Stubbornella

Most companies either don’t have the resources or aren’t willing to invest in assistive technologies so that they can actively test their web products, so their employees are forced to simply follow the rules (WAI) as best they can and hope that their final product is at least somewhat accessible. Victor Tsaran’s video introduction to screen readers is very useful as it allows a peek into real life screen reader usage. I wonder how many people will be surprised by the last couple minutes of the video?

I’m not a proponent of lowering skill level for diversities sake, but is it possible that there are CSS Goddesses on the A-list in terms of technical skill, speaking ability, and vision who simply aren’t on the radar of the web development community?

Un site accessibles et un site inaccessibles peuvent paraître exactement les mêmes pour un utilisateur qui n’est pas handicapé. Il peut alors être difficile de comprendre les raisons de tout ce remue-ménage. Pourquoi est-il aussi important de tenir compte de cette accessibilité lorsqu’on conçoit et lorsqu’on met en forme des pages Internet ?

L’une des améliorations les plus importantes pouvant être réalisée pour l’accessibilité d’un site est une tâche qui échappera souvent aux rédacteurs. Ajouter du texte pour décrire des images permet aux non-voyants et aux déficients visuels d’accéder au contenu de votre page, mais écrire n’est pas forcément quelque chose d’inné. Les conseils énoncés ici vous aideront à débuter et à éviter les erreurs fréquentes.

A List Apart has launched a new site design. They had a couple seconds of style-less content, and then boom, the new site was born. At first glance it is a 1000px wide, four column design based on ruby on rails. Take a look.
New design. New structure. New server. New publishing system [...]

bobbyvandersluis.com | Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) v1.0
A great article which explains a useful way to include flash content in your website without compromising standards.

I attended WWW2005 in Chiba, Japan, just outside of Tokyo. It was a fun conference. I met lots of great people, and saw some people I hadn’t in a while.

Allowing writers to contribute to the creation of accessible documents.

The testing was based on the needs of non-technical content contributors; writers, graphic artists, editors, etc. The program had to shield the user from all the code and provide a simple usable interface.

It is reasonable to expect writers to be able to update documents and follow preexisting styles without substantially compromising accessibility. However, they won’t be able to create or change the overall look and feel of the documents. This type of change requires familiarity with CSS and XHTML, even in the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. With proper planning, this limitation can actually help insure consistency across large documents. . .

An accessible and non-accessible site can look exactly the same to a non-disabled user. It can be difficult then to understand what the fuss is all about. Why is it important to consider accessibility when designing and planning online assets?

One of the most important improvements that can be made to the accessibility of a site is a task that will often fall to writers.  Adding text to describe images allows blind and visually-impaired users to access your content, but writing it is not necessarily something that comes naturally.  The tips compiled here will help you get started and avoid common pitfalls.