#22752
UK Accessibility Investigation of 1,000 Web Sites - Results Released
An investigation of 1000 UK Web sites carried out on behalf of the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) reveals unacceptably poor (in fact woeful) accessibility. At least 81% of sites failed to meet the minimum accessibility standard, and this figure is likely to be much higher.
Dodd, Jon. Usability Professionals Association (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Usability
#31073
Understanding Disability Issues When Designing Web Sites
When you design or modify Web sites to allow access to people with disabilities, you make the Web accessible. New Web sites and applications, however, are introducing new problems and barriers. There are complex graphics and multimedia applications that assistive technology simply has not solved. One solution to these new problems is to put accessibility in the hands of the Web developer and content author. Creating a Web site that is accessible by people with disabilities is relatively easy as long as the Web developer and author follow some basic guidelines.
IBM (2007). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
#11901
Understanding the Tradeoffs: A Case Study of the University of Washington Homepage 
Good web development requires knowing when and what tradeoffs should be made to best fulfill the needs of a broad audience. This article uses the University of Washington homepage to help you understand these tradeoffs.
Prosser, Jaime. EServer (2001). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#22976
Universal Design and Disability Access to the Web
As the importance of the Internet increases, so does the need to make its content available to larger, more diverse audiences. These audiences use a variety of technologies to access the Web, ranging from traditional browsers on desktop computers to portable, hand-held devices, cell phones and hands-free devices. The need to accommodate these technologies through more universal Web design strategies grows with every new technology which is introduced. Web developers who ignore the emerging trend toward multiple-environment Internet access will be left to lament their inability to reach important segments of the population.
Bohman, Paul. WebAIM (2000). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
#18600
Universal Design Interface Standards
Essential to the ability of people to come up to universally designed products and know how to operate them is the existence of interface standards. Work is currently under way in a number of areas to ensure that people: 1. Know what to do to operate products they encounter; 2. Are able to connect any assistive technologies they may have with them to the products they encounter.
University of Wisconsin. Design>Usability>Accessibility>Universal Usability
#18448
Universal Usability Guidelines for Users with Slow Connections
Since the beginning of 'age of the Internet', the load time of Web pages has been the major concern among the designers and the users. Analysis of traffic patterns of the web sites has shown how the users get frustrated about slowness of the connection. WWW, which stands for 'World Wide Web', has been pronounced as 'World Wide Wait' by many users. Web designers often want to use graphics, animation, and even sound and video to represent or enhance web site content. However, these can generate longer waiting times unless the users have a high speed connection and research shows that web users don't like to wait. Tenth Georgia Tech GVU WWW Survey (1998) showed that slow ads, speed of the Internet and graphics are among the problems that the users complained most.
Ayan, Necip Fazil. Universal Usability (2001). Design>Usability>Accessibility>Bandwidth
#18443
Universal Usability Web Design Guidelines for the Elderly (Age 65 and Older)
The use of computers in everyday life, particularly the Internet, is growing at an astonishing rate. The idea of universal usability has been put forward to address the problems of building 'An Information Society for All'. Ben Shneiderman proposed three challenges to attain universal usability for Web-based and other services: technology variety, user diversity, and gaps in knowledge. While a variety of groups and organizations are working on hardware and software accessibility, how to design an easy-to-use interface that accommodates all user communities remains a major task. On the other hand, the population of older people is increasing at an extraordinary rate. People 45 years and older will soon make up more than half the adult population, and people 85 years and older are the fastest growing age group. While technology is rapidly being integrated into most aspects of life, changing the nature of work, the form and scope of personal communication, education, health care delivery, and home, older people are highly likely to be active users of technology.
Zhao, Haixia. Universal Usability (2001). Design>Usability>Accessibility>Elderly
#22972
University Web Accessibility Policies: A Bridge Not Quite Far Enough
Most university Web accessibility policies fall short of achieving their purpose. The Web sites of these universities often fail to meet minimum Web accessibility standards. Part of the problem lies with the policies themselves. Many of them fail to delineate a specific technical standard, fail to indicate whether compliance with the policy is required, fail to indicate a timeline or deadline for compliance, fail to define a system for evaluating or monitoring compliance, and fail to enumerate any consequences for failure to comply.
Bohman, Paul. WebAIM (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Policies and Procedures
#26789
Usability and Accessibility with AJAX
The Ajax express train rumbles on, threatening to crush anything in its path. Recent discussion has turned to those critical elements of good web development, usability and accessibility. Accessibility is a major issue with Ajax, mainly because anything that relies on JavaScript to function is inaccessible pretty much by default. There are two solutions: either provide a fall-back system where the site remains useful without its Ajax enhancements, or provide a whole separate interface that works without scripting.
Willison, Simon. SitePoint (2005). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Ajax
#26767
The number of older web users is growing at a dramatic rate. Find out how to make your website easy to use for this lucrative market.
Fidgeon, Tim. Webcredible (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Elderly
#19494
Usable, Accessible Web Pages for Low Vision: Criteria for Designers 
This paper identifies challenges for design of web pages for low vision. It examines key usability considerations (subject, occasion, audience, and purpose) for defining content for web pages and emphasizes seven basic principles of universal design. SOAP for web pages is a model that web page developers can use to define content criteria for websites. The model emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to audience, needs, task, and requirements analysis. It discusses a user–centered approach (capture, specify, plan, realize, deliver) to usability testing. Additionally, this paper summarizes key findings from low vision research on type legibility. The paper concludes with design principles that can be derived from print–based studies (normal and subnormal vision) for developing accessible web pages.
Reece, Gloria A. STC Proceedings (2001). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Visual
#19218
The UsableNet (LIFT) On-line Web Accessibility Tool
TechDis and UsableNet are working together to bring you this FREE online web accessibility evaluation tool. The tool automates many of the 'Technical Accessibility' requirements for your web pages.
TechDis (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Software
#27719
The traditional way of implementing the HTML accesskey attribute using unique letters does not work. I propose always to use the first letter of the link name as access key. The first letter can be generated by code. We badly need are more accessible Internet.
Tverskov, Jesper. Smack the Mouse (2002). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
#22830
User Modeling for Adaptive and Adaptable Software Systems
Universal Usability requires that user interfaces accommodate users with a wide variety of expertise and knowledge. Moreover, individual users' needs and preferences change as they use a software system. Systems that guide the user through an evolutionary learning process or adapt the user interface to the user provide a solution to this challenge. This paper introduces the techniques, highlights several examples of systems that implement them and provides guidelines for practitioners who wish to develop adaptive and adaptable interfaces.
Kules, Bill. University of Maryland (2000). Design>User Interface>Accessibility>Universal Usability
#19219
This is a simple 'wizard tool' to create a User Style Sheet. These can be extremely useful for students with visual impairments, scotopic senstivity or visual processing difficulties such as some forms of dyslexia. User Style Sheets are a client-side application of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), they can be used to overide the presentation of HTML based web pages. They can be extremely powerful in enforcing the way in which the user desires a web page to be presented. You can set option of text font, size and colour. The font colour of hyperlinks etc. The user style sheets can be used in Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozilla.
TechDis (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Software
#26516
User-Centred Design (UCD): 6 Methods
Learn all about user-centered design, the methods available to you, and how and when they should be employed.
Fidgeon, Tim. Webcredible (2005). Design>User Centered Design>Accessibility>Usability
#27420
Access keys are a contentious area of accessibility, as they can sometimes clash with the shortcut keys used by user agents. One method to get around this problem is to allow users to define their own access keys. This post suggests a PHP class that allows users to define their own access keys.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
#23823
User-Defined Style Sheets and Accessibility
How you can set your own stylesheet for greater accessibility; another lecture/essay.
Bartlett, Kynn. HTML Writers Guild (1999). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>CSS
#27477
Users with special needs who are not sufficiently visually impaired to require assistive technologies can still be frustrated by poor contrast, problematic colour schemes, or tiny, unreadable text. Up to 10% of men are colour blind to some extent, and the increasing number of older users are less likely to have 20/20 vision than those designing the pages.
#26853
Using an Access-Centered Design to Improve Accessibility: A Primer for Technical Communicators 
This article discusses accessibility barriers as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and provides a basic primer on how technical communicators can remove these barriers during their Web design process and test to ensure the barriers were removed. The article focuses on 10 common barriers to a meaningful experience for people with disabilities, barriers that a technical communicator can consider when designing online information. Working on accessibility issues before online information goes live will help to reduce re-work and re-design and can save a lot of headaches for a technical communicator.
Roberts, Linda Enders. Technical Communication Online (2006). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility
#26371
Using Customized Sounds Effectively
Learn about the advantages of, as well as common tools for creating customizable sounds.
Microsoft (2002). Design>Accessibility>Software>Audio
#22968
Using Opera to Check for Accessibility
There are a lot of tools available to check your Web content for accessibility. Some tools are Web-based (such as WAVE 3.0). Other tools are stand-alone software products that you install on your hard drive. One tool that you may have overlooked is the Opera Web browser. Opera is not an accessibility validator—it's a Web browser—but it can act like an accessibility validator if you know how to use it that way. In fact, it's one of the best available. This article explains why.
WebAIM (2003). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Software
#14236
UUGuide: Practical Design Guidelines for Universal Usability
Even if technology is made more affordable and accessible, it still must be usable by a wide variety of people – experts and novices, abled and disabled – using a wide variety of hardware and software – old and new, text-based and audio/video. Universal usability has thus become another related, but distinct area of research. This web site seeks to identify some of the major issues faced by hardware and software designers who wish to build with universal usability in mind. The Table of Contents to the left contains a list of papers on topics related to universal usability organized into two groups. The first group, User Communities, identifies some of the groups of people who require special considerations when designing hardware and software. The second group, Hardware and Software, looks at the problem from the other direction and identifies hardware and software solutions to usability issues that effect a number of groups. All of the papers were written as resources to provide guidelines for practitioners.
Browne, Hilary, Jeff Carver and Erica Kolatch. Universal Usability (2000). Design>Usability>Accessibility>Universal Usability
#19401
A mailing list where web page developers can get assistance for having their web pages tested by visually impaired users.
#23128
Il Vero Costo Dell'accessibilità Web
La realizzazione dei contenuti incide profondamente sul costo di un sito accessibile. L'uso di standard consolidati e di tutti i tag ed attributi dell'(X)Html accessibile la rende però una soluzione vantaggiosa, poiché ne riduce la successiva manutenzione e revisione.
Volpon, Antonio. FucinaWeb (2002). (Italian) Design>Web Design>Accessibility
