“Sim Daltonism is a color blindness simulator for Mac OS X. It filters in real-time the area around the mouse pointer and displays the result — as seen by a color blind person — in a floating palette.

Since there are many types of color blindness, Sim Daltonism allow you to choose the one you want to see.”

“In these notes, I summarize my presentation of original research and testing of an Ajax application (Basecamp) with users of screen readers and other adaptive technologies. Here’s my working definition of Ajax: The use of scripting to cause portions of a page to refresh without reloading the entire page. That usually happens after the user does something, but it can also happen automatically.”

“I was recently reminded while working on our panel for SXSW that accessibility isn’t just about screen readers, markup guidelines, or alt tags. Unfortunately, that’s about as far as most of us ever get with accessibility. It’s good that most of us are making an effort, but it’s time to start consistently thinking bigger.”

“AAA-level compliance is the ideal of accessibility, the bonus-round of accessible design: AAA-level compliant pages meet the needs of every group of users. AAA is achievable, but requires preparation and forethought. To create a forward-looking, fully AAA-compliant site, we need to execute a sort of hat trick: XHTML 1.0 and 2.0-compliant markup, a generous breadth of backwards compatibility, and real universal accessibility.”

“These are the speaking notes I used during the ‘Accessibility is for everyone!’ panel discussion at South by SouthWest earlier this week [March 2004]. I came here to be on this panel to tell y’all that I don’t care about accessibility. Don’t care. Not an issue. Hardly ever comes up. Here’s my big secret for you today. When you design for the Web ó that is, when you design exclusively and specifically for this medium ó when you do that natively, so many of the things we consider problems just start to fall away.”

“UDM is a lightweight and accessible javascript menu, which provides useable content to all browsers—- including screenreaders, search-engines and text-only browsers. But accessibility shouldn’t mean compromise, and so UDM has a sophisticated range of design and usability controls, many of which are unique to this script. The navigation bar is simply a list of links. You can use Tab for navigation, and Enter to activate links, or whatever keystrokes you would normally use. To the best of our knowledge, Ultimate Drop Down Menu is the ONLY fully-featured and accessible DHTML menu in the world!”

“Digital Web: ‘Accessibility’ is now part of the Web development community’s lingua franca. However, it’s often used as shorthand to mean making a site function for blind people. How would you define it, in the Web development context? Joe Clark: I use the same definition of accessibility everywhere: Accommodating features a person cannot change or cannot change easily.”

“We sent 10 of your questions to usability guy Joe Clark, and he took it upon himself to go a bit beyond simply answering them. In his reply he said, ‘Answers attached in a valid XHTML file. I would suggest at least retaining the id attributes. I copy-edited all the questions, but the words are all the same; they are now merely spelled and capitalized correctly. I think all the links work.’ Whatever. We left Joe’s formatting intact. It’s a little different from our usual style, but variety is the spice of Slashdot.”

“The purpose of the book? Teaching developers, of any sophistication and working with any kind of budget (including none), how to improve the accessibility of online media. I have come up with a new approach to the issue, which has never been documented properly in the past.”

“After half a decade of attempts and a misapplication of the ‘classic’ wheelchair icon, we finally have something that might work as a generic indicator of accessibility — from Apple, of all places. Just how hard is it to boil the concept of ‘accessibility’ down to a single symbol? And how does this task change when the goal is symbolizing accessible computers, Web sites, or audiovisual media like TV and film?”

“The whole point of weblogs is to share knowledge, ideas, and some small amount of self promotion (or exhibitionism, depending on the blog). If you design your weblog so that a disabled user has a hard time reading your ideas and thoughts you are losing part of your audience and you are missing an opportunity to share your ideas with a wider circle. And it’s just not fair.”

“An Israeli hi-tech company has produced a computer mouse that acts as the eyes of the blind and partially-sighted by helping them view computer graphics through touch. Growing dependence on graphics and ‘mice’ to navigate screens in increasingly computer-based societies have limited the ability of the partially-sighted to use new technology.”

“I have signed on the dotted line with New Riders Publishing and will write a book on the topic of Web accessibility. Finally. At last… The purpose of the book? Teaching developers, of any sophistication and working with any kind of budget (including none), how to improve the accessibility of online media. I have come up with a new approach to the issue, which has never been documented properly in the past.”

“Creating a good ergonomic working arrangement is important to protecting your health. The following 10 steps are a brief summary of those things that most Ergonomists agree are important. If you follow the 10 steps they should help you to improve your working arrangement. You can also use the Computer Workstation Checklist to help to pinpoint any areas of concern and take a look at the ‘Computer Workstation summary’ diagram’ for specific tips. However, every situation is different, and if you can’t seem to get your arrangement to feel right or you are confused about some of the following recommendations you should seek professional advice.”

“This is a pre-study for a larger audiovisual speech synthesis project that is planned to be carried out during 1998-2000 at Helsinki University of Technology. The main objective of this report is to map the situation of today’s speech synthesis technology and to focus on potential methods for the future of this project … The objective of the whole project is to develop high quality audiovisual speech synthesis with a well synchronized talking head, primarily in Finnish. Other aspects, such as naturalness, personality, platform independence, and quality assessment are also under investigation.” Be sure to check out the Speech Synthesis Demonstrations page.