Archive for the ‘Web life’ Category

Contacting an organisation to explain why you find their website difficult to use, can seem a bit daunting. Who should you talk to? What should you say? How should you approach it? Contacting Organisations About Inaccessible Websites is a splendid new resource from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Google Wave is the latest innovation in online communication. It’s caused a great deal of interest across the industry, and may well herald a new era in online social interaction. It’s new, it’s cutting edge and it’s exciting. It’s also a catastrophic accessibility failure for screen reader users.

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.

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.

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 [...]

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.

Emoticons are short strings of punctuation intended to express emotions in type written text. Text can be a very antiseptic way of communicating and without the ability to see the facial expressions of the person you are talking to, it can sometimes be difficult to correctly interpret the meaning of what they are saying.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The WAI are a branch of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organisation that provides guidelines and specifications for many web technologies.