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2009 in Review

Wow, what a year! Too many topics to mention, but highlights include the growing usage of ARIA, Google’s good and bad, another screen reader survey by WebAIM, and the launch of Accessible Twitter! Below is a brief summary of this year’s happenings on Web Axe and elsewhere; please comment on anything I’ve missed, which I’m sure is a lot. Cheers to a great 2010!

Also, I want to say how proud I am to be a part of the wonderful web accessibility community which has grown larger and more intimate through conferences and “Web 2.0” tools, especially Twitter. -Dennis

Web Axe Podcast Highlights

Web Axe Blog Highlights

From WebAIM

More Google

E-Books

Great Tips

Awareness & Victor

Victor Tsaran of Yahoo is now a “web celeb” after numerous articles appeared about him and Yahoo’s accessibility lab. Great web accessibility awareness! Here are a few of the articles:

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Involving Users Early in Web Projects

The W3C article Involving Users in Web Projects for Better, Easier Accessibility gives excellent guidelines for developing accessibility in a web project. The article states:

Involving people with disabilities from the beginning of a project helps you better understand accessibility issues and implement more effective accessibility solutions.

In my experience, this couldn’t be more true. Nothing is much worse than having to retro-fit an existing web site or web application for web accessibility, or having to explain what assistive technology is to the author of the specifications document. You must plan from the start, and implement at the end (an old Hijax saying). When the different teams on a project understand accessibility, including the developers, it certainly makes the project run much more smoothly and efficiently.

The article discusses the following items in detail:

  • How Involving Users Early Helps
  • How to Involve Users throughout Your Project
  • Getting a Range of Users
  • Working with Users
  • Combine User Involvement with Standards

These techniques can be applied to more than web sites; also assistive technologies, media players, authoring tools, policies, and technical specifications.

For more, here’s the W3C blog discussing this article: Discover new ways of thinking about accessibility.

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Roundup 2: Accessibility Links on Twitter

There’s so many great web accessibility links in the Twittersphere that I felt compelled to do another roundup of resources.