Category Archives: Accessibility
Accessibility findings vs recommendations
This article on newspaper site accessibility dropped into my inbox, from the author hoping to get some coverage from accessibility related sites. Whilst the aim is good (testing sites to increase the awareness of accessibility), I wouldn't be happy with the recommendations.
Voiceover HTML navigation updates
There were quite a few updates to the VoiceOver screen reader on OSX Leopard, not least of which was the new, very smooth voice "Alex". What will be of interest to developers is the new commands to help people navigate HTML. Comparing Tagged PDFs from Office and Acrobat
After my initial disappointment with the Office 2007 pluggin for creating PDFs, I've had some discussion with the Microsoft team, and a chance to do a bit more testing. This post compares the conversion of a simple Word 2007 document with the Office pluggin, Acrobat 8.1, and OpenOffice. Colour Contrast Visualiser – New Tool
A friend & colleague of mine has just released the beta version of a new tool. Although everyone (who cares) has probably heard of colour contrast analysers, this does the opposite, and helps you choose accessible colour combinations. Enter the Colour Contrast Visualiser.
Accessibility kit for Sharepoint
Finally there could be a little light at the end of the tunnel for accessibility and Sharepoint: Microsoft has formed "an agreement" with HiSoftware to create an accessibility kit.
Office 2007 PDFs – Not (always) accessible
I had previously heard that Office 2007 (or 12 back then) was going to have built in PDF support, with tagging (i.e. accessible output). Not too long ago I installed Vista and Office 2007 on my work machine, but there was no sign of it. Then I found the Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS Add-in for 2007 Microsoft Office.
Responsibility for accessible content
A simple rule for good web sites: content is golden. In an accessibility context, structured content is golden. It a core responsibility of the site owner to ensure this is followed (not just the developer). When you examine this issue, you can then understand why few organisations will ever produce accessible PDFs.
IA and accessibility
If your interest was peaked by mention of addressing accessibility issues at the Information Architecture (IA) stage when reading my .Net article, there is finally some further reading on it.
Testing with a screen reader
In case you missed it on accessify, Mike Davies posted detailed notes from his presentation on AJAX and accessibility. It's all good, but one part I particularly applauded...
CMS editable Flash
With all the fuss over AJAX and Flash accessibility you get, I thought it might be worth outlining the process we used to create a Flash/AJAX widget and highlight one of the advantages you get with this method. It also means that the use of Flash has no impact on your Search Engine Optimisation.