AJAX, or Asynchronous Javascript and XML, is one of the latest popular technologies to drop into a web developer’s bag of tricks. Although quite complicated to work with, the technique can provide an incredible variety of rich web application methods to work with. If you’ve ever visited any of the myriad "Web 2.0" applications, one common feature is the use of AJAX technologies.

The fundamental principle behind AJAX programming is that it works, as in the name, asynchronously. Most interactive web programming requires regular requests to a server. The general information flow is that you, the user, request a document. That document contains a form, where you fill in your information. You press submit, the page sends your information to the server, which does something with it such as signing you up for a mailing list, and then sends back a response – usually, an indication of success or failure.

In this process, every request requires a full refresh of the web page. However, AJAX works differently. Using the ability of Javascript to manipulate the DOM of a page (that is, edit page elements without refreshing) combined with the ability to make XML requests to the server, AJAX can send queries to the server and post the response to the web page without performing a page refresh.

For a web application, this is tremendous – although a server request may not actually be any faster than it was before, a programmer can now create a site which reacts to the information a user puts into the site instantaneously. Handling the server request no longer interrupts whatever the user is doing – they can continue working, reading, or moving ahead without having to wait each time for the page to refresh.

But! (And you knew there would be a but!) Accessibility and dynamic behavior have always had some significant conflicts. In a traditional format, a page refreshes and a user simply has to start reading from the beginning. Usually, at the beginning of the content section of the page, there will be a notice of what has happened – either "this section was not filled out" or "your submission was successful", or some response to that effect. Very easy to deal with from an accessibility point of view. AJAX changes all that. Suddenly, a dynamic site is updating areas all over the page without a refresh. How does a blind user know that anything has changed? To a visual user, you can see that a section of the page blanks out and refreshes. The content is now different. A blind user sees nothing, experiences no change.

This obvious issue with refreshing data is not the only accessibility concern with AJAX and DHTML. Thankfully, the new popularity of the AJAX technology family has spurred many large organizations to pioneer new methods of managing accessibility for dynamic technologies. Recently, the Mozilla Foundation teamed up with IBM to establish DHTML accessibility in Mozilla’s open-source browser, Firefox.
This accessibility is still rudimentary – but it’s definitely a start. The W3C has also begun to establish their own roadmap towards accessible dynamic content, having released their working draft on April 5th, 2006.

At this time, I will only employ AJAX in very limited circumstances – usually, for administrative backends where I can be certain that only a few specific people will have need to use it, and I can be assured that I will not be creating problems for others. However, the day may yet come when AJAX technologies are ready for truly accessible use.

Tags:

• ajax
• dhtml
• accessible web design

It’s a common misapprehension that making an accessible website is expensive. Not exactly true – it’s more accurate to state that it’s expensive to make a website accessible. There is a subtle distinction between those two statements, but an important one.

The same is true in most issues regarding accessibility – it’s not significantly more expensive to make a building, a voting terminal, or a digital resource reasonably accessible from the beginning than it would be otherwise. However, it’s always significantly more expensive to retrofit your existing building to be accessible. You have to widen doorways, build ramps, replace bathroom fittings, etc. The same is true for a website – it’s not a simple matter to make a website accessible if it has previously been built in a less acceptable manner.

Part of what makes a website truly accessible is providing valuable, unique information embedded in the code. Writing alt tags which are descriptive and helpful, writing long descriptions of complex graphs and other visual aids, or providing meanings for acronyms and abbreviations. This is detailed work – and you can’t easily take shortcuts.

Automation is sometimes an incredibly valuable aid, but it’s too easy to perceive it as a solution. Making a website accessible takes time, patience, and attention to detail.

Tags:

• accessible web design

One of the challenges in accessible web design is getting feedback from actual users. I know relatively few individuals with low-vision who regularly use screen readers. I know only a few people with handheld web devices – and certainly not enough to cover the entire range of possibilities in that area. This challenge is one of the reasons that web accessibility is so closely tied to web standards. Since most of us can’t test our work "in the field," we have to rely on our intuition, logic, and the fact that a careful adherence to standards will keep us from straying too far from the path.

There are a few places to go for valuable perspectives on these issues. First, and the most commonly used, for me, is the web design community. Interacting with other designers who are struggling with the same issues can provide valuable insights into potential problems which you yourself may not have considered. I belong to one major web forum, Cre8asite Forums, where discussions of standards and device compatibility have provided a lot of help. I’m also a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers, an organization committed to accessible web design. This highly focused group regularly considers the complexities of accessibility.

A second option is web accessibility testing. Disregarding the standard testing services for accessibility, Cynthia, WebXACT, and others, there are organizations such as Usability Exchange, a company which provides testing by actual disabled end users, giving you some of the best information you can get. The downside? It’s not free. And it never will be, I imagine. Still, for larger-budget projects it can be a hugely benefical step.

The third choice, is to read about the experiences of disabled users. It can be difficult to find this kind of information outside of lawsuits and news articles. These resources, though valuable, tend not to contain anything more than can be found in any number of online accessibility sources. Recently I’ve become aware of two blogs which can provide good insight: the American Foundation for the Blind and Blind Confidential, the personal blog of Chris Hofstater – a blind programmer heavily involved with the JAWS screen reader. The AFB blog is very general, but sometimes can provide an interesting link or story. Chris Hofstater’s blog, on the other hand, can sometimes provide fantastic insight into the experiences of the blind.

There’s nothing more valuable in accessible web design than getting a good sense for the experiences and frustrations of an actual user. If you can gain insight into the practical difficulties of a website, you’ve made the strongest step towards resolving the accessibility problem.

Tags:

• Chris Hofstater
• accessibility testing

The most well-known and thoroughly discussed accessibility techniques make websites more accessible for the blind and partially-sighted. After that, the discussion usually strays into mobile devices or learning disabilities. The deaf tend to get much less attention.

One might imagine that the deaf don’t really suffer from web accessibility problems. They can see the images, use a mouse, navigate the site just fine. Right?

Well, it depends. Those who are deaf from birth may not actually read written english very well. It’s not that they are illiterate – it’s simply that they have learned sign language as their first language. Sign language appears in many forms – British Sign Language, American Sign Language or Gestuno, the International Sign Language amongst many others. Each sign language has its own characteristics of grammar and interpretation, and they don’t necessarily correspond to the so-called "native language" of the signer.

But making a website accessible to this level is very difficult. It’s a lot of work, and it’s expensive. Sign language requires human sign interpreters – for a website, the production of a video which conveys the text. Creating alternate forms of content is a constant task for most websites. The thought of creating a new video everytime you edit your text is enormous!

There’s a sign-language services company, SignPost, which is working on producing signed video for websites. Their CEO was interviewed
on vnunet.com discussing their aims with this new product. Their technique is a lower-bandwidth video to convey signed texts. The technique is fine, but the expense and challenge may well continue to act as a significant barrier.

Accessibility for the deaf is clearly a bigger problem than that for the blind – until we can design a tool which performs an equivalent task to a screen reader for the deaf, it’s unlikely that sites will really become fully accessible.

Nonetheless, there are basic things we can do to assist. The same techniques which are used to help the learning disabled can help the deaf (or the illiterate!) – graphic indicators to show purpose and other visual aids can support their understanding of the material. The simplest aid can be providing an option for the deaf to specify their use of a TDD (also known as TTY) phone. This simple option added to a contact form can greatly help the deaf in making human contact through the web.

Tags:

• deafness
• accessible web design
• signpost

When I attempted to summarize the substance of the accessibility lawsuit against Target, I commented in frustration about the extensive ignorance concerning accessibility and the rights of the disabled.

Today, I ran across a post by Bruce Lawson which is devoted to this very problem. If you read the post, it’s really necessary to read through the comments. The post summarizes a few relatively high-profile comments on the subject, such as those from Molly Holzschlag and Derek Featherstone.

But in all of these cases, the really interesting issues come in the comments. Ignorance begets response begets response. I have yet to see an example of somebody changing their mind because of this discussion – but the discussion is still helpful.

The reason for making a website accessible, to me, is that web designers and business owners do not have the right to prevent access to our resources on the basis of disability. Making an accessible website, at least to the basic elements such as ALT texts and appropriate labels is not complicated, and to not follow these guidelines due to ignorance or laziness is simply unacceptable.

My last post discussed accessibility as it relates to devices. The most common understanding of accessibility relates to visual disabilities. But learning disabilities are also an important aspect to making a website accessible. Learning disabilities are also the most difficult aspect of accessible planning.

Determining how to make your site accessible to an individual with a high function disability such as dyslexia or Asperger syndrome can be very challenging – and making it accessible to individuals with more severe disabilities such as sever autism or other pervasive developmental disorders can be a serious problem.

To a degree, with major developmental disorders, I feel that you can take into consideration the likelihood that the information on your site will be needed by these individuals. Also, you can consider that many people with severe developmental disorders will have assistance in acquiring the information you need. However, for high-function autism or dyslexia, you must assume that your page may be useful to these individuals!

One method to assist the learning disabled is the incorporation of graphic icons which clearly indicate important activities. Dyslexics may find text confusing, and may process graphical information more quickly. The graphic icons should be clear and consistent to add the best assistance. Avoid flashing text, animation, or variations in font faces. Visit Dyslexia.com for some further tips on designing for dyslexics.

The issues with autism and web design are more related to your content. In general, the difficulty an individual with autism will have is in interpreting human interaction. For a website, this means being careful to construct your text in a logical, consistent manner. Avoid idiomatic speech or other language constructions which do not convey a literal meaning, since these may simply be confusing.

It is not possible to construct a web site, or any other information resource, which will be ideal for everybody. With any site design, your first consideration must be your primary group of users – however, all websites should also consider the needs of anybody who will visit their site. You have no justification for assuming that your own needs will answer for all your visitors.

I’ve been thinking about the mobile web today. Accessible web design is all about providing access to web-based information to all users and platforms – and the mobile web is a fast-growing and very challenging area.

The biggest challenge with mobile web design is the fact that you just can’t test it very easily. There are dozens of mobile browsers and related products.

Opera has supplied options to test for small screens in their browser for quite some time, but that only provides testing for Opera’s interpretations. Every web enabled phone provides a browser of some sort – many of them have created their own browsers. Some use obscure custom browsers.

And Google has now announced their own lightweight mobile interpreter for pages accessed through a search from a mobile phone. This is all wonderful, but it’s a herculean task to test for all of these options (not to mention all of the phone charges and extra handhelds one would need to acquire!).

All of these services have their own interpretation of web standards (or non-interpretation, as the case may be). Support for HTML, CSS, and handheld specific style sheets is very spotty. However, a well-constructed page will usually degrade gracefully in a mobile browser. Not always, of course, but there are certainly things you can do which will help.

• Use proportional widths.

  Handheld browsers usually have very small screens – the largest screen I know of is on the Hiptop from Danger, measuring in at a massive 240 pixels. Nobody likes side-scrolling! If you use a proportional width you can avoid this problem.

• Place your page elements in a logical order.

  Which comes first, the content or the navigation? Neither is a great solution – if your visitor is going to an article, they want content. If they’re looking for an article, they want navigation. You’ll have to make a choice – but I feel this is where internal page navigation is a must. Provide just a few links to navigate around the page – Skip to Navigation, Skip to Content, perhaps even a dynamic link to visit the most recent article published! These can go at the very top of the page, allowing you to organize your page as you need. I still am inclined to recommend that content comes before main navigation, however.

• Follow web standards

  Despite the fact that support for standards is not good amongst handheld browsers, you should always strive for standards. Unless you have a tremendous development budget which can support redevelopment of your mobile interface everytime a new browser comes out, you need to plan for the future. It is a better bet that the future of handheld browsers will tend towads standards than not.

This is a minuscule part of what you can do to improve your mobile web presence – Cameron Moll is writing a four-part series which provides detailed and extensive tips for mobile web design.