Accessible HTML/XHTML Forms

Forms are often the most tricky aspect of web development for beginners to get their head around, largely because it means stepping out of the comfort zone of one-way information - no longer are you simply presenting information at the person viewing your site, now you are asking for input, for feedback that you have to process in some way. And just as it may be difficult for HTML beginners to understand just how they handle form data, so is it difficult to understand some of the issues relating to accessibility.

Lloyd, Ian. Web Standards Project (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Forms

Current Browsers and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Any effort on the part of web authors to add accessibility features is rendered useless if browsers and assistive technologies don’t take advantage of them. User agent developers need to ensure that their products support these features and, most crucially, make them available to users in an accessible and obvious manner. What follows is a quick run-down of most of UAAG’s guidelines and checkpoints, annotated with comments, suggestions, personal gripes about current levels of implementation, and wishlists for future browser versions.

Lauke, Patrick H. Web Standards Project (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Web Browsers

CAPTCHAs, CAPTCHAs Everywhere

My business and passion is accessibility and there is obviously a huge problem with these visual CAPTCHAs. If you used alt-text on this image, alt="e3TJ6Jdp", that would be fine and very welcome for blind visitors. It would also be welcome for any computer system seeking to sign up for lots of emails. Using alt-text on the image does not solve the problem! The visual image CAPTCHA is fundamentally inaccessible. For the example above, this means very simply that Yahoo excludes people who are blind (or vision impaired) from signing up for Yahoo email accounts.

Thatcher, Jim. JimThatcher.com (2009). Articles>Accessibility>Security>Web Design

Evaluating Existing Audio CAPTCHAs and an Interface Optimized for Non-Visual Use  

Audio CAPTCHAs were introduced as an accessible alternative for those unable to use the more common visual CAPTCHAs, but anecdotal accounts have suggested that they may be more difficult to solve. This paper demonstrates in a large study of more than 150 participants that existing audio CAPTCHAs are clearly more difficult and time-consuming to complete as compared to visual CAPTCHAs for both blind and sighted users. In order to address this concern, we developed and evaluated a new interface for solving CAPTCHAs optimized for non-visual use that can be added in-place to existing audio CAPTCHAs. In a subsequent study, the optimized interface increased the success rate of blind participants by 59% on audio CAPTCHAs, illustrating a broadly applicable principle of accessible design: the most usable audio interfaces are often not direct translations of existing visual interfaces.

Bigham, Jeffrey P. and Anna C. Cavender. University of Washington-Seattle (2008). Articles>Accessibility>Security>Web Design

Pitfalls of Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools

Automated web accessibility evaluation tools are hard to trust, understand and only provides feedback on a small amount of factors that influence accessibility. Also, a unified web evaluation methodology should be adopted to provide consistent results across tools.

Standards Schmandards (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Assessment

Back To Basics: How Poor Usability Effects Accessibility

In recent user testing with a range of participants including Visually Impaired (VIP) and Blind users we found that the majority of problems were common across all groups. However the effect of poor usability is more severe for users with visual disabilities. Surprisingly all of the issues are very familiar and are easy to fix so we thought we’d revisit some of the basics of accessible web design.

Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Usability

Effective Alt Text

It is perfectly possible to diligently apply alt text to every image on a site and create a result that is completely useless. Unless the alt text effectively conveys the information the image displays, it will be ineffective.

Frontend Infocentre (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Graphic Design

New Accessibility Guidelines A "Welcomed Update"

The World Wide Web Consortium recently approved new accessibility guidelines. Passed in December 2008, the new "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" is now the official recommendation for web accessibility for the disabled. This new WCAG 2.0 document, a welcomed update, replaces the WCAG 1.0 W3C recommendation of 1999. This article is part one in a series discussing the impact of WCAG 2.0 on your website.

Dolson, Joseph C. Practical eCommerce (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards

New Accessibility Guidelines Part II: Operability

The concept behind website operability is simple: Can everybody use the tools and mechanisms required to operate your website? Operability may seem easy, but it can be very challenging. Every control, every link, and every button on your site is a potential point of failure for operability. Without appropriate consideration for the disabled, you run the risk that disabled users will be unable to access your site.

Dolson, Joseph C. Practical eCommerce (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Usability

New Accessibility Guidelines Part III: Understandability

The understandability of text is crucial to web accessibility. At broad levels, this means specifying text languages, explaining the meanings of jargon or idioms, and expanding abbreviations to clarify text. It's not just text that can present a barrier to accessibility, however. A lack of organizational predictability or proper error management can greatly decrease the accessibility of any website.

Dolson, Joseph C. Practical eCommerce (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Writing

New Accessibility Guidelines Part IV: Robustness

The fourth principle of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines requires new web documents to be “robust.” Robustness, future-proofing, user-agent independence, accessibility-supported: All are terms that suggest the same basic idea that your documents should follow standard, supported models for web document types. In many ways, this is the simplest and most testable requirement of the WCAG, but the details can be quite complicated.

Dolson, Joseph C. Practical eCommerce (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards

Designing for Screen Reader Compatibility

Techniques that work for one screen reader almost always work in other screen readers. In some cases, one of the screen readers has capabilities that the others do not have, or handles some types of content better than the other screen readers. Still, developers are almost always better off when they focus on accessibility standards and generally-accepted accessibility techniques than when they focus on screen reader differences.

WebAIM (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Visual

Adopting WCAG 2

It is six months since the release of WCAG 2.0 and I thought it might be interesting to see how extensively it has been adopted as a bench mark for determining web content accessibility. Over this time, I have felt that the rate of adoption has been relatively slow and the number of countries and other regulatory authorities now using WCAG 2 is lower than I expected.

Hudson, Roger. DingoAccess (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards

From Web Accessibility to Web Adaptability  

This article asserts that current approaches to enhance the accessibility of Web resources fail to provide a solid foundation for the development of a robust and future-proofed framework. In particular, they fail to take advantage of new technologies and technological practices. The article introduces a framework for Web adaptability, which encourages the development of Web-based services that can be resilient to the diversity of uses of such services, the target audience, available resources, technical innovations, organisational policies and relevant definitions of 'accessibility'. Method The article refers to a series of author-focussed approaches to accessibility through which the authors and others have struggled to find ways to promote accessibility for people with disabilities. These approaches depend upon the resource author's determination of the anticipated users' needs and their provision.

Kelly, B., L. Nevile, D. Sloan, S. Fanou, R. Ellison, and L. Herrod. Opus (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility

Designing for "Mature" Users

According to a study by the Annenberg School at USC, American Internet users include: 75% of adults aged 56-65 and 41% of adults over 66. If we want to design for the bulk of our users, we had best consider the more mature user groups.

Hall, Mark. UI Design Newsletter (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Elderly

Ten Ways To Make Your XHTML Site Accessible Using Web Standards

Let’s take a look at 10 ways to improve the accessibility of your XHTML website by making it standards-compliant. We’ll go the extra mile and include criteria that fall beyond the standards set by the W3C but which you should follow to make your website more accessible. Each section lists the criteria you need to meet, explains why you need to meet them and gives examples of what you should and shouldn’t do.

Irigoyen, Michael. Smashing (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards

Creating Accessible Tabular Data Tables: A Help Authoring Guide

This Fast Track tutorial demonstrates and employs web standards and accessibility methods for tabular data table creation. It is presented free of charge to the community as a help authoring, technical writing and web design guide.

Palinkas, Frank M. helpware.net (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Help

HTML 5 and Accessibility

Probably the most worrying thing about the HTML Working Group is the lack of respect for differing opinions that some working group members have. The apparent disinterest in accessibility is another troublesome factor.

456 Berea Street (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>HTML

HTML 5, Microformats and Testing Accessibility

Testing is vital, particularly at the border of accessibility theory and practice. I wonder, for example, if tabindex and accesskey would have made it to the HTML4 spec if there had been full testing with assistive technology users? What I really want to know from the HTML5 people is who they think is going to do this research that will provide the evidence that their gang requires before useful attributes are restored to the specification.

Lawson, Bruce. BruceLawson.co.uk (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>HTML5

HTML 5 and the Summary Attribute

As I wrote in Help screen reader users by giving data tables a summary, the summary attribute on the table element can be used to provide information that helps non-sighted users understand data tables. The current draft of HTML 5 requires that validators display a warning if they encounter a summary attribute, since it is now an 'obsolete but conforming feature.'

Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>HTML5