Web Access Centre Blog

In June 5th of this year Shawn Henry from the World Wide Web (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) presented on “What’s new, WCAG 2.0, and current issues” hosted by RNIB in London. Shawn gave a great overview of what is happening with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2 (WCAG 2.0) as well as spent some time answering some really interesting questions from the audience.

It’s taken a bit of time to get the transcript finalised (see an earlier post on the trials and tribulations of podcast transcription) but we’re there now. A huge thank you to Stuart Colville of Muffin Research who helped organise the even and the University of Westminster where it was held.

What follows is a transcript of the talk.

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One of the most common accessibility problems we find when conducting the Better Connected survey is the lack of marked up headers in data tables. So let’s look at why these are important, and how to make sure that tables can be clearly understood.

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We’re recruiting for three more posts in our busy Web Access Team, two consultants and an administrator. So if you’re energetic, enthusiastic and want to contribute to web accessibility come and join us…

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At Oz-IA last weekend, the Australia Information Architecture conference in Sydney, Gary Bunker and Gabriele Hermansson presented on User Research in Virtual Worlds.

They talked about how their company Hyrdo, have set out to build a research platform to allow user testing within virtual worlds, not only for their experiences there but also of products in real life. This is a great idea on so many levels. Firstly, user testing can be daunting to set up, it can be hard to get cross cultural input or people may feel out of their comfort zone. What struck me as really exciting however is the idea of being able to carry out user testing by people with disabilities in virtual worlds.

I’ve wanted to see testing of the grid by users with disabilities in Second Life for a while and have been informally chatting to people there about their experiences. You have a community of Residents who are already familiar with the world who are excited about what they can do there and its lack of real life constraints. Being able to solve problems of access through the combined efforts of Residents themselves and trained experts is a positive and effective way forward. Testing in-world also removes some of the potential issues around testing by people with disabilities in real life such as:

• Travel and costs
• Supplying equipment, assistive technologies and support
• Payment and possible conflict of interest if a tester already earns a salary or is on benefits. Presumably payment in Linden Dollars transcends these issues.

Recently there have been some interesting projects set up looking at access for users with visual impairments most notably IBM announcing research in opening up virtual worlds to the blind. Involving users themeselves is essential in any design project but especially so when it comes to users with disabilities.

The range of presentations at this year’s Techshare conference offers a wealth of choices for people interested in web accessibility, including a 40 minute spot from me. It’s quite late in the day on Friday, so I’m plugging it here, in case you don’t want to miss it.

It’s about the hidden barriers that can be built into sites when the perceived needs of one user group override the real needs of others.

Hope you can make it to room G at 15:00 On Friday 5th to hear the presentation: Avoid the hidden barriers to accessibility – produce truly inclusive websites

Techshare is fast approaching and places for the conference dinner and pre conference workshops are rapidly filling up.

Techshare 2007 - the international conference and exhibition for professionals interested in the role that technology plays in the life, learning and work of people with disabilities. Organised by RNIB, with pan-disability partners, this year’s theme is “Access to Information”. Pre-Techshare workshops will be held on the 3rd October with the conference running itself 4th and 5th October in London, UK.

Book a place online

Key Speakers

On Thursday 4th October the Techshare Key Speakers will be Axel Leblois, Director, Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict) and Rob Sinclair, Director of Accessibility, Microsoft.

On Friday 5th October the DAISY Key Speakers will be Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech and Founder of Bookshare.org George Kerscher, Secretary General, DAISY Consortium.

Full biographies for the Key Speakers will be online very soon.

Programme

The Techshare 2007 programme is now available online.

Pre Conference Workshops

You can also book for any of the following Pre Conference workshops being held on 3rd October 2007

• Exploring Disabled Peoples Access to Your Call Centre
• Web 2.0 and Screen Readers: Challenges, Solutions, and the Future
• Software tools for dyslexic learners
• Testing your website: is it accessible?
• Transitioning your website from WCAG 1.0 to 2.0

Further information about these workshops are available online.

Any queries, comments or suggestions you may have please feel free to contact us:

Telephone: +44 (0)121 665 4240
Email: techshare@rnib.org.uk

If you want or need to get to grips with some of the detailed or less obvious issues involved in creating accessible web sites, enrol now on our Accessibility - beyond the basics training course, to run on Thursday 27th September.

Apart from the dubious pleasure of being in the same room as Ann and me for half a day each, you’ll also get hands on experience of the joys and frustrations of using access technology, and learn:

• How CSS can improve accessibility and which popular techniques cause problems.
• How to apply good structure from the site as a whole to the humblest link.
• What to do and what to avoid to make your forms work for everyone.
• Which JavaScript techniques improve accessibility and which ones make browsing difficult for a variety of users.

Don’t miss this early chance to get up to speed with practical, functional accessibility techniques.

The first commandment of Web Accessibility is to Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element. Unfortunately, this is more often easier said than done, with inappropriate alt text often being the cause of many sites failing to reach even Single-A. So here is our guide to best practice alt text.

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Six months on from the publication of the Better Connected 2007 report, our thoughts begin to turn to this year’s survey.

So with that in mind, we thought it’d be a nice time to write a series of posts packed full of hints and tips, and pointing out the various issues we come across year after year.

If you’re a local authority web manager, this should give you enough time to make some changes before the survey starts.

If you’re not, then the advice is equally valid, and can be applied to any site.