Category Archives: Accessibility

Better Practices Checklist

The Australian Information Management Office has put together a nice set of Better Practice Checklists “to help web managers, business unit owners, and others quickly enhance their understanding of a range of issues associated with the provision of services online. The checklists are short documents which provide information in a simple, non-technical manner.” While geared [...]

MS and accessibility? Ahahaha!

I recently learned of Microsoft’s Accessibility site and the mailing list you can sign up for. Since I do a lot of .net work these days, and get frustrated with the complete lack of standards support in the built in components, I was quite curious to see what MS has on the horizon. Unfortunately, to [...]

Table Inspector Favelet

Juicystudio.com has created and released a great favelet for viewing the visually hidden elements in a well structured data table (such as headers, header abbrevations, etc.) A complex Table Inspector Favelet

Accessibility and link separators

We all love to use various characters as bullets or separators for our links. Common ones are |, > and » (the latter being read as ‘right double angle bracket’). Unfortunately, for those using screen readers, these can be a bit cumbersome to sit through. Standards Schmandards has taken the time to list out how [...]

“real” online typography is here?

Mike Davidson, along with a hard working crew, released sIFR 2.0, rc2 yesterday. sIFR is a free, simple little flash file that you can use on your web sites to replace your semanticly marked up html text with flash rendered type in your font of choice. While I haven’t been a big fan of this [...]

Accessify FireFox

I’ve recently come across two new FireFox extensions to assist with making more accessible web sites. The first is Fangs. Fangs is designed to emulate what a screen reader would read aloud when visiting your site. It’s no replacement for using an actual screen reader, but it looks like it comes fairly close and sure [...]

10 Accessibility Misconceptions

I just stumbled upon Bunnyfoot, a Usability and Accessibility firm out of the UK. Their current site is going through a redesign, and their old site is a bit…well…bland in terms of looks, but they have some great articles available for free. One of them is a list of 10 Accessibility Misconceptions. It’s all fairly [...]

Accessibility *is* Branding

Roger Johansson has an excellent post on the issues of Accessibility and Branding at 456 Berea Street. Everyone go read this. Now. I mean it. He brings up the age-old squabble between print designers vs. web designers where print designers feel that any compromise to their pixel-perfect worldview destroys the brand image they’re going after. [...]

Interesting Skip-Link implementation

Philippe has introduced an interesting implementation for ‘skip-to’ navigation on his blog at emps.l-c-n.com. He uses the familiar (and accepted) method of positioning the skip-to links off screen via CSS (setting them to diplay: none, while oft-documented, will actually render them invisible to many screen readers). This ensures that screen readers and text browser will [...]

Accessibility Blinders

I’ve been meaning to comment on this article for about a week now. The NY Attorney General has gotten two major travel sites–Priceline.com and Ramada.com–to make their sites accessible to the blind. This is great news in that we’re finally seeing some pressure put on major web sites to embrace the true benefits of the [...]