What is this about?
Join me in the search for accessibility best practices.
Are practices and techniques developed several years ago still valid as web technology evolves? Designers and developers are continuously changing their techniques. As we move away from using tables for layout to using CSS for layout, what accessibility techniques need to be updated? This blog uses a quiz format to seek current best practices. Many, but not all, questions ask about techniques that can be used in designs using CSS for layout. I ask about specific situations and see how the best minds in the industry answer.
The W3C is currently updating their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The new 2.0 version is a functional reorganization and update of guidelines that are already familiar to most who care about accessibility. It categorizes the guidelines into four categories: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. The quizzes are be organized around these four principles, not because they are perfect but because they are convenient.
Dan Cederholm used the “Simple Quiz” format a while back to ask questions about standards based web development techniques. He published a book from the results. Will the questions and answers from Access Matters end up in a book? I don’t know. I will be pleased to uncover a collection of best practices and know we’re using them in making web sites more accessible.
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March 29th, 2005 at 5:13 am
Access Matters
Bob Easton has a great site called Access Matters. He is searching for accessibility best practices using a quiz format. I really like the idea, and now have the site in the daily check rotation….
May 9th, 2005 at 2:51 pm
Here’s a topic that could open a can of worms:
The Microsoft Windings font encodes as normal characters. So a telephone symbol becomes a left parenthesis and a check mark symbol becomes an umlatted lower case u when converted to text. Not accessible to anyone using non-IE browsers or non-Microsoft computers.
One possibility for dealing with this is to substitute an equivalent Unicode character. So for the telephone symbol could be substituted with Unicode decimal entity 9742 ☎ and the check mark symbol could be substituted with Unicode decimal entity 10003 ✓. That’s assuming there is even an equivalent Unicode symbol.
That substitution would accomodate sighted site visitors in all modern browsers and operating systems. But what about folks who use screen readers? Do screen readers have Unicode symbols built into them?
May 17th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
This is a great website, if readers have accessibility questions that they would addressed, is there a way to submit quiz questions for review? I have several.
June 13th, 2005 at 8:04 am
I’m trying to find the spot to propose a question… Is this it?
I’d really like to know what the browser/screenreader support is for Javascript (see Derek’s Javascript and Accessibility post). I vaguely remember reading that JAWS had reasonable support for DOM-added nodes and ignored document.write, but I have no idea where. I’ve not tried it myself yet. Given the recent rise of Javascript in web apps it might be time for a reassessment…
May 10th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
This particular is very correct. I savored examining it.