Web Access Centre Blog

The Web Access Team have been pretty quiet over the last few months but for a good reason. We’ve been hard at work on our training offerings in response to feedback from past delegates.

We have two new courses to offer, one of which has been requested for many times and another which ventures into new accessibility territory.

Our Practical Accessibility Testing workshop aims to guide you through web accessibility testing techniques, introducing tools and providing tangible examples along the way. This workshop also illustrates both automated and manual testing and explains the differences between them.

Our Accessible Rich Internet Applications - Understand and Use WAI-ARIA course introduces the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) specification. ARIA improves the accessibility of script heavy websites and web applications for assistive technology users. Whilst still in the process of being defined, implemented and supported, learning about ARIA now can help developers prepare and plan for the future.

We are also still running our existing training courses, details of which can be found on their respective pages:

• Demystifying Accessibility
• Working Through WCAG 2.0
• Accessibility - Beyond The Basics

In addition to our new courses, we also have new venues outside of smoky old London! The dates and venues are:

• Liverpool: 17th - 19th June
• Edinburgh: 21st - 25th September

We also have weeks lined up at our regular London Head Office venue. The dates for these are:

• 10th - 14th August
• 23rd - 27th November

We hope to have you joining us on one of our courses soon!

In 2009, the RNIB Web Access Team is changing the way it runs its open training courses. For the benefit of delegates who wish to attend our open courses, but are a significant distance from London, we are going to be running all of our training courses back to back during training weeks at various points throughout the year. This is in contrast to how we have run our training courses in the past, with single day events being interspersed throughout the year. Having training weeks should save travel and accommodation costs for delegates who wish to attend more than one course.

Our first training week of 2009 is running from Monday 16th to Thursday 19th February in London. We’ll be scheduling further training weeks throughout 2009 and also looking into the possibility of running some of these weeks at different venues other than London.

We also have a new open course for 2009 which we will be running for the first time this month. Our testing training course aims to guide you through web accessibility testing techniques, introducing the tools available to help you and providing tangible examples to take away.

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The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) announced today that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) have become a full W3C Standard.

This is great news and something many in the accessibility world have been waiting for for a long time. Version one of the guidelines were released in 1999, which is a long time in anyone’s book, but in “web years” it’s a very long time!

Much has changed on the web since 1999 and WCAG 2.0 seeks to address many of the new accessibility challenges facing the web today. As a document, it’s much more flexible and testable than WCAG 1.0 and covers more than just W3C Technologies. Proprietary technologies such as PDFs and Flash etc are also covered.

The techniques document for WCAG 2.0 is also updateable which should help the guidelines move with technology, and not become out of date as quickly as WCAG 1.0 did.

As always, guidelines cannot guarantee accessibility unless they are understood and applied correctly, but they can go a long way towards helping developers and content editors get things right. Having a modern, stable version of the guidelines for today’s web is only a good thing.

Further Reading

• Full W3C Press Release
• WCAG 2.0 at a Glance
• The WCAG 2.0 Documents
• WCAG 2.0 Guidelines
• How to Meet WCAG 2.0: Customisable Quick Reference
• Understanding WCAG 2.0
• Techniques for WCAG 2.0
• How to Update Your Web Site from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0
• WCAG 2.0 Resources - The Web Standards Project
• WCAG 2.0 is official - but is that all you need to make a site accessible?

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AUWG) published a Working Draft of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 yesterday.

The following is taken from the email sent to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Interest Group:

ATAG defines how authoring tools should help Web developers produce Web content that is accessible and conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). It also defines how to make authoring tools accessible so that people with disabilities can use the tools. An overview of ATAG is available for those who are new to the guidelines.

In this update, Part A, which addresses authoring tool user interface accessibility, is refocused. Part B is restructured to replace the concept of “Web Content Accessibility Benchmark” with a more straightforward relationship with WCAG 2.0. The Working Group welcomes feedback on these changes.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) encourages you to review the updated 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 6th January 2009 to the comment list, which is publicly archived.

Further Reading

• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AUWG)
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Interest Group
• How WAI Develops Accessibility Guidelines through the W3C Process

So the big news of this week wasn’t the result of the US Election, it was the news that the technical material of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) has been completed and real world example implementations have been provided for all of the guidelines / success criteria. This is great news and means that WCAG 2.0 has now moved on to being a W3C Proposed Recommendation.

The next, and final stage for WCAG 2.0, is final publication which is expected to happen in December 2008. We will then have a modern, stable set of guidelines to reference as an alternative to the ageing WCAG 1.0.

Further Reading

• Overview of the WCAG 2.0 documents
• Latest news from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

If you haven’t heard already, Christian Heilmann from Yahoo! is organising a free accessibility conference / hack day in London this Friday and Saturday (19th and 20th September). Although both days are free, you need to register your details and get a ticket to attend. The hack day on Saturday is now fully booked but you can still grab a ticket for the fact finding conference day on Friday if you’re quick!

The following is taken from the Scripting Enabled site:

The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time - let’s not wait, let’s make it happen.

You can find out more details about the event by visiting the Scripting Enabled site. The schedule for the day is also available. There has been a last minute change with Jonathan Hassell from the BBC stepping in to talk about dyslexia in place of Phil Teare who unfortunately can no longer make the event.

Check out this page to get your ticket. Hope to see you down there on Friday!

John Slatin, a respected member of the web accessibility community and former chair of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, sadly passed away earlier this year leaving behind him the University of Texas Accessibility Institute.

Sadly UT want to close the Accessibility Institute which has been a centre of excellence for research and innovation in web accessibility. This would be a huge loss to the industry as the Accessibility Institute has contributed to the furtherance of web accessibility in many ways.

As news has spread of the closing of UT’s Accessibility Institute, many have asked for a simple way to register their objections. Knowbility has created and posted an online petition and welcome all the support you can bring by signing the petition and forwarding it to anyone else who may be interested.

Reasons for saving the Accessibility Institute include:

• Need for research based findings to support accessible design practice
• Opportunity for a world class institution like UT to serve as an example to other institutions.
• Place where emerging practices can be tested and modelled
• Contributions to international body of knowledge on inclusion
• Maintain thought leadership in Texas, easily disseminated to state agencies that have accessibility mandates

Sign the petition to save the Accessibility Institute today.

Getting geared up for WCAG 2.0? There are just a few places left before we close the bookings for our Transitioning from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 training course. Find out what is likely to change, and how you can prepare for the forthcoming renewed web accessibility guidelines. This half day course is run on the same day as Hidden Barriers to web accessibility, where you’ll learn how to avoid some of the less well-known issues that create real access problems.

Both courses will run on Thursday 18th September, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Venue RNIB head office, London. Anyone who books both courses will qualify for £25.00 reduction on the total cost, and get a free lunch. .

AbilityNet’s conference Accessibility 2.0 was a resounding success in more ways than one. While is sparked controversy within the microformats and accessibility debate it was also the start of much creativity in making social networking sites more accessible.

So much happened during the day it’s difficult to know where to start but thanks to AbilityNet you can catch up yourselves on events by via the podcasts and transcripts.

Keep an eye out for Scripting Enabled, a conference to be held September 19th and 20th, that aims to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web.

See you there I hope!

We seem to have gone a little bit Olympics crazy over here but as the games draw to a close the AbilityNet team look ahead at what we should be doing with the UK Olympics website by publishing their user testing findings of the Beijing 2008 Olympics website in the State of the eNation Report Beijing Olympics Special.

In this special report we asked disabled users to try out the Beijing Olympics website in our interaction lab. Poor information architecture and a lack of adherence to web standards result in an uneven playing field for disabled sports fans across the world…In a departure from our standard State of the eNation review procedure we brought a range of disabled users into our lab to perform some basic tasks on the website. Users uncovered a variety of accessibility and usability issues that only real-life user testing would have uncovered.

The report contains some fascinating user videos which give real insight to the barriers people face both in terms of guidelines as well as poor usability for people with disabilities - not to be missed. These all also come with either captioning or transcripts.

For further comment on the Olympics site see also E-Access Bulletin’s Web Accessibility - Beijing Olympics: Revisiting The Errors Of The Past as well as our post on the accessibility of the Beijing Olympics website