So we’ve taken the plunge and set up a group on Facebook and have started to tweet on Twitter!
After much to-ing and fro-ing we thought why not, if people want to follow what we are doing via these channels then what’s to stop us. Don’t worry if you’re not using Facebook or Twitter though - you wont miss anything as all content there is also available and accessible in the Web Access Centre and blog. You can also keep tabs on us by using our RSS feed as well.
Many of you might be aware that as of the 1st February this year, Bobby and WebXact are no longer publicly available online. Bobby and WebXact were great tools for giving you a quick overview of the accessibility of a single web page free of charge. While there is only so much automated testing tools can do, they never the less have their place in the arsenal of anyone testing websites.
After the news, we had a couple of emails come our way from people asking if we knew of any alternatives to Bobby and WebXact and the answer is…we do! There is a great resource available on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site which is a complete list of web accessibility evaluation tools. This would be a good place to start for anyone looking to find a new tool to use.
These are some of the favourites used by our team. Interestingly, the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) tool includes support for checking against the draft WCAG 2.0 guidelines.
For those wishing to do some more manual checks with a little assistance, there are some great accessibility toolbars and plug-ins available for Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (FF).
Finally, some links to the well known Markup Validation Services provided by the W3C.
We hope these help!
it seems to be a day of conference announcements today. Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom
25th of April 2008 will be held by AbilityNet 25th April.
The event will look at practical solutions to the Web 2.0 accessibility problems, showing cutting edge techniques. Jeremy Keith, author of Bulletproof AJAX and technical lead at Clearleft, will be the keynote speaker talking us through through Open Data. Other speakers include Christian Heilmann from Yahoo talking about the implementation of accessibility and Steve Faulkner, author of the AIS toolbar, talking about screen readers and AJAX.
We’ll also be speaking together with many more so hope to see you there.
I spotted Using Virtual Worlds and Emerging Technologies for People with Disabilities on Upcoming this Friday, 29th of February. The free event will be held online with live discussion in Second Life at 9am PST (slurl) as well as a follow-up discussion for the rest of the day, 10AM PST- 6PM PST, in TechSoup’s Accessible Technology & Public Computing forum.
Simon Stevens (aka Simon Walsh in Second Life) will be speaking about his work in Second Life. Simon, who has cerebral palsy manages the Wheelies nightclub for people with disabilities in Second Life and the Second Ability Second Life simulator.
Topics that will be covered during the rest of the day in the TechSoup forum include:
Hope to see some of you there.
E-Access Bulletin has reported that a new British Standard for Accessible websites is to be written.
Back in March 2006 ‘PAS 78: a guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites’ was published by the British Standards Institute (BSi). With Julie Howell, formally of RNIB, as Technical Author PAS 78 was originally commissioned by the Disability Rights Commission, now the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
E-Access reported:
The new standard will relate to procurement or development of accessible websites. It will not set out the technical requirements of accessibility, but will outline a process developers can follow to ensure they are taking all the right actions to make their websites and services as inclusive as possible. In an exclusive interview with E-Access Bulletin published in this issue, Julie Howell says BSi would like the standard to be based on PAS78 but she is also keen to widen it to embrace some of the new types of web service such as social networking. Other issues to be revisited from the PAS include the need for user testing of websites by disabled people; and the need for organisations to produce an accessibility policy.
PAS 78 has been a key document in any website owner or developers toolbox and has been widely recognised all over the world. The web has shifted considerably since March 2006 with Web 2.0 and Social Networking taking over the space. It will be great to see a refresh of such a useful resource taking into account all these changes.
A couple of weeks ago, it was the Super Bowl in the US.
For many years, this has been one of the most watched events in the US sporting and television calendar, and consequently, a time for companies to spend millions of dollars on new adverts to try and capture the attention of the millions of sets of eyeballs tuned in for the game.
This year, PepsiCo released a new ad - Bob’s House.
The advert was created and enacted by deaf members of the PepsiCo workforce, a group called EnAble and is based around a deaf community in-joke.
I first saw it when someone sent me a link to the advert on YouTube, and I thought it was really quite clever and funny. At the same time, I was impressed that Pepsi had put the investment in both to make the ad in the first place, and also buy a slot at the Super Bowl for it.
In the comments accompanying it, some people felt that the ad was offensive. Some disagreed and felt it was positive, and some showed their ignorance of what people with a disability can do. Standard youtube stuff, mostly.
It reminded me of a video that we sometimes use in awareness raising courses - “A world made for disabilities” and it got me thinking - do adverts like this raise awareness, and if so, do they do it in a good or bad way, or is it that there’s no such thing as bad awareness raising?
View the making of Bob’s House on youtube
View A world made for disabilities on youtube
What do you think?
In the last two months I’ve come across more examples of the LONGDESC attribute in use, than I’ve seen in as many previous years. Due to this apparent rise in its popularity, this seems like a good time to look at when the LONGDESC can be useful, and when it’s just a waste of code.
This is a resource that i think i’m going to find handy - cheat sheets for all manner of client and server side languages.
While not directly related to accessibility, when this one turned up in our inbox we thought we’d post it on here as this is a pretty handy resource for anyone working with the web in any way.
Client side languages catered for include (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript (including AJAX), ActionScript and Adobe AIR.
On the server side, there are resources for Apache Web Server, MySQL, .NET, Perl, PHP and Ruby On Rails.
There are also a number of resources for the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI), Google keyboard shortcuts and popular blogging services including WordPress, TypePad and Moveable Type. Firefox and Thunderbird users will also find some cheat sheets they may find useful and for the creative people out there - Adobe Photoshop!
Enjoy!
