Web Access Centre Blog

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.

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.

Earlier this year I took part in a workshop for Public Sector Forums (PSF) called “Real World Accessibility” along with Bruce Lawson, Patrick Lauke, Grant Broome, Dan Champion and Ian Lloyd.

It was only open to Public Sector employees, and went down a storm. So much so, PSF asked us to do another one, this time open to anyone.

It’s being held near the Barbican, this Wednesday, 8th August, and tickets have been selling well… but there are still tickets available if you want to take advantage of the collective knowledge that will be in the room, and if you’re still not sure, then check out the agenda:

Agenda

Chair: Dan Champion

9.30-10.05: Web Accessibility: What, Why, How, and Who Cares?
Bruce Lawson

An introduction to accessibility: whistlestop tour around why and how you should use Web Standards to make sites that are accessible to disabled people, usable for all and profitable for your client.

10.05-10.40: How disabled users use the web
Ann McMeekin, RNIB

A closer look at assistive technologies and how people with disabilities can - and do - use websites.

10.40-11.10: Short supplier slots

11.10-11.30: Exhibition, networking and coffee

11.30-12.05: Too much accessibility - good intentions, badly implemented
Patrick Lauke, University of Salford

HTML offers many features and attributes that can make your sites more accessible…but only if they’re used wisely. Can there really be “too much accessibility”?

12.05-13.05: Discussion - A Public Sector Web Management Group?

13.05-13.45: Exhibition, networking and lunch

13.45-14.20: GIS, PDF and other monsters in the closet
Grant Broome, Shaw Trust

Certain proprietary technologies sit on our servers secretly hoping that no-one will find them. Grant Broome from the Shaw Trust Accessibility Services examines how disabled users find these technologies and offers advice on how they can be made more accessible.

14.20-14.55: Quality assurance - testing, monitoring and maintaining accessibility
Dan Champion, Champion IS

14.55-15.15: Exhibition, networking and coffee

15.15-15.50 Case study - real world examples of common accessiblity cock-ups in the wild
Ian Lloyd, Nationwide BS and Accessify.com

To include video examples of public and private sector sites

15.50-16.45: Panel discussion, including WCAG2

Book a ticket for the second Real World Accessibility workshop.

Last week at CSUN I spent a large proportion of my time focusing on sessions and workshops that looked at JavaScript, screen readers and Web 2.0. Overall it was an interesting week with some great presenters one of which was Steve Faulkner from the Paciello Group who ran a one day workshop on “Screen readers and JavaScript”.

Originally scheduled to co-present with Gez Lemon, also of the Paciello Group, Steve found himself presenting solo for the first half of the day after Gez’s plane got cancelled due to blizzards. Charles Chen, the man behind Firevox, stepped up to the table mid afternoon to do a session on AJAX, live regions and accessibility as well as demo Firevox and it’s capabilities. Firevox is an open source suite of extensions for Firefox that make Firefox into a talking browser for the visually impaired.

Steve’s presentations

Building accessible web applications

Screen readers and JavaScript

Charles Chen - WAI ARIA

AJAX Live Regions and accessibility ppt

Other resources

Further useful resources focusing on JavaScript and how it can, or can’t, work with screen readers can be found at:

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI ARIA): WAI-ARIA defines how to make more advanced features of dynamic content and rich Internet applications accessible to people with disabilities. A primary focus of WAI-ARIA is providing information about user interface controls—such as expanding navigation bars—to assistive technology.

The JavaScript Dojo: Dojo is an Open Source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript. Dojo aims to solve some long-standing historical problems with DHTML which prevented mass adoption of dynamic web application development.