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.

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.

The Web Accessibility Initiative have just published a set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 presentation materials.

The presentation “slides” and extensive notes are designed for presenters to use for their own presentations and is also available for anyone who wants to learn about WCAG 2.0. Topics covered are:

• the benefits of WCAG 2.0
• shortcuts for using WCAG 2.0
• how it differs from WCAG 1.0
• related topics

The About WCAG 2.0 presentation is available in “Presentation format” (compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint, Open Office Impress, and some other presentation software) or “Web format” (HTML/CSS) the presentation, notes and instructions can be downloaded from the WAI site.

RNIB’s Web Access Team run training courses to help people understand issues behind and ways to achieve, accessible web sites. Our laptop based technical course is designed to highlight best practice, and things to avoid when implementing CSS, structure, forms and JavaScript. You’ll get the chance to find out, first hand, what it’s like to work with a screen reader, and how people get round the web without a mouse.

We have just two spare places on the course that will run next Thursday, 26th July, in Judd Street, London (close to Kings Cross). And at just £350 + VAT this course is a bargain.

To find out if it is a subject that would interest or help you in your work, find out more about Web Accessibility Training - Beyond the basics, together with details of how to book online.

We are running our “Demystifying web accessibility” training course in London this Thursday, July 19th. There are the final few places available.

This course is designed to introduce website owners, commissioners, marketing or project managers and designers to the reasons for making websites accessible, including the principles and practices that make this possible.

Find out more about the course and book online

Here we go again, we’ve organised another series of dates for our ever-popular training courses, Demystifying accessibility and Accessibility, beyond the basics.

Apart from offering a bunch of new dates to choose from, we also offer a “bulk” training service for clients who have several people that they want trained at the same time. We can arrange an exclusive training day to deliver either of the courses, or we can bring the Demystifying accessibility course to your door.

Another day, another Accessibility - Beyond the Basics training course done and dusted.

Yet again another great group of really positive web developers/authors determined to get to grips with the finer points of accessible web design.

Bim and I are really enjoying the chance to meet and talk to people and share what we know - both information and experience - and we think that this series of training courses will run and run.

Don’t just take our word for it though - here are some comments from our delegates:

Very good. I thought I’d read most of the articles and my knowledge about accessibility was about 60%. It was really about 20% but now is more like 60%. Well done. - Melissa Cupis, Director, Budget Web Sites Ltd.

Thorough. Gives a good list of points that are issues for web design today. Carlos Rey, Senior Manager, Datapharm Communications Ltd.

Very practical and hands-on. I learned a lot. Janet Deverell, Communications Officer, Neighbourhood Renewal.

I thought it was of a very high quality - a course aimed at developers who need more than just the basics is definitely needed. Dennis Odell, Senior Web Developer, AKQA.

If you think that sounds like the kind of thing you need, then you can book yourself a place, for a very reasonable sum, via our training course booking form. If you want more information about this or any of the other courses we’re running, look at the aptly named Web accessibility training courses page.

As regular readers of the Web Access Centre will know, we’ve been running open training courses in web accessibility since May this year. Now, I’m delighted to say, they’ve been such a huge success that we’ve scheduled dates for more courses to run right up until March next year.

We’ve learned a lot from the courses that have already run, and through the feedback from these, we’ve been able to make popular changes that are already being put into effect. The two courses currently available are:

• Demystifying web accessibility: a course for people who need to understand the big issues; why accessibility is vital and what happens when sites aren’t accessible. This is now running as a full day course in which, apart from learning all the good reasons for embracing web accessibility, delegates will see access technologies being used, even on their own web pages.
• Accessibility – beyond the basics: the more technical course for people who need to understand the detail of how it’s done, includes examples, so that delegates are equipped to rip out the bad practice and bolt in the best, on their return to work. The most popular part of this hands-on, computer-based learning experience, is where delegates actually get to use a screen reader. It’s so good to hear the pennies drop!

Other good news is, we have plans afoot to add a course, on testing sites for accessibility, to the training suite. More news on that soon !