Categories
administrative

Awareness/Ignorance of Web Accessibility

The toughest problem facing web accessibility is awareness. I’m surprised frankly, that there haven’t been more official complaints or court cases against an inaccessible web site, and they are the vast majority on the web. Fortunately, Target is currently being sued by the NFB!

I’ve recently started a new company, CheckEngine USA (now Web Overhauls), that focuses on web accessibility and web standards, but who cares? I’m having problems getting clients because no one is even aware of what this is and why it’s important. I hope the U.S. gets more serious about theses issues and follow the lead of the U.K. and Australia. Not only for my sake, but everyone else’s.

Furthermore, it seems that most web design companies themselves are quite ignorant of the subject and use web accessibility. So not only must I educate potentials customers, but also web designers (in order to have any chance of winning consultation services).

Are you facing the same issue?

Categories
caption podcast web webaim

About Captioning

Topics include why captioning, methods of captioning, and challenges such as transcription.

Download Web Axe Episode 15

Links:

Categories
ajax webaim

AJAX Hype?

Yes, AJAX is very cool. This is a newer combination of technologies that allows instant, more interactive web content through communication between client and server without refreshing a page (GoogleMaps is most common example). But this can only work if the user agent (a.k.a. browser) has Javascript enabled and can handle XMLHttpRequest. There are also usability issues, such as the user not being aware of automatic content and formatting changes. What are your thoughts? Experiences?

Check out this great article on the subject from WebAim on the subject:
Accessibility of AJAX Application

Categories
forms podcast table web

Accessible tableless forms

There are tables, there are forms, and there is accessibility. How should you use, or not use, these on a web page?

Download Web Axe Episode 14

Sample XHTML:


Sample CSS:
form div {
clear: left;
padding .5em 0 0;
margin: 0.5em 0px 0px;
}
form div label {
font-weight: bold;
float: left;
width: 10em;
margin-right: 1em;
}

Categories
law

More than 508

What do the US, UK, Denmark, Australia, Italy, Japan and India have in common? Yes, they all have legislation for web accessibility!

So I apologize if I’ve mentioned “Section 508” but not the other laws around the world. I didn’t realize until recently how much legislation exists. Hopefully the law will spread. Case in point, the US government has law to cover accessibility for federal web sites and other electonic media, but to my knowledge no states have passed legislation.