Web Accessibility

Berin Loritsch — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:08:00 +0000

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking into accessibility for web sites to finally get a grip on what needs to be done. Sadly, it is overlooked by the big guys when it doesn’t really have to be so hard. There are several types of disabilities including:

Visual (full, partial, or color blindness; Photo-Epileptic Seizure [PES] susceptibility)
Motor control (full or partial disabilities preventing the use of a mouse)
Cognitive disorders (dyslexia and the like)
Auditory (full or partial deafness)

The main issue with accessibility is the lack of knowledge and reasonable resources available to help. In particular, the tools that are needed to support people who have the disabilities are expensive and complicated. There are tools available that everyone can have at their fingertips that will help. Most are Firefox plugins, some require you to use an external site. Below are a few of the resources I’ve found:

The folks at WebAIM have several good recommendations. For example, you know those “edit in place” controls on Flickr? You can make them keyboard accessible by applying the attribute “taborder=’0’”. The control will be in the page’s natural tab order. I did a little experimentation and the control supplied by Script.aculo.us can take care of all these things for you. The only issue is that IE 6 won’t put the control in the tab order unless it is in the original markup. Dynamically changing the DOM to put it in won’t put the control in the tab order with that browser.

Just a Thought...: Web Accessibility

Web Accessibility