Latest Accessibility News on Accessify

Accessible tables the LIFT way

LIFT is a product offered by UsableNet that makes checking a site’s accessibility - and then fixing it - a much less painful procedure. As I’ve mentioned before on this site, the trickiest problems relating to accessibility appear to be forms and tables. LIFT offers a neat way of dealing with both, and Macromedia now has a Flash demo showing how the tool works within DreamWeaver MX (LIFT is also available for Front Page). Worth a look if you’re serious about getting your site into shape.

Homeland protection site - a much visited 508-compliant site

Ready.gov is one of the latest US government sites to go live, and it’s proven very popular - in its first 24 hours it had 2.5 million visitors. The site is aimed at giving US citizens information about how to prepare in case of a terrorist attack. The strapline: “Don’t be afraid … be Ready”. Oh, and did I mention that it’s section 508-compliant?

Related link

• Homeland opens Ready.gov home page [Federal Computer Week]

Disabled Web-users flex their muscles

There’s a nice little article in the Toronto Star about web accessibility which covers the basics about what accessibility is about and how blind/visually impaired people are, ironically, helping business leaders to see the light. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Though he sees only shadows and light, Larry Marcotte is leading RBC Financial Group employees out of the dark. His job: adapting software code so that visually-impaired call centre workers can interact with their monitors using a talking screen reader called JAWS.

Marcotte, who was in a car accident that all but obliterated his vision at 13, helps JAWS understand some of RBC’s oldest systems - systems that were designed long before developers realized blind people would ever need to use them. When he’s not writing code, the 54-year-old IT consultant likes to surf the Web. Often, he finds elements of a company’s site that JAWS, which translates on-screen text into synthesized speech, can’t interpret.”

New review on this site: TopStyle 3.10

The behemoth Cascading Style Sheet editor gets an update … and a full review on this site. Find out how TopStyle 3.10 Pro is embracing accessibility by including hooks into Bobby and other web page validators.

Accessibility and the Project Management Life Cycle

Over on UsabilityNews.com is an article that I wrote especially for them - entitled ‘How Nationwide tackled Accessibility - The Whole Story‘. For those who are managing web projects and need to consider the accessibility implications, this should make for useful reading.

If you have any comments on the article, please feed them directly back to UsabilityNews.

One for Valentine’s Day

Seeing as it is Valentine’s Day, here’s a link to an accessible ‘Blind Date’ Flash game brought to you by the RNIB. It does require Flash 6 Player though, folks …

Netscape Developer Central gets accessified

Netscape’s developer resource DevEdge has had a complete re-working - gone are table-based layouts and in is a swanky new CSS design. The site has also been given a good accessibility make-over, passing Bobby A status (or WCAG Priority 1). There are some slight errors that stop it from passing the priority 2 and 3 tests, but it’s a marked improvement - and given the audience for the site, it’s a case of leading by example.

Accessibility training online

There is little in the way of organised training for web accessibility, so when you see an opportunity, you should seize it!

News reaches us of a major new training event: an online course from WebAIM. Training
will include real-time audio discussions, streaming video, simulations,
tutorials, text chats, and an interactive discussion group. Registration details for this online course are here.

Meanwhile, The Making Connections Unit have a new article entitled ‘Making Websites Accessible‘, which covers such things as
how to get online,
how to plan your website,
how to design your website,
how to maintain an accessible website
and where to get further help.

It’s a non-technical introduction for people who have yet to start putting together a site, and reads very well. Good work, Jim!

Comments system added to site - beta feature

Please note that the comments link at the foot of each post is a new feature and is sort of undergoing beta test. The comments are provided by enetation.co.uk, which is a free service and as such the comments server may not always work. Please don’t report bugs on this just yet!. Thanks

New pop-up tool added to accessify

Following the tutorial ‘The Perfect Pop-Up‘, comes the Pop-up Window Generator - a tool to quickly let you generate a link to a pop-up window that is both accessible and XHTML-compliant.

Please note: the tool is built using JavaScript, not server-side scripting. It does not work under Netscape 4, as it uses standards-compliant code (something that Netscape 4 is somewhat averse to).