#33548
New Accessibility Features in Internet Explorer 8
Hi, my name is JP Gonzalez-Castellan and I’m the Accessibility Program Manager for IE8. The IE team has been working towards making IE8 the most accessible browser possible, and we wanted to detail some of the work we’ve done toward this end. In this post I will provide you with some background on Accessibility, I’ll cover new UI features (Caret Browsing, Find on Page, Adaptive Zoom, High DPI, etc) and also platform features (support for ARIA, support for IAccessibleEx, and support for additional WinEvents) that improve the Accessibility of the browser.
Gonzalez-Castellan, J.P. Microsoft (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Web Browsers
#33664
Are Accessibility Statements Useful?
An accessibility statement provides website visitors with information on how to utilize any accessibility features implemented, together with known barriers and how to overcome them. This information is usually presented on a dedicated page within the website. This article will look at the benefits of providing an accessibility statement together with common problems, before evaluating whether accessibility statements are useful.
Tomlinson, Leona. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Policies and Procedures
#33685
A simple checklist that presents the principles and techniques of WCAG 2.0 in a user-friendly, understandable format. The language has been significantly changed and simplified from the official WCAG 2.0 specification to make it more easily tested and verified for web pages.
WebAIM (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#33853
Yes, if you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Ajax is like most techniques and technologies on the web—they are what you make of them.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Ajax
#33953
Usable Accessibility: Making Web Sites Work Well for People with Disabilities
When people talk about both usability and accessibility, it is often to point out how they differ. Accessibility often gets pigeon-holed as simply making sure there are no barriers to access for screen readers or other assistive technology, without regard to usability, while usability usually targets everyone who uses a site or product, without considering people who have disabilities. In fact, the concept of usability often seems to exclude people with disabilities, as though just access is all they are entitled to. What about creating a good user experience for people with disabilities—going beyond making a Web site merely accessible to make it truly usable for them?
Quesenbery, Whitney. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Usability
#34001
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
#34003
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
#34147
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
#34148
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
#34256
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
#34258
Worldspace is an accessibility analysis tool designed to identify errors with Section 508, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
#34463
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
#34473
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
#34504
This presentation describes how creating an accessible website takes care of its (organic) search engine optimization to a very appreciable extent taking reference from the WCAG 2.0 working draft and the Google webmaster guidelines.This presentation was created and presented by Abhay Rautela to the Sapient creative community at the New Delhi office in February 2007.
Rautela, Abhay. Cone Trees (2007). Presentations>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization
#34615
Web Axe: Practical Web Design Accessibility Tips
A podcast and blog featuring practical web design accessibility tips.
#34616
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
#34617
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
#34618
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
#34619
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
#34634
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
#34642
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
#34643
This standard is directed toward ensuring equitable access to all content on Government of Canada Web sites.
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (2007). Resources>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#34773
People with dyslexia frequently experience discomfort when reading because they find it more difficult to ‘decode’ the words on the page, and can also find it difficult to remain focussed on a particular piece of text. Some people may also have to concentrate more to remember what they have already read, which means they will tire more easily.
Hobo (2008). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Typography
#34781
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
#34936
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
