Category: accessibility

Useful Links: Accessibility tweeps, NFB Complaint, 3G woes

The ultimate “follow Friday” list for accessible tweeps or perhaps it would be more correct to say people who tweet about accessibility.  Oddly, the names in the list are not linked to the relevant twitter pages, making following the suggested people rather labor intensive. One Twitter name on their list is wrong. Tom Babinszki is @tbabinszki, not what their post says. Complaints aside, it’s a useful resource list for those interested in accessibility information on Twitter.

Law Schools Discriminate Against Blind Applicants: National Federation of the Blind Files Complaints Against Nine Law Schools. This action from the National Federation of the Blind may have far reaching consequences similar to what happened with the Target lawsuit.

The other day someone was asking my opinion about whether to not to buy an iPad, and if she did, whether it was worth the extra hundreds to get an iPad with 3G capability. My position was go for the 3G if you’re going to do it. I think it’s a good policy to start with the maximum capability you can get in  a new device. It you start from the lowest point, you have to upgrade almost immediately to keep the device useful for a period of years. Then yesterday, something happened to several AT&T towers in the Albuquerque area, and my phone lost service for the day. After repeated attempts to get through to AT&T from my neighbor’s land line (I don’t have a land line) I finally talked to someone at AT&T. They had me turn off the 3G capability on my iPhone and use the Edge network until the 3G problem was fixed. I was stunned by how slow service was using the Edge network. Honestly, I’d never realized what a significant difference 3G makes. Now I can speak from experience when I tell people that they should go for the 3G if they are going to spend the money  for a device of any kind. And, by the way, 3G is back in working condition  in my part of Albuquerque today.

Useful links: Facebook, iPad accessibility,

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options. Seriously, Facebook, show some respect for your users and get your shit together. Or, as I said it on Twitter . . .

I apologize to Microsoft for ever complaining about the menu maze in Word. Facebook tops them: http://nyti.ms/cChrNXThu May 13 15:13:20 via SeesmicVirginia DeBolt
vdebolt

To add fuel to the current inferno of bad vibes facing Facebook, here’s Why Facebook Can’t Be Trusted.

Not everything is about Facebook, however. Random Highlights from Chicago Trip and Beyond at Do It Myself Blog gives some real user reports about how an iPad facilitated a better experience at SOBCon for several attendees.

Useful Links: Web3.0, iPad AT and a tribute

Web 3.0, a documentary movie by Kate Ray describes the semantic web. It’s about 15 minutes long and worth every minute.

iPad Assistive Technology/Disability Round up from ATMac is a great resource list.

I can’t let Lena Horne’s passing go unremarked, even though it’s completely off topic here. A great woman.

Useful links: site specific browsers, social media stats, Web 2.0

Fluid–Create Site Specific Browsers from ATMac is a new concept to me and has interesting potential.

This stat filled video about social media is eye-opening.

Speaking of video, O’Reilly Media has a lot of video from the Web 2.0 Expo up on YouTube, including this interview with a good deal of talk about HTML5, Flash, and other technology from Brady Forrest, Eric Meyer, and Ge Wang.

HTML5 and Accessibility: heading elements

The second of Aaron Anderson’s articles at WebAIM on Future Web Accessibility appeared. I recommend that you read the entire article, but there’s one section on headings that I want to quote here because I think it’s extremely important.

In current versions of HTML, the only way to define sections and outline-hierarchy of a document is use of the <h1>-<h6> in an otherwise flat structure. This is very beneficial to accessibility, but can be a bit awkward for web authors, especially when moving sections around in ways that change the heading depth. HTML5 introduces two new elements, <section> and <article>, that define logical sections and syndicatable articles present in a page; content hierarchy and heading levels are defined by nesting these tags inside each other. Because of this, HTML5 no longer requires that one actually use the correct heading level for a particular heading, but allows web authors to use <h1> everywhere, with the idea that assistive technologies and other systems can determine the heading level by the nesting of the <section> and <article> tags.

This is actually a perfectly fine way of doing things, but has the potential to create some sizable accessibility problems during the transition phase, that is, during the time where not everyone is using AT (of which there currently is none) that knows how to handle this. Since it will be several years before all the AT vendors update their products to support HTML5, and several more years before all users of those products upgrade to the newer versions, accessibility will require that we continue to use heading tags of the correct level, even when they’re inside nested <section>s and <article>s, at least for now.

Useful links: Funny stuff, press Enter, VoiceOver

Need a laugh? How to Successfully Educate Your Clients on Web Development at Smashing Magazine is really funny.

Who moved my Enter key? from Know IT describes the role muscle memory plays in keyboarding. Personally, I’m still waiting for Mac and Windows to agree on the location and function of the Ctrl/Cmd keys. Moving from Mac to Windows and back again is like getting into a car and discovering that the brake and gas pedal are reversed in this particular model. Once you get it working, you go back to the other car and have to learn it all over again.

iPhone VoiceOver Features for People with Disabilities is an informative video describing the iPhone VoiceOver accessibility features.

Useful Links: Links in PDFs, CSS starter pages, Ning networks

Creating Accessible Links in PDFs from PWS gives “techniques for tagging links correctly to ensure that they are both keyboard operable and usable with a screen reader. It also looks at, amongst other things, how to make URLs more intelligible for screen reader users.”

Dreamweaver CS5 Features Part 1: The All New CSS Starter Pages at Community MX explains what Adobe has done with CS5 starter pages. Some good changes are described with more explanation to come. One thing I’ve wondered about the new Dreamweaver is whether or not there will be an option to use an HTML5 doctype. I’m watching the reports on CS5 for that tidbit of information.

In a move that may affect many educators, Ning has announced that there will be no more free social networking sites from them. Sites that currently exist must pay up or will be removed. Here are some news reports from The Inquisitr and PC World. I personally think this is a radical move that will be greeted with an angry backlash. ReadWriteWeb has a list of alternatives for current Ning sites that educators should check. At BlogHer, you’ll find even more suggestions for replacements for Ning.