Categories
design html5 podcast twitter

Podcasts from Tweeps: Universal Design, SitePoint, Heretech

Some great recent podcasts from some great Tweeps (if you’ve been on Mars, that means users of Twitter).

Categories
"assistive technology" input mac testing yahoo

Visit to Yahoo! Accessibility Testing Lab

I was fortunate enough to get invited for a visit to Yahoo! Accessibility Testing Lab (in Sunnyvale, California). Victor Tsaran (@vick08) and Alan Brightman (@abrightman) were kind enough to spend about an hour and a half with me and several other computer professionals. Here are some notes from the meeting:

  • Learned a lot about Mac’s accessibility features. You can find them under under System Preferences/System/Universal Settings. Apparently they’ve been present since 1985, but most people don’t know they exist.
  • Apple computers come with a screen reader VoiceOver, which is now on the iPhone. On the Mac, it displays the text which it’s speaking; a great for blind person to work with a deaf person.
  • The demo of alternative input devices and software (including switch devices, head tracking, and an alternative keyboard) really creates awareness of others’ needs.
  • Saw a demo of a braille output device. It was noted that this type of device is best for the deaf-blind. They are very expensive, and more popular in Europe as there tends to be more subsidy.
  • Issues and features with mobile devices including screen magnifiers, speaking menus, camera-scanner-reader combo.
  • Some excellent links:

Victor, Rob and Alan in the lab

Categories
guidelines heading usability wcag2

Article Headings, Please!

This has become an issue for me of late, and it needs more attention. And that is lack of sub-headings in articles. Not just the page heading and/or article heading, but headings  throughout an article to make it more accessible and usable. Especially so the longer an article is. (And of course, use proper markup! H1, H2, etc.)

Examples, Poor

Among many, I came across the following articles which could really use more headings. The articles are fairly long, and could no doubt be broken up into sections.

Why Headings?

Why are headings so important? First of all, it’s part of accessibility guidelines such as WCAG 2.0; see section 2.4.6 Headings and Labels. The W3C points out that headings create meaning when read out of context. And they help people with limited short-term memory. In addition, headings provide:

  • Better navigation for screenreaders.
  • Default formatting when CSS is not available.
  • More semantic.
  • Scanning more usable and readable document.
  • SEO.

Examples, Good

Here are examples of articles with good use of headings:

Please use headings and sub-headings as it creates more web accessible and usable articles.

Categories
standards

Accessibility Versus Standards

A few weeks ago, an article was published on Smashing Magazine 10 Ways To Make Your XHTML Site Accessible Using Web Standards.

The article drew well over 150 comments, including much criticism from web accessibility experts such as Jared, Patrick Louke, Joe Dolson, and yours truly.

As Andy points out in comment 17, a web page can be 100% XHTML Strict (or standards-compliant) but not be accessible.

In comment 41, the “some random ten things one can do to be more of a web standardista, per se”

In comment 29, Jared list several

Why not?

Categories
standards wordpress

Accessible WordPress Themes?

I’m really on a quest to find some web accessible, standards-compliant WordPress theme. It’s so disappointing that the platform is set up for web standards (and usability, accessibility) but nearly all custom themes break it. Ugh!

Last week, I did a search on Google, but wasn’t happy with the results. Then on Twitter, I asked the question:

Can anyone recommend a few fully accessible, fully standards-complaint #WordPress themes (besides Sea Beast)

I received a few replies, but didn’t get much further in my quest. Then I ran a few searches in the WordPress themes site, but didn’t come up with much. This is what I’ve got so far:

  • Sea Beast by Mike Cherim: the first theme to come to mind. Solid, but outdated.
  • Puritan by Peter Krantz: didn’t try it because it didn’t install with the new version of WordPress, 2.8.
  • Hybrid: Already had it installed , but still needs styling since it’s a framework. And it requires joining a “club”.
  • Stardust: good, but still needs some tweaking.

Does anyone know of any other accessible WordPress themes available? Valid code and semantic markup sure wouldn’t hurt either. Template options and widget-ready are good too! Not sure why this is so difficult. Guess I’ll have to make time to build my own (hopefully late this summer!).

UPDATE 2016

Accessibility-ready WordPress Themes on WordPress.org