After a little bit of pain with video editing and writing transcripts (man that’s hard work) Shawn’s video of her talk at Yahoo’s offices London is now available. She talks about the new version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and some of the other W3C accessibility standards. You can see the video and the […]
Shawn is in town for @media. She
The “final” draft of the WCAG 2 got knocked back for revisions. The working group has released its first draft after making revisions which it says address all the comments. I got an email from Judy Brewer who heads the WAI asking for comments by 27th April 2007. If you haven’t already seen this draft […]
Kestrell posted something that made me really sad. Why I wish Yahoo would just stop trying to b***s*** me that they care about accessibility expresses her frustration using the Yahoo groups product.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time trying to improve the state of accessibility on the web, I find it especially disheartening that […]
I was trying to think of what to write for BADD 2007. I’ve been trying really hard to avoid some trite comments from the Accessibility advocate that I am.
Then it occurred to me that my dyslexia is a disability as real as any other. It’s certainly something that gets a few laughs in the office. […]
Diary of a Goldfish has a post about BADD 2007. BADD is happening on the 1st May which is next Monday. The general idea is to write about the discrimination faced by people with disabilities in the community.
I think ideas like this are excellent. Getting bloggers to raise awareness is the key to removing some […]
I asked the totally awesome Niqui Merret about how to check the basic accessibility of some Flash without using a screen reader. She pointed me to the Microsoft Active Accessibility 2.0 SDK Tools. These allow you to interact with the Flash plugin and find out what Accessibility features have been enabled for the movie.
While I […]
Number 10 has issued a response to the petition to make government sites more accessible (or at least comply with WCAG 1.0). In typical political fashion it’s vague, skips the point and talks about stuff that has already failed as if it’s working. It’s a bit like Prime Minister’s question time then.
I’d like to see […]
One of my daily (or as frequently as Onstad bothers) comics is Achewood. Recently links have been appearing to “Transcribe this comic”.
These are links to a new service called Oh no Robot by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics¹ fame. It allows web comics to ask their users to transcribe their comics.
The main reasons cited are […]
Desert Skies has a post about the new GW Micro Blog. I met Doug recently at an internal Yahoo! developer conference. It’s really great to see an Assistive Technology vendor take steps to engage with the community. Doug is a really great guy and it’s going to be really interesting to keep an eye on […]
Wow, what a busy week. Today we had the first day of an internal conference at Yahoo! about Front-end engineering or as they say in internal acroynization F2E.
There are two things that I notice in particular:
We have so many really really smart people at Y!
We are in a great position to offer accessibility training
While the […]
Since I know there is going to be a podcast I’m just going to highlight a couple of points from the London Web Standards Group Meeting I thought were interesting to me.
I’m glad Niqui talked about FlashAid. Aral and Jeremy did a fabulous job. I posted some comments on how I would like to see […]
So I have a problem. It’s a bit of a corker, and it seems like everyone who uses AJAX suffers from it. That means, me, and probably you.
The problem is AJAX is not accessible. Gez and Steve improved the situation, but again AJAX is not accessible. I know I’m being rather alarmist, but the situation […]
I’m writing some accessibility training for us to use at Yahoo!, and I’m wondering if people have had some great training in they would like to share ideas about. What kinds of things made training really work for you? Is there any material that I should look at if I am writing training?
Company permitting I […]
I really loved Gez and Steve’s original post on AJAX and JAWS, they have just added an update that covers methods to force updates to the JAWS virtual buffer.
This information is invaluable as it allows developers to write AJAX application which work in the audio rendering mode which most JAWS users use. My current fears […]
I would like to commend the efforts of those involved in FormCamp. I love this idea, that the community can get together and focus on a very specific goal to achieve a useful deliverable. Conferences are great but I like the idea that this unconference actually ends with something which will actively help the community. […]
I was reading through some posts of the excellent Joe Dolson. This one particularly struck me, “What’s the key to Accessibility?“. In it Joe says:
In a word, options. Building an accessible website doesn’t mean building a visual experience which will work perfectly for all audience. It doesn’t mean writing content that everybody will be able […]
I was talking with Steve this afternoon, and he put into words some of the stuff I have been thinking about recently.
One of the dangers for developers trying to make things more accessible is believing they understand assistive technology in the way a user does. Unless you use assistive technology everyday you don’t really know […]
It’s been a couple of years since I last worked on WCAG 2.0. However, being at the RNIB today for a demo of assistive technology made me think a lot.
Web accessibility hasn’t changed, some of the techniques have, but really it’s the same old problems that were bouncing around a couple of years ago or […]