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 […]
Continue reading “Speaking on Web Accessibility” »Category: Accessibility
Web site Tune-up: 8 Quick Checkups
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) […]
Continue reading “Web site Tune-up: 8 Quick Checkups” »Review: W3-Markup Code Preparation Service
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 […]
Continue reading “Review: W3-Markup Code Preparation Service” »Testing Color Contrast for WCAG 1 & 2
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 […]
Continue reading “Testing Color Contrast for WCAG 1 & 2” »Best Practices: Writing for Accessibility
Thanks to an off-hand comment from Steve Green while discussing a forthcoming Accessites article, I’ve spent some time today thinking about what it takes to write for accessibility. Most of the time, the primary focus of information about accessibility has to do with making non-text information available as text. Captioning and audio description for video, transcriptions for audio, simple text alternatives for static images. Next in the list tends to be availability of functionality: progressive enhancement for client-side scripting, ability […]
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