Category Archives: Accessibility

Comparing Tagged PDFs from Office and Acrobat

A PDF open with the tags editor showing. 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

Screen shot of the Colour Contrast VisualiserA 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

A PDF open with the tags editor showing. 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

The Defacto-CMS website carousel widget.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.

@media 2007

I’m just back from @media, and thought I’d post up brief notes (such as they are) for my own reference and anyone else’s gain. Obviously, I will only comment on the presentations I saw, and it’s all from my own particular perspective.

Jesse James Garrett – Beyond AJAX

Jesse James Garrett presents the keynote on Beyond AJAX.I didn’t …

WCAG Samurai published at @media

A little while ago Joe Clark asked me to review the WCAG Samurai’s WCAG 1 errata, which Joe has announced will be published today.

Also available is my independent review of the errata: WCAG Samurai Errata Review. Unbeknownst to me, Joe had also asked Gian Sampson-Wild, who’s review …