Web Access Centre Blog

Most of you won’t believe what I’m about to describe, and would never use heading structure in this way. This post isn’t for you, it’s for the people who believe that it’s OK to wrap several links inside a single heading tag, or in fact use one heading to enclose one or more other elements or types of content .

If you find this difficult to comprehend, you aren’t alone, it came as an enormous surprise to me too, but I’ve recently seen four different sites using one heading to enclose at least one other element.

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With all eyes on the Beijing for the 2008 Olympics I thought I’d publish a few observations of how well the official Beijing Olympic 2008 website works for international users. This post accompanies one I wrote about the accessibility of the Beijing 2008 website and flags where the cross overs exist with accessibility, localisation and internationalisation.

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We’ve been commissioning banner ads to place on other websites recently so I thought I’d share some of the guidelines we work to in-house when commissioning accessible advertising. It’s hard enough to know at the best of times how to deal with content on your site but when it comes to advertising, especially third party, what Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) apply and what should we be doing to make advertising accessible?

This article builds on Tips for creating accessible banner ads so if you’re looking for answers then read on. Continue Reading »

Then look no further. We’re running two half day courses Thursday June 26th on Transitioning your website from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 and Hidden Barriers to accessibility.

Transitioning from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 - With WCAG 2.0 nearing completion now is the perfect time to get ahead of the game and get started. This practical course is your WCAG 2.0 starter kit and looks at the new guidelines, what’s changed, what’s new, supporting resources and tools as well as implementation advice. The course aims to enable and inform web managers, designers and developers, who have been working with WCAG 1.0 on how to start using WCAG 2.0.

Hidden Barriers to accessibility - While guidelines are designed to do just that, guide, developing accessible websites is about understanding your user and their needs. This technical course is designed to enable website designers, developers and programmers to identify and cure some common, but less obvious accessibility problems on their web sites such as TITLE text, hidden text, same page links and placeholder text (to name a few).

These courses go beyond standard accessibility advice and look into the knottier aspects of accessibility so you can walk away with some practical and implementable solutions for your web sites.

Find out more and sign up.

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.

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.

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Structure is important.

A house wouldn’t be a house without structure - it’d be a pile of bricks and mortar, with some windows and doors.

Now, while you can’t have a house without structure, unfortunately, you can build a web page without any structure.

It’s not hugely useful though, so to help you make sure your pages are useful to your users, here’s our How To Do Headings guide.

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One of the joys of doing the Better Connected accessibility assessments, is the chance they give us to see how much residents can do on their local council web sites now. Things are just so much easier for people who don’t find it easy to get down to the council offices, especially for quick tasks like paying bills.

So you can imagine how distressing it is when we have to fail a site because its online payment system won’t function without JavaScript.

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Earlier this year, Bim wrote very eloquently on the subject of Too much accessibility: TITLE attributes, which, if you haven’t read it, or don’t remember what it says, is worth taking a couple of minutes to read over.

In the run up to the annual Better Connected survey, I thought it was worth a quick reminder of the issues, and a few top tips to help you make sure you’re not straying off the accessibility path.

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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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