xBlog: The visual thinking weblog » Accessibility

The Design State

Bill — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:07:00 +0000

“Design State is a weblog about government web design and its attendant subtopics: accessibility, usability, and web standards. In addition to these nuts and bolts, Design State will also focus on higher level issues and project challenges that affect government and public-sector web design.”

Sim Daltonism

Bill — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:19:38 +0000

“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.”

Is Ajax accessible? At all?

Bill — Thu, 11 May 2006 14:21:03 +0000

“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.”

Accessiblity for the Masses

Bill — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 14:56:06 +0000

“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.”

The Accessibility Hat Trick: Getting Abbreviations Right

Bill — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 15:22:05 +0000

“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.”

I don’t care about accessibility

Bill — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 16:16:07 +0000

“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 � that is, when you design exclusively and specifically for this medium � when you do that natively, so many of the things we consider problems just start to fall away.”

Accessible Website Menu

Bill — Thu, 29 Jan 2004 20:18:35 +0000

“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!”

An Interview with Joe Clark

Bill — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 08:00:00 +0000

“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.”

Joe Clark’s Answers — In Valid XHTML

Bill — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 08:00:00 +0000

“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.”

Building Accessible Websites

Bill — Thu, 17 Oct 2002 08:00:00 +0000

“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.”