Category: articles

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articles expert guidelines wcag wcag2

Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust

Joe Dolson recently completed an excellent four part series published on the Practical eCommerce web site. Another great read from Joe,highly recommended. The articles cover the following four fundamental principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2):

  1. Is it perceivable?
  2. Is it operable?
  3. Is it understandable?
  4. Is it robust?

Here are the articles:

PS:
Joe was a guest back in 2007 in Podcast: #41: The Definition of Web Accessibility

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articles disability

Accessibility to the Face

Accessibility to the Face is a must read article for any web site owner, designer, or developer, etc., especially for those who doubt the importance of creating an accessible web site. It’s a personal perspective by Rob Foster. The article doesn’t mention web accessibility specifically, but is directly related (well, he does mention Section 508).

Here’s a quote about the goal of the article:

My hope with this article is to make accessibility issues surrounding disabilities become real for the reader. The ideal response for me would be for people to think a little harder about the people using your product or experience and what it might be like for those who may not have all their faculties.

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articles socialmedia twitter

Articles on Accessible Twitter

Accessible Twitter is coming along well. It’s still in Alpha status, but the word is getting out! Here are a couple articles about Accessible Twitter that were published today.

Accessible Twitter logo

 

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articles expert firefox twitter

Improving Twitter Accessibility

I admit I’m hooked on Twitter, but unfortunately, like many web sites, it’s not very web accessible.

Thanks to Gez Lemon of Juicy Studio, you may now implement a Focus Twitter Greasemonkey script to help with web accessibility, specifically keyboard use. With the script, the user is now able to view the Favorite, Reply and Delete links for each tweet in the timeline on the focus event (in addition to on current mouseover event, which obviously requires a mouse).

In order to use the script, you have to install Greasemonkey which is a Firefox add-on, so it obviously requires the Firefox web browser.

Learn more about it in the Juicy Studio article Twitter Focus.

UPDATE (Feb 3)

  • The script was broken due to Twitter changing code on their site, but it is now fixed.
  • I (Dennis) am working on an Accessible Twitter web site and hope to launch it within a couple weeks!
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articles heading usability wcag

WCAG 2 and Usability articles lack subheadings

Below are two articles on web accessibility. Unfortunately, both articles are lacking subheadings, which would make them much more scannable and usable, and therefore better accessible (see Understanding WCAG 2.0 Section Headings).

Organisation in the Spotlight – W3C: Global Standards Giant Gears Up For Battle

With the long-awaited appearance of version 2 of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) now expected in December, the spotlight is set to fall once more on the workings of this key international standards body.

Accessibility in web design provides a high degree of usability

While the focus of this section is largely on design for blind users who access the web page via a screen-reader, if you make pages accessible in the ways suggested you will improve clarity for all users.