Category: Accessibility

Spam vs. Accessibility

June 24, 2008

19 Comments

Topics: Accessibility, Usability.

The whole world of spam is an accessibility nightmare. The concept behind web accessibility is to ensure that users can access the complete functionality of your web site — but how do you cope with the fact that spambots will happily take advantage of any hole you leave? Comment forms, contact pages, email addresses and enrollment forms. All methods of giving critical access to previously unidentified users — and all in positions where you just need to find that crucial […]

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Speaking on Web Accessibility

June 18, 2008

8 Comments

Topics: Accessibility, Blogging.

Giving a talk is an interesting experience. In this case, with a time limit of 15 minutes, the biggest challenge was figuring out what I had time to cover. With a subject like web accessibility, I firmly believe that every aspect is critical — anything I leave out is something that somebody needs to know. But it’s 15 minutes. You can’t really be effective if you try and cover the entire scope of a subject in 15 minutes. The first […]

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Web site Tune-up: 8 Quick Checkups

June 2, 2008

6 Comments

Topics: Accessibility, Web standards.

Perfecting a web site is a long and involved process. There’s no getting around the fact that if you want every aspect of your site to be right — accessibility, search optimization, and just all-around pizzazz, you’ve probably got some significant work to do. However, that’s not to say that there aren’t things you can check quickly and efficiently to make sure you’re not making some of the more egregious errors! Here are 8 speedy checkups (in no particular order) […]

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Review: W3-Markup Code Preparation Service

May 21, 2008

7 Comments

Topics: Accessibility.

There are a lot of services in the web marketplace offering code conversion. You give ’em a design, they spew out some junk code for you. This isn’t the way it has to be, thankfully. There are, believe it or not, PSD to HTML (HyperText Markup Language) conversion services which are committed to creating standards compliant, semantic code. Well, there’s at least one — http://w3-markup.com/. I’m not personally aware of others… But the point is that if you’re a designer […]

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Testing Color Contrast for WCAG 1 & 2

May 14, 2008

32 Comments

Topics: Accessibility, Web standards.

Use the Color Contrast Spectrum Tester or compare the contrast of two colors. Some time ago, while pondering whether web accessibility posed limitations on design, the thought occurred to me that there are presumably some colors which simply cannot be used for text or text backgrounds in any site. WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 1 does not, in fact, provide any specific guidelines concerning color contrast. The formulas commonly used to judge this were specified in Techniques For Accessibility Evaluation […]

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