dump all responsibility to web designers/developers. The onus has to also be on user agents, and end users themselves.
As an aside: skip forward to 43:48 of the audio file to listen to Joe calling me up on stage…
Andrew Kirkpatrick will be delivering a free online seminar on Flash captioning on Tuesday, 10 July 2007, 11:00 PDT (19:00 GMT).
Adding captions to video in Flash is essential to ensure that users who are deaf or hard of hearing can access Flash video content. Adobe Flash CS3 includes a new component to make captioning easy and effective, and a variety of captioning tools are available to help developers define a process that fits into their existing workflow. This session will share best practices for Flash 9 swfs, Flex applications, and older Flash 8 swfs and will show you how to get captions in your video step by step.
Don’t be mistaken by the ‘Public Sector’ part of Public Sector Forums – this time around the organisers are opening the event up to anyone – you don’t need to be working in some dingy council office to apply for this one, anyone’s welcome!
I will be doing a general show and tell, finishing up the day’s events with plenty of real world examples of people getting things wrong-diddly-wrong, including many web sites you know and possibly love.
If you’re going to run a 