Month: August 2007

Categories
screenreader

JAWS Shortcut Keys/Commands

While doing a little testing in JAWS, I quickly remembered how inexperienced I am with the program. So I went to the Help section to look up some shortcut keys. All the information is there, and there’s a lot of it, but on many different pages.

So I put what I thought were the most significant key commands on one HTML page. It can print nicely on 2 paper pages. Hopefully you will find it useful!

JAWS Shortcut Keys/Commands

Categories
articles

Reworking A Large Site for Accessibility

Creating an accessible web site can be challenging. Retro-fitting a web site for accessibility is even tougher. Now try upgrading a humongous, corporate site full of new and old pages. Where to begin? Fortunately, Accessites.org has posted an article by Mel Pedley to help tackle this problem: 5 Steps To Reworking A Legacy Site

Categories
guidelines podcast wcag

Podcast #55: WCAG Samurai

The WCAG Samurai is an “independent group of developers convened in 2006” and headed up by Joe Clark, accessibility guru. In this podcast, Dennis and Ross discuss the WCAG Samurai’s errata to the W3C’s WCAG 1.0 web accessibility guidelines. This includes:

  • what it is and if we should use it
  • discussing the 12 main points
  • which WCAG 1.0 Priority 3 guidelines to ignore

Download Web Axe Episode 55 (WCAG Samurai)

The WCAG 1 + Samurai Guidelines

  1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content
  2. Don’t rely on colour alone
  3. Use markup and stylesheets and do so properly
  4. Clarify natural-language usage
  5. Create tables that transform gracefully
  6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully
  7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes
  8. –
  9. Design for device-independence
  10. Use interim solutions
  11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines
  12. Provide context and orientation information

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Categories
captcha

Terribly Inaccessible CAPTCHA

Found this terrible, almost humorous example of inaccessible CAPTCHA. If you’re blind, I don’t think refreshing the page will help you read the letters in the image!

form with text under captcha field 'click refresh if you cant read the numbers'

Here’s the Web Axe entry on how to make accessible CAPTCHA: Podcast #40: About CAPTCHA and Accessibility.

Categories
podcast table

Podcast 54: The Summary Attribute

By now most of us should be pretty familiar with creating an accessible data table–use a caption, TH for row and col headers, scope attribute, and the summary. In this podcast, Dennis talks about the least familiar of these techniques–the summary attribute of the table element. The summary attribute is WCAG Checkpoint 5.5 (Priority 3).

Download Web Axe Episode 54 (The Summary Attribute)

Examples of good summary text:

  • The number of employees and the foundation year of companies in Orlando, Florida, in 1988.
  • A warming trend has been observed in Cache Valley, with temperatures about 5 degrees above historical averages over the last two months.
  • This table charts the number of cups of coffee consumed by each senator, the type of coffee (decaf or regular), and whether taken with sugar.
  • Total required by pollution control standards as of January 1, 1971. Commercial category includes stores, insurance companies and banks.

Sample Code (from 456bereastreet’s Bring on the Tables):

Table 1: Company data
Company Employees Founded
ACME Inc 1000 1947
XYZ Corp 2000 1973

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