Web Access Centre Blog

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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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.

We talk a lot about making PDF’s accessible and how we should present them on the web but rarely do we touch on making PowerPoint accessible. As with PDF the bottom line is that if the content of the PowerPoint can not be made accessible then an accessible alternative should be given.

Accessibility is about access to information for all types of people regardless of ability or disability including people with hearing cognitive, mobility and sight impairments. For the purposes of this article however we’re looking at how people with screen readers can both access PowerPoint to read and also use when delivering presentations.

The general consensus is that PowerPoint files are not as accessible as HTML pages, and that, while there are ways to improve on the accessibility of slides, it is advisable to provide a Text or HTML alternative.

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When I was at South by Southwest Interactive earlier this year, I attended a panel which had the intruiging title of “High Class and Low Class Web Design”. I’m not sure what I expected before I went in, but while I was in there, I had a bit of an epiphany.

Coming from a topic based on class, there was a lot of talk about respect for the audience and whether designers treat their audiences as equals and how do deal with audiences that aren’t in the same cultural, educational or peer group. One of the panelists worked for a wrestling magazine and described how after being initially skeptical, he came to understand, and then to respect his audience as he got to know more about them.

In amongst a lot of fascinating discussion, came an interesting point - that it’s difficult, if not impossible to design for an audience that you don’t respect - and it got me thinking…

…what if the reason that web accessibility (and accessibility in general) hasn’t got as far as it should have by now, is that the majority of designers/managers/people in charge of making stuff have no, or not enough knowledge of what life is like for people with disabilities, or what it’s like having a disability, and as a result, don’t understand, and don’t respect them.

It’s all very well to make a choice that you don’t want to design websites for wrestlers because you just don’t “get” them (or think that it’s a complete waste of time and money), but there really shouldn’t be a web designer out there who decides they don’t want to (or can’t) make websites for disabled people.

It’s not news that there’s a lack of understanding generally about disability, but this is particularly true when it comes to how people with disabilities use the web, and since coming back I’ve been having a look around the web to see what’s out there, and the truth is, there isn’t much. Yahoo have been doing some good things with videos of screen reader and screen magnification users, but the feedback I’ve been hearing is that while those are great, it’s still not enough.

So in the coming months, we’re going to try and do something about that.

First though, it seemed sensible to get some opinions from you - the readers of this blog, and the people who have been crying out for this information - as to what exactly you want.

Some of the ideas we’ve come up with are:

Profiles/text interviews, accompanied by photographs of how each individual uses the web.
Audio interviews/podcasts (with transcripts, of course)
Surveys of groups of disabled people
Videos (technology and hosting permitting)

What do you think? Anything else you’d like to see? Any particular group you’d like us to concentrate on first?