Latest Accessibility News on Accessify

You need to know about this

From Need to Know (ntk.net):

“If you’re keeping up with our pettier news stories, you’ll
recall that document recently published by the BBC all about
how to make websites accessible by not using proprietary
standards. The one they released in PDF. Well, with all the
speed of a publically-funded body, they got on the case and
produced an alternate version. As you can see from the link,
the BBC have now released it in Word format. Well, at least
they’re trying.”

Well, sarcasm humour aside (I have to admit, it’s pretty funny that someone should make a report about accessibility available in PDF format), the report is truly worth a read (even at just under 2 MB). The report comes in at 74 pages long and include many useful nuggets of information. If you are actively considering commissioning a similar report, perhaps you should look at this first. Perhaps you don’t need a report after all? Thanks, BBC, for making this publicly available.

Bob talks about accessbility

Nigel Peck of MIS Web Design interviews Bob Regan, Accessibility Product Manager at Macromedia. Bob details progress to date and suggests how accessibility may be implemented in future product lines.
It’s a good article with very full responses from Bob - go take a look now.

The Disability Rights Commission says one thousand websites will be investigated for their ability to be accessed by Britain’s 8.5 million disabled people.

The investigation will break new ground in its breadth and depth. 1,000 web sites spanning the public and private sectors will be tested for basic compliance with recognised industry accessibility standards.

Bookmark these …

Two very useful articles to bookmark for anyone working in a corporate environment where selling the concept of designing to agreed web standards can sometimes be difficult ("What? You mean it will look dull in Netscape 4?!").

1. First up is an interview with ESPN’s Mike Davidson about their decision to redesign to web standards (caveat - their site does not validate completely, but it’s a very big step in the right direction). This is only part one of Eric Myer’s interview with Davidson, so add this to your favourites and come back to it later to read part 2.
2. Another standards evangelist, Tristan Nitot, (who is also responsible for the recent launch of OpenWeb, a French language site covering web standards - more on Web Standards Project) brings us ‘The Business Benefits of Web Standards‘. This is an excellent article that lays out the reasons why web standards are a good thing (including the notion of accessibility)

If you find yourself consistently having to argue the case for dropping support for browsers that do not support web standards and instead moving forwards with standards-compliant solutions, these two articles alone will be useful additions to your arsenal. It would be very difficult to ignore the messages contained in this articles.

Syndicate Accessify today …

Accessify can now be synicated., thanks to Alp Uckan. This page (and others on the site) will shortly be re-jigged to include a link to this RSS feed very shortly, but for now I just wanted to get this mentioned and made available to everyone. Deep joy.

Hiptops and Web Standards

I almost forgot to mention this article - Why Hiptops are Harmful to Web Standards. Actually it’s more of a personal rant having discovered what an awful mess these devices make of Accessify - a site that is authored to W3C standards and really should render very simply on screen. Not so, it seems. So, do we go back to the dark days of non-complaint HTML, proprietary mark-up and what have you to make pages work on this device? Or have I just totally misunderstood what’s going wrong when this device tries to render standards-complaint sites?

Cynthia says ™ “Do as I say”

… but “not as I do”. What am I referring to? The new accessibility checking service that features the cartoonified face of Cynthia Waddell. And why is it a case of do as I say, not as I do? Well, I found a few issues with the results page.

First, let me say that the reports are much more manageable for beginners to understand. This is a good thing, however …

• The reports have underlined section headings suggesting a link (which they are not) - this is a usability issue that should be fixed ASAP
  
• The tables that the results are displayed in caused horizontal scrolling in Netscape 6, even with the window enlarged above 1024 by 768. It appears that the heading which should be sitting above the table is sitting beside it and causing everything to shuffle along.

Cynthia Says ™ looks to be addressing things in the right way by cutting through the swathes of reports that you would normally get with Bobby. I will watch this one with interest.

Accessible web text

Jim Byrne from the Making Connections Unit (MCU) has posted part two of his introduction to accessible web typography. It re-states the general principles of flexible design, and what this means in relation to specifying text sizes. Among the topics covered are:

• Why using absolute units to set text sizes is bad for accessibility.
• Style sheets, the font tag, or presentation markup?
• Relative units of measurement - good or bad

Part one of Jim’s web typography series is available here, and a complete list of articles on MCU can be found here.

Get Accessify while on the go

Accessify is avaliable to view on your PDA using the AvantGo service. If you have an AvantGo account, you can add Accessify as a channel today. Please note that this is limited to 1000 users, so don’t delay.

AvantGo lets you syncronise your Palm or Pocket PC with the AvantGo servers whereupon a re-worked version of the pages you are viewing now are placed on your handheld device. You can browse these pages offline at any time without the need for any wireless modem/bluetooth connection. Impress your friends and colleagues as you walk along reading these pages shortly before falling under a bus on account of being distracted.

For an example of what you can expect, here are a few screen shots of Accessify as viewed with Pocket PC 2002:

Techshare 2003 will be held on: 20th - 21st November at Jury’s Inn, Birmingham, UK.

Techshare is for professionals who work in the field of visual impairment, or have an interest in technology and how it facilitates independent access to education, employment, lifelong learning and society for people with sight problems.

I went last year and it is a nice little conference with a wide range of people from all sorts of backgrounds attending. The call for papers will be out soon so watch this space as we will let you know.