I’ve always believed that web site accessibility depends on an understanding of accessibility issues — not on technical issues. Obviously, knowing the technical side of web site construction and how it impacts accessibility is very important. Some decisions are fundamentally technical, but a huge part of web site accessibility is purely visible — and just understanding accessibility issues will make a huge difference. To that end, here are a few quick comments about color blindness. Color blindness (or color perception […]
Continue reading “Color Blindness Myths and Misunderstandings” »Author: Joe Dolson
Usability testing isn’t for you? Really?
Whenever somebody tells me that they really don’t see the point in doing usability testing on their web site, I can’t help myself from asking why. Let’s be honest here — what’s a really good reason for skipping usability testing? The first thing that comes to my mind, of course, is because you’ve just finished a major usability review. I can understand wanting to give it a skip if you’ve just gone through the usability testing process! But, surprisingly, that’s […]
Continue reading “Usability testing isn’t for you? Really?” »WP to Twitter Updated to OAuth
Well, it’s a day for updates. Today was (at one point) the deadline for Twitter to permanently disable Basic authentication. The date has now been extended to August 31st, but the difference isn’t really significant. The one benefit which it will provide is a little extra time to debug the new OAuth version of WP to Twitter before it becomes the only working version. There are a lot of complications surrounding the OAuth update — most of them unfortunate. For […]
Continue reading “WP to Twitter Updated to OAuth” »Forthcoming Updates on Federal Section 508 Rules
Section 508 web accessibility standards were written as an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act in 1998. In web development terms, this isn’t short of an eternity — and in all practical sense defines an era. The web programming methods and styles of 1998 were radically different to what you see in normal use today. The Section 508 rules have been under revision recently, and were available for public comment until June 21, 2010. Unfortunately, my time didn’t allow me to […]
Continue reading “Forthcoming Updates on Federal Section 508 Rules” »Accessibility Viewer Application Beta from the Paciello Group
Steve Faulkner, from The Paciello Group, just announced the beta release of their new Accessibility Viewer application aViewer. The purpose of the application is to give easy access to what information the browser is reporting back through Accessibility APIs. It’s an interesting application, and certainly has the potential to provide useful information in the future. It is in beta, of course, so it may not function entirely perfectly — in my installation, I had trouble getting a few features to […]
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