Accessibility conference, yesterday
I was at a little accessibility conference here at The University of Waterloo where I work. Joe Clark was supposed to be the keynote (which I was excited about!) but he was sick so Derek Featherstone filled in. A worthy replacement, for sure.
I'm going to write more about this on my blog but for now, I'll just tell you about some key things I learned. Firstly, is that screen readers aren't the only assistive technology you need to keep in mind. People with low vision can use screen magnifiers which work just like the zoom feature in Opera, only on the entire desktop. So everything gets bigger (some users may also just be making the text really really big in the browser). I think this is a good reason to make sure your line lengths dont' get too long, although I didn't really see the software in detail so I'm not sure how it behaves.
Another one is voice recognition, which is used by people who have no use of their arms. Since they can't type or use a mouse, they'll say what they need to do instead. They will attempt to read the name of a link in order to click on it, for example. The problem that Derek showed was when you've got images with text on them and the alt text doesn't match what's on the image. IMO, that's another reason to use text with CSS for navigation instead of graphics as much as possible.
One of Derek's key messages was to think about accessibility in terms of people, not technology or legislation. These are human beings with unique needs and problems. No two users are alike, and there are a lot of potential problems they might encounter. If you need some disabled users for testing, try contacting your local college or university's disabilities office.
Oh, and Derek used Opera to demonstrate some accessibility testing features in his session on testing . I was thrilled to see that, as you can imagine! There is an accessibility toolbar available for Opera, although I don't think you'd be able to have both the Accessibility one and the Web Developer one. I'm going to try to do some sort of a hybrid if I can. I actually got a chance to chat with him on a break about some of Opera's features, and he gave me a good idea for my new site.
Megan posted this at 13:55 — 16th August 2006.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
I forgot to mention that we also got a chance to hear a screen reader in action. This one wasn't as fast as the one I'd heard previously, although the users can change the speed. The important thing to know about screen readers is that they read everything. They will read all puntuation, for example, including | which gets read as "vertical bar". I'm definitely going to stop using those to separate navigation items and title bits! Lots of searching and replacing to do now!
They also read out what type of text something is. If they are reading a link they will say "link, (title of link)" and they do the same for headers. When they load up a page they will say how many links and headings the page has. The user can then use keyboard shortcuts to navigate from header to header. The message here is mainly to make sure your page is structured properly and to use headers to break up text where appropriate. And properly structured headers too!
Megan
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Busy posted this at 21:00 — 16th August 2006.
He has: 6,151 posts
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lucky you, would love for something like that to come up here, I have heaps of questions for them, but biggest one is, if it's so important (and I already agree it is) why isn't there a free screen reader or even a online version webmasters can use like we use w3c to validate our code.
Look forward to reading your blog
IanD posted this at 12:46 — 17th August 2006.
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Derek's site is boxofchocolates.ca (not aboxofchocolates.com)
Megan posted this at 13:16 — 17th August 2006.
She has: 11,421 posts
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Thanks, Ian.
Busy - I totally agree with you there. To add to the confusion, there are several different screen readers that people could be using but they don't all behave in the same way. This came up when people were talking about using display: none to hide text from visual users while displaying an image as a CSS background instead (because some screen readers would obey the display:none and not read it).
There is quite a lot of great information out there about accessibility. Yesterday I printed a 34 page article about writing alt text! There's a lot to learn
Megan
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Megan posted this at 20:35 — 17th August 2006.
She has: 11,421 posts
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I've got a longer summary up on my blog
As a sidenote - does anyone know how to post exceprts instead of full links in wordpress? I don't think I want to do that all the time, just for longer articles. Well, most of mine are longer (blabbermouth!) so maybe it would be best to do that all the time...
Megan
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Busy posted this at 23:55 — 17th August 2006.
He has: 6,151 posts
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A few years ago I was able to go through some of my sites with a screen reader (Jaws - don't remember the version).
It's very slow on a long page (most of mine are/were) and is amazing how much html it picked up, luckily the tabled layouts were readable as they were laid out properly. Have never seen/heard one with using CSS.
On a similar note, no one can code a site 100% to comply to any screen reader as most is guessed off guidelines. I was hoping after the US made it illegal not to comply to 508 or WAI for some sort of free editor. Last time I priced one up it was about $400 US and that was a cheapie.
You basically have to pick a disability and work to that, but in doing so you'll cut a lot out. Even WAI and 508 aren't 100% compatiable.
There is a lot of great information out there about accessibility but be very careful as a lot of it's wrong. A lot of it is from Chinese whipsers (gets taken from one site, spruced up, then another and another as they do and it gets changed), a lot is also outdated
Just thought of another tag re your other thread - tabindex
demonhale posted this at 01:12 — 18th August 2006.
He has: 3,278 posts
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use the tag at any point of the article and it will cut it at that point and add a read more link at the bottom, when clicked shows the article in full and on single article with comment at the bottom...
Megan posted this at 18:02 — 24th August 2006.
She has: 11,421 posts
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Belated thanks, demonhale! I've got that working on most of my recent posts now!
demonhale posted this at 00:05 — 25th August 2006.
He has: 3,278 posts
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no prob, glad I could help...
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