Web Access Centre Blog

As many of you may now have heard Dr John Slatin has passed away on Monday night. He was one of the original accessibility advocates, co-chair of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group in 2005 and 2006 as well as author of “Maximising accessibility”. He was a familiar face at South by South West where he gave panels and presentations on topics such as “Can Stevie Wonder see your website” as well as many other conferences.

He was an inspiration to all of us here and will be missed.

This is really exciting, the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C) have just released a simplified Chinese version of the Web Accessibility Toolbar. This is fantastic news as it’s so hard to find resources in Chinese for web accessibility let alone tools. This can be downloaded from The Paciello Group blog where you’ll also find links to resources in Chinese.

I’ll be headed over to Beijing in April for the W4A and WWW2008 conferences where I’ll be speaking about the cross over between mobile and web accessibility. If you’re going to be there come by and say hi.

Read about and download the Chinese Web Accessibility Toolbar.

Today I attended a presentation at CSUN on Creating Blogs, Podcasts and Use of Social Media Tools with Screen Readers presented by Mika Pyyhkala from the Association of Blind Citizens.

The focus of the session was to walk blind and partially sighted users through how to blog using Wordpress, use Twitter, Facebook and what poscasting tools there were out there. It was a really well thought out presentation which was written up in a Wordpress blog together with tools, resources and links. This was made all the better as everyone was sat at a laptop or PC all of which had a screen reader running.

Twitter was the area Mika seemed most excited about and talked the most in depth about. In fact his enthusiasm was such that when he asked how many people in the room used Twitter only two said yes. By the end of the session people were signing up and following his feed.

Most social networking sites have a way to go to make them truly accessible to all users with disabilities but it is great to see people taking advantage of these tools as far as they canm and Mika’s resources are a great place to start if you want to get into it. I’m a true believer in signing up to Facebook, Twitter and blogging in order to spread the word about web accessibility as well as keep up to date with what is going on.

Join us on Facebook and Twitter and follow news soundbites as well as updates on what we are up to.

At the start of February I presented at Techshare in Delhi, India’s first ever conference for technology for people with disabilities. It was an eye opening event with people gathered from both government, industry and non-profit from all over India and the world.

It was fascinating to learn about what is happening in India with regards to web accessibility and talk to different people, learn what the drivers are and what needs to be done to promote accessibility. As an invited guest blogger on the UN Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT (G3ICT) I pulled these thoughts into an article. This, I hope, will be the first of a series of articles looking at web accessibility in various locales. Next will be China as I’ll be speaking about the cross over between web and mobile accessibility at the WWW 2008 Conference and gathering information there in April.

Read Putting accessibility to information centre stage in India

Updated drafts of the Authoring Tool Accessiblity Guidelines 2.0 and Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Techniques documents were released today.

ATAG defines how authoring tools should help Web developers produce Web content that is accessible and conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines; it also defines how to make authoring tools accessible so that people with disabilities can use the tools. ATAG is introduced in the ATAG Overview

ATAG is part of a series of accessibility guidelines/standards developed by WAI, which are listed in
WAI Guidelines and Techniques

WAI encourages you to review the update ATAG 2.0 documents and submit comments on any issues that you think could present a barrier to future adoption and implementation of ATAG 2.0. Please send comments by 14 April 2008 to the comment list, which is publicly archived.

Please read, and comment. These guidelines are just as important as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

This is the news many of us have been waiting for. The announcement that in Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft will be supporting the WAI ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) Syntax.
ARIA is essential to the future of accessible applications on the Internet as it enables developers to define custom controls correctly. This in turn means that access technologies can understand them. The fact that Microsoft are now joining others in supporting ARIA is great news!

Find out more about Microsoft support for ARIA.

With the help of Barrier Break Technologies we have pulled together a list of Jaws and WindowEyes keystrokes for Flash and PDF. These are based on certain versions of each screen reader, Flash and PDF. Most of these are standard keystrokes but useful to flag within the context of using or testing accessible Flash and PDF. Also included are some useful links.

We’d be interested to hear your feedback, how you get on with the keystrokes, or if you have any more tips and advice that others may find useful.

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