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!

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.

The Schedule

Monday 16th February 2009

Demystifying Accessibility (Full Day): 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.

Tuesday 17th February 2009

Transitioning from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 (Half Day): a practical course to introduce the newly released guidelines for web accessibility, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). It will enable and inform web managers, designers and developers who have been working with WCAG 1.0 to start using WCAG 2.0.

Hidden Barriers to Web Accessibility (Half Day): a technical course, designed to enable website designers, developers and programmers to identify and cure some common, but less obvious accessibility problems on their websites.

Note: These two courses run on the same day. If delegates attend both courses, lunch will be provided and the total cost reduced to £310.00 (a saving of £25.00).

Wednesday 18th February 2009

Accessibility - Beyond The Basics (Full Day): this is a technical course designed to enable website designers, developers and programmers, to make informed best practice choices with some of the more advanced techniques of accessible web design by looking at forms, structure, JavaScript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Thursday 19th February 2009

Testing Training Course (Full Day): This practical workshop guides you through web accessibility testing techniques, introducing tools and providing tangible examples. It focuses on testing carried out using dedicated testing tools, simple browser tests and some widely used assistive technology software, such as screen readers. The workshop illustrates both automated and manual testing and explains the differences between them.

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 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

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)

Firstly we had dConstruct 2008, held in Brighton. The title of this year’s event was “Designing The Social Web”.

The day consisted of the following talks:

• Steven Johnson – The Urban Web
• Aleks Krotoski – Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place
• Joshua Porter – Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design
• Daniel Burka – Designing for Interaction
• Tantek Çelik - Social Network Portability
• Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones – Designing for the Coral Reef
• Jeremy Keith – The System of the World

All in all it was a good day with all the talks being informative, interesting and inspiring me to think about the implications the social web has for accessibility in a wider sense.

I won’t be doing a full run down of the day here – that’s already been done elsewhere on other blogs. If you couldn’t make the day, Alastair Campbell from Nomensa has dConstruct 2008 notes which cover the day well on his personal blog. The podcasts of the talks are also starting to appear on the dConstruct website so make sure to check those out as they get released.

Talking of podcasts, a big thank you should go to Opera Software who sponsored the production of transcripts for the podcasts. These should also be available soon from the dConstruct website. It’s good to see a company sponsoring events such as this through providing something genuinely useful for a lot of people that couldn’t make the day rather than freebies for the attendees.

The Web Today

The web is an integral part of life for a lot of people. I, like many other people I know, feel out of the loop if I haven’t got access to the web for a few days. This situation can be exacerbated if you have a disability and have difficulty getting out of the house for example. For most of us, things such as online shopping and banking etc can be a more convenient way of doing something. If you haven’t got a car, online shopping can avoid you having to carry lots of bags on a bus for example. Similarly, online banking can be great if you don’t have time to physically get to the bank during the day. I can safely say through working with many people with disabilities over the last few years, that the web is usually more than a convenience to them. The web is often their lifeline to the outside world and more independent living and is invaluable.

The Social Web

The social web is no different. It holds a lot of potential to connect people with disabilities with each other in ways that were previously not available as easily or readily. Connecting online with people with similar types of disability to share thoughts, experiences and information presents a fantastic opportunity for self discovery. As with traditional online services, the benefits of the social web for people with disabilities are arguably greater than for those without disabilities.

Looking at this from the other side, social networks are totally reliant on people visiting and using their sites to be successful and profitable. Social networks that are almost always free to use, are often valued as businesses by the size of their user base that regularly use the site. Without the users, there is no social network and the site dies. This is of course true for any site or business, but is arguably more important for social networking sites.

Problems and Solutions

With this in mind, in my opinion social networking sites should really be taking accessibility and usability seriously. At present, some of the most popular social networking sites have some fundamental problems as highlighted in a recent eNation Report by AbilityNet. Social networking sites also highlight one of the other major challenges facing web accessibility at present, that of User Generated Content (UGC). The web is no longer being developed by professionals, it’s being developed by anyone who has access to a computer and enough knowledge to be able to create an online presence using tools no more difficult than a word processor.

As most users are not versed in accessibility, there are hopefully things that tool developers can do to help ensure that the authoring tools help users produce content that is accessible. The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) are being developed to help ensure that authoring tools are usable by people with disabilities and that the content they produce is accessible and meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). As many social networking sites fall under the category of authoring tools, these guidelines could help to ensure these sites are available to as large a user group as possible, which at the end of the day is what they are all after.

Despite many of their accessibility problems, there is one shining light that many social networking sites currently offer, their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). These APIs allow you to access the data and services of social networking sites from your own sites and applications. Essentially, you can build your own interfaces to the standard versions of sites. This concept inspired Christian Heilmann from Yahoo! to organize his own conference, called Scripting Enabled, where the concept of “accessibility mashups” was brought to the fore. I’ll be doing a post on Scripting Enabled and everything that has happened since the conference and hack day very soon so keep an eye out for that one.

While the ultimate goal is to have accessible and usable social networking sites for all, until sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr etc start making accessibility and usability part of their design and development processes, accessibility mashups are a way to get around the current problems in an inventive way with great results.

Further Reading

• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (W3C Working Draft)
• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (W3C Recommendation)

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.

The problem this causes is that because heading markup is meant to enclose a single entity, a heading, and screen readers announce the beginning, the end and the level of each heading, whatever is inside the opening and closing tags gets announced as a single item.

Example 1: several links inside one heading

When several links are placed inside a heading, tabbing to any of the links causes screen reader announcement of all links, so the user has no idea which link has focus. If you have access to a screen reader check it out yourself.

Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 Link 4

For those without a screen reader, the output when the focus is on Link 1,is “Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 Link 4 heading level 4 link”. Tabbing to the second, third and subsequent links produces identical output.

I believe that the web authors who created the live example, probably wanted to mark up the links to aid navigation. What they should have done is identify the purpose of the links, for instance “Site-wide navigation” and used that as the content for the heading markup, immediately before the first of the links. (Which of course should have been in a list.)

The code that produced this is:

<h4><a href=”#”>Link 1 </a> <a href=”#”>Link 2 </a> <a href=”#”>Link 3 </a> <a href=”#”>Link 4 </a></h4>

Other problems

The above example is among the worst that I’ve come across, but other mixed content within one heading can cause almost as much confusion, Recently encountered instances include:

1. Using heading markup to apply a given style to an entire paragraph, including one or more links. This has a similar effect for screen reader users as the multiple links issue, but with the added confusion that the whole paragraph sounds as though it’s a link.
2. Including an image within heading markup, alongside the valid heading text, (presumably to help with positioning). Any text value given to the image ALT attribute will be announced as part of the heading, even though it may have nothing to do with it.
3. Including a related link within heading markup, for instance a heading “News” and its related “RSS feed” link both inside the opening and closing heading tags. This almost sounds as though it would be a good idea, but it isn’t. The benefit of having the heading, and thus the topic of the RSS link announced when the link has focus, is cancelled by the mis-information that there’s no “News” heading only a heading for “News RSS feed”.

So please just use heading markup for heading content. Not to enclose all of the content covered by the heading, nor for styling, positioning or link context.

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!

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.

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. .