Archive for the ‘Accessibility’ Category

Standards.Next is an informal meetup hosted by Opera, and attended by anyone with an interest in web standards and beyond. On Saturday 19th September focus turned to one of the most unchartered areas of user experience: Cognition and Accessibility.

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Jaws 11 public beta introduces support for drag and drop with WAI ARIA. Although Jaws has included desktop drag and drop capability for some while, the same functionality on a web page has always been more difficult. Jaws 11 now indicates which elements on the page can be dragged, and where they can be dropped.

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Vinux is a Linux distribution optimised for blind and partially sighted people. Originally based on Ubuntu, Vinux 2.0 beta was released earlier this month based on the Debian distribution. Vinux boots with screen reader and Braille support fully loaded, and with screen magnification available at a simple keystroke.

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Rich Internet Application (RIA) websites encourage people to generate content, collaborate online and make choices about the information they receive. Unsurprisingly, RIA websites can represent a considerable challenge for screen reader users. The WAI’s Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)is an emerging standard that aims to bridge the gap between RIA websites and screen reading technology.

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There’s simply no denying it. Twitter is one of the web’s killer applications of the moment. It’s not uncommon to hear of people buying a computer and getting online, just so they can start tweeting.

Twitter is also proving popular with blind and partially sighted people. The Twitter website itself is reasonably accessible, and there are several accessible alternatives available to people as well.

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Bruce Lawson recently asked whether adding rel=accessibility to the HTMl 5 specification was a good idea. Among the initial comments, Jared Smith noted that getting assistive technologies to support the idea might be a problem. For the major screen readers at least, I thought it could be easily solved though.

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