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….

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?

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…