Web Access Centre Blog

John Slatin, a respected member of the web accessibility community and former chair of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, sadly passed away earlier this year leaving behind him the University of Texas Accessibility Institute.

Sadly UT want to close the Accessibility Institute which has been a centre of excellence for research and innovation in web accessibility. This would be a huge loss to the industry as the Accessibility Institute has contributed to the furtherance of web accessibility in many ways.

As news has spread of the closing of UT’s Accessibility Institute, many have asked for a simple way to register their objections. Knowbility has created and posted an online petition and welcome all the support you can bring by signing the petition and forwarding it to anyone else who may be interested.

Reasons for saving the Accessibility Institute include:

• Need for research based findings to support accessible design practice
• Opportunity for a world class institution like UT to serve as an example to other institutions.
• Place where emerging practices can be tested and modelled
• Contributions to international body of knowledge on inclusion
• Maintain thought leadership in Texas, easily disseminated to state agencies that have accessibility mandates

Sign the petition to save the Accessibility Institute today.

Getting geared up for WCAG 2.0? There are just a few places left before we close the bookings for our Transitioning from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 training course. Find out what is likely to change, and how you can prepare for the forthcoming renewed web accessibility guidelines. This half day course is run on the same day as Hidden Barriers to web accessibility, where you’ll learn how to avoid some of the less well-known issues that create real access problems.

Both courses will run on Thursday 18th September, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Venue RNIB head office, London. Anyone who books both courses will qualify for £25.00 reduction on the total cost, and get a free lunch. .

AbilityNet’s conference Accessibility 2.0 was a resounding success in more ways than one. While is sparked controversy within the microformats and accessibility debate it was also the start of much creativity in making social networking sites more accessible.

So much happened during the day it’s difficult to know where to start but thanks to AbilityNet you can catch up yourselves on events by via the podcasts and transcripts.

Keep an eye out for Scripting Enabled, a conference to be held September 19th and 20th, that aims to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web.

See you there I hope!

We seem to have gone a little bit Olympics crazy over here but as the games draw to a close the AbilityNet team look ahead at what we should be doing with the UK Olympics website by publishing their user testing findings of the Beijing 2008 Olympics website in the State of the eNation Report Beijing Olympics Special.

In this special report we asked disabled users to try out the Beijing Olympics website in our interaction lab. Poor information architecture and a lack of adherence to web standards result in an uneven playing field for disabled sports fans across the world…In a departure from our standard State of the eNation review procedure we brought a range of disabled users into our lab to perform some basic tasks on the website. Users uncovered a variety of accessibility and usability issues that only real-life user testing would have uncovered.

The report contains some fascinating user videos which give real insight to the barriers people face both in terms of guidelines as well as poor usability for people with disabilities - not to be missed. These all also come with either captioning or transcripts.

For further comment on the Olympics site see also E-Access Bulletin’s Web Accessibility - Beijing Olympics: Revisiting The Errors Of The Past as well as our post on the accessibility of the Beijing Olympics website

With all eyes on the Beijing for the 2008 Olympics I thought I’d publish a few observations of how well the official Beijing Olympic 2008 website works for international users. This post accompanies one I wrote about the accessibility of the Beijing 2008 website and flags where the cross overs exist with accessibility, localisation and internationalisation.

Read the whole article…

Our busy and expanding team is looking to recruit two new posts, a Senior Web Accessibility Consultant as well as a team Administrator. We are also recruiting for a Principle Manager for Digital Accessibility in the Accessibility Group.

Read the whole article…

Scripting Enabled is an accessibility and social networking hack day scheduled for 19th and 20th of September and tickets just went on sale today. The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve.

Organised by Chris Heilmann from Yahoo! the event is set to be a first and not to be missed. Here’s a break down of what the two days will cover:

On 19th and 20th of September we’ll spend two days kicking off an ongoing research and solutions exercise to remove online accessibility barriers. The event is split into two days with different venues:

On Friday, the 19th of September we’ll meet in the Henry Thomas hall of Metropolitan University in Holloway Road, London to learn from speakers what kind of barriers there are in online offers. Instead of development experts telling us what they think the barriers are this will have speakers that deal with them day by day and cover a range of problems, not just visual impairment.

This event has 150 tickets all in all and will be a discussion/presentation day.

On Saturday, the 20th of September 50 hackers then meet at Gamelab in Shoreditch take the learnings from day one and turn them into alternative interfaces for sites that unnecessarily block out users. We’ll also create blue-print solutions for common problems that will be released open source and documented under Creative Commons.

This event is a hack day and we got space for 50 dedicated hackers.

This looks like a really exciting event so be sure to book your free ticket(s) and see you there.

Everybody loves a good analogy and surprise surprise I’m no different! I want to revisit an issue that I’m sure has been raised numerous times before – the differences between guidelines and user testing and the benefits of each. Now feels like an important time to talk about this again given the imminent release of the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). At the recent Accessibility 2.0 conference held by AbilityNet, there was also some talk of how useful guidelines actually were compared to user testing, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to put my opinion out there.

So, with all that in mind, let’s talk about food instead!

Read the whole article…

Chris Mills, who looks after Dev Opera has gathered together the great and the good from the world of the web and developed the first instalment of the Web Standards Curriculum.

The Opera Web Standards Curriculum is an education program to help propagate best practices and increase web standards usage on the web. It provides a thorough grounding in all the skills you need to be a proficient front end developer, including web background theory, in-depth HTML and CSS, design principles and introductory DOM/JavaScript.

This is a fantastic resource aimed at web developers, designers, students, educators; just anyone who wants to learn web design the right way. Whether you’re starting out or simply want to refresh your understanding this is the place to go. Written by experts such as Mark Norman Francis, Jonathan Lane, Linda Goin, Paul Haine, Roger Johansson, Ben Buchanan, Jenifer Hanen, Craig Grannell and Christian Heilmann you can hardly go wrong.

Presented as if you are working on a project from start to finish, the Web Standards Curriculum is broken down into a series of articles taking you from information architecture and wire-framing through to design and build of pages using (X)HTML, CSS and so on. It kicks off with some necessary scene setting describing the origins of the Internet and the Web which in turn provides the backdrop for the rationale of why we need web standards. What’s so great is that while you can opt to read the Curriculum from start to finish you can also just dip into it as it works just as well as modules.

I particularly liked the articles about colour theory, colour schemes and design mock-ups. While I may understand colour from an accessibility point of view this opened up my understanding of how uses of colour can be manipulated to enhance typography, forms, lists, tables and images, all of which are covered in more depth in other articles.

All this lovely goodness doesn’t stop there however. In total there will be fifty plus articles with future additions planned to cover accessibility, CSS and JavaScript. The Web Standards Curriculum will also be maintained to ensure that you get the most up to date information. The best bit however is that it’s for you to use not just as a resource for yourself, but also when teaching others either in schools and colleges or at work.

Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum is also supported by the Web Standards Project (WaSP) who are themselves developing The Curriculum Project. This will be a resource that is intended to be used by those in education, as well as anyone needing to update knowledge on web related technologies.

As Glenda Sims, Senior Systems Analyst University of Texas, and co-lead of WaSP says of Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum says:

Web development and design are ever evolving professions. Anyone teaching these subjects must ask themselves if they are equipping their students with best practices or burdening them with impractical methodologies. All of us in this field can benefit from this resource and use it as a catalyst to further the W3C vision of ‘Web for Everyone. Web on Everything.

Enjoy, share, teach and be part of the movement to build a better web!

Further resources

• Dev.Opera - Dev Opera is a community resource site where developers can share tips, tricks, extensions and more.
• Web Standards Project (WaSP) - a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
• Business Case for Web Standards wiki - a resource that logs case studies and information supporting the business case for web standards.
• A List Apart - A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
• WebAim - Web Accessibility In Mind.

Headings can be tricky to implement so I thought I’d pull together some quick tips on accessible headings. This isn’t a full explanation but rather a checklist to look at when you are building or testing web pages.

Read the whole article…