AbilityNet

27-08-2010 09:53

New Yahoo! Accessibility blog post on the accessibility of the web industry from the perspective of an autistic developer.

27-08-2010 09:53

What is the world's largest web company doing to aid accessibility?

27-08-2010 09:52

Brilliant periodic table of HTML5 elements

27-08-2010 09:52

Great look at the technologies and methods used by blind users to access the internet. Bonus marks for great Sam Spratt illustration.

27-08-2010 09:50

Nine free and one paid for web acccessibility checking tools. Whilst manual testing will always be required, it makes sense to let computers do the leg work and let you focus on the more interesting areas of accessibility.

11-08-2010 14:29

Great set of ARIA examples from the Illinois Centre for Information Technology Accessibility

11-08-2010 14:30

Free PDF accessibility checker. Useful for people creating PDFs from Word, who may not have access to the checker built into Adobat professional.

11-08-2010 14:29

A handful of useful, often common sense (But also often forgotten so well worth mentioning them again) tips.

02-08-2010 11:37

An interesting look at the appropriateness of alt text on photo sharing websites, where content is generated by users rather than web designers.

02-08-2010 11:34

A look at Office 2010's from an accessibility point of view, including the new accessibility checker.

26-07-2010 11:41

Icons are well used within web applications. Because of their small size they are space efficient. Whilst it is common sense that the meaning of icons should be readily apparent (a printer icon for printing, the well known, but somewhat outdate floppy disk, for saving files are both examples), the accessibility of these icons is a topic that should also be considered.

Here to the rescue, then, is Nomensa with an excellent 2 part article on designing accessible icons.

26-07-2010 11:41

Yahoo have launched their accessibility blog, with articles from the Yahoo team on a range of accessibility themed topics.

26-07-2010 11:39

Some interesting and useful suggestions on assistive technologies for people with epilepsy.

26-07-2010 11:38

Good news for all users of the popular CMS Drupal; there is now an accessibility statement, stating what improvements have been made to help make it more accessible. Also linked from this page are resources for developers on creating accessible resources.

15-07-2010 16:44

Actualy Braille display used with the iPhone 4

15-07-2010 16:44

Designing emails - good design and accessibility are covered in this article

07-05-2010 10:02

Information Architecture explained via Plasticine dinosaurs!

07-05-2010 10:01

Interesting look at how different components e.g. browsers, assistive technologies, multimedia etc, all relate to one another in terms of providing an accessibility web service.

07-05-2010 10:01

Time to get those travelling shoes on; A list of up and coming conferences on accessibility, the majority being across the United States but also represented are India and the UK.

23-04-2010 11:25

Progressive enhancement means serving up content in the best way possible given a user's browser. This page allows you check the feature set of any target browser, from CSS3 support, ARIA, AJAX and more.

23-04-2010 11:13

A 5 minute YouTube video demonstrating how the iPhone's touchscreen interface has been made accessible using VoiceOver.

23-04-2010 11:13

The RNIB have asked a blind user to review the iPad; link on page.

16-04-2010 11:39

A look at how users view their screen and how their attention is split from the left to the right of the viewable area. This research backs up the common belief that user's don't like horizontal scrollbars.

06-04-2010 15:09

The importance of contrast and colour in effective and accessible web design.

06-04-2010 15:08

Components of the imminent Equality Bill, which supersedes the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), could result in inaccessible websites being taken offline.

12-03-2010 14:10

How the previous accessible Flash example content was made.

12-03-2010 14:05

Gordon is a Flash player written in JavaScript; no Flash plugin required! This means that the iPhone (amongst others) can now have access to Flash content.

12-03-2010 14:11

Users with poor vision may be using their computer in a high visibility mode. On Windows, there are several high contrast colour schemes. When selected, these will change the colour scheme to white text on a black background, or similar, as well as sometimes increasing the default text size for applications.

It is worth checking this out on your own website, to see how it fares. Here are some links on changing the colour scheme on your computer:

• Change your colour scheme in Windows
• Change your colour scheme in Mac OS
• Change your colour scheme in Linux

Common areas you should look at for possible high visibility issues are:

• Text boxes and other form elements
• Links, particularly when they receive the focus

How this is handled when viewing web pages in your browser depends both on your browser settings, and how the website has been coded.

A general rule is that any colours specified in the stylesheet will not be overwritten by the colour scheme selected by the user. What this does mean is that any elements that do not have a colour specified in the stylesheet, will adopt the colours specified by the users colour scheme. Further to this, given that their are two colour attributes for each element (both text colour and background colour), if one of these is present in the stylesheet, and one isn't, this can lead to cases where the text colour adopts the high visibility colour but the background colour remains static. This can result in black text being displayed on a black background, making it invisible to users.

The solution to these types of issues is to always specify both the foreground and background colour attributes within any stylesheets. Alternatively specify neither colour attribute and instead just adopt the users default colours.

25-02-2010 12:12

Joe Clark looks at the Vancouver Winter Olympics website from an accessibility and usability point of view and finds it lacking.

25-02-2010 12:11

Steve Grobschmidt interviews Steve Spohn of Ablegamers. Make sure you read the wrap-up for part 2!

19-02-2010 09:25

5 useful tools for checking aspects of colour usage such as lack of contrast, or potential issues for colour blind users.

19-02-2010 09:24

Hidden disabilities like dyscalculia and dyslexia (difficulty processing numbers and text respectively) are less well covered by the web content accessibility guidelines, and are explained here from a users perspective.

19-02-2010 09:23

Published in 2004, this article on definition lists, is still a useful read today. What they are used for, and how to code and style them.

19-02-2010 09:22

Brief look at how games are getting more accessible.

12-02-2010 08:22

After Google's security scare in China recently, the company announced they are soon to cease support for the IE6 browser. This article argues why you should continue to support it.

12-02-2010 08:22

One of the forces behind Google's video auto-captioning system tells of his personal quest to make the web more accessible for dead users.

08-02-2010 09:23

The Americans with Disabilities Act, similar to the UK's Disability Discrimination Act, has caused problems for Amazon's Kindle ebook reader, resulting it being blocked from use in 3 universities due to accessibility concerns, specifically for blind users who cannot currently use the kindle. While Amazon have said they will release a version with audio menus in the summer of 2010, this highlights the peril in ignoring these acts.

08-02-2010 09:24

Angela Colter talks about the range of tools she uses when carrying out accessibility audits on websites. Useful overview of what is available.

08-02-2010 09:23

There are still places left on our Creating Accessible Flash course! Get the lowdown here.

08-02-2010 09:23

Useful guide to typefaces and CSS - just one thing; it doesn't cover the importance of relative sizing for font sizes, but otherwise some useful tips

08-02-2010 09:21

Googling for "Powered by Wordpress" produced 244 million hits when I tried it; it's well used, that's for sure. If you use it, it's worth having a look through the wordpress accessibility resource for tips, plugins and more, to get your WP site as accessible as possible.

20-11-2009 09:48

A guide from Adobe on accessing PDFs using assistive technologies. Link goes to PDF.

20-11-2009 09:47

View how your site may look through different browsers, all within Adobe's flash based BrowserLab. (Free) signup required to Adobe.

06-11-2009 11:27

Links to 8 browsers designed with vision impaired users in mind, following on from an article on Disaboom

06-11-2009 11:26

Useful quick access to W3C accessibility tips

30-10-2009 14:35

In October of this year, WebAIM surveyed 665 users on their screenreader preferences. This is a great followup to their survey done at the beginning of this year

23-10-2009 13:03

Google support page explaining the process of adding captions to YouTube videos

23-10-2009 13:02

An indepth look at usability studies, with some surprising results

23-10-2009 12:59

New York Times article on TV Raman

16-10-2009 15:55

Jeremy Keith takes a look