Category: accessibility

Dear Adobe, Here’s an idea for you

Dreamweaver and RDFa. Can they be friends? More. . .

Dear Adobe,

I know you’ve been learning about RDFa (Resource Description Framework). You guys pay attention. I’d love it if the folks working on Dreamweaver could add some RDFa support to the next version of Dreamweaver.

Here’s my vision of this. The already existing metadata developed by The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative could simply be added as a menu, perhaps a new DC menu. Using that menu, a developer could quickly select from a list of existing properties and insert them in semantically appropriate locations on a web page.

Here’s an example of some RDFa code from the W3C:

<div xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<h2 property="dc:title">The trouble with Bob</h2>
<h3 property="dc:creator">Alice</h3>
...
</div>

Wouldn’t it be lovely if a busy front end developer using Dreamweaver could just grab the xmlns or one of the dc properties from a menu and apply it to the proper semantic element?

The other day I heard  Michael (TM) Smith say,

Semantic markup is markup that encodes meaning into content. Semantic markup transforms a document into an information source. The information becomes usable in unanticipated ways when the structure is reusable.

I know that the hand coders and the standardistas out here in web page land will take to RDF without your help. But what about Adobe’s core user group? Don’t those developers need to be describing their data with machine-readable structured meta data, too?

I  hope you will give the idea some consideration.

Sincerely,
Dreamweaver’s  biggest fan,
Virginia

Useful Links: Screen Reader Survey, px to em, speech impaired

WebAIM’s screen reader survey results, a nice px to em converter, and advice for the speech impaired from one who knows. More . . .

WebAIM’s Screen Reader Survey results are available now. A main overall finding was that screen reader users are a diverse lot. They made a few recommendations based on their findings, but concluded

In general, these results suggest that following accessibility guidelines and standards, using technologies that support high levels of accessibility, and providing users with options is of the highest importance.

Px to Em can help you take that font measurement you can visualize perfectly at 36px and covert the measurement to ems. Then it gives you the CSS and even tells you a bit about why ems are such nice and loveable units.

Seven Ways to Communicate when you are Speech Impaired at Do It Myself Blog offers communication tips.

All my photos from Web Directions North can be found at Flickr.

Report from WDN 09: Educating the Next Generation of Web Professionals, V

Live blogging the final afternoon session . . .

This session was a conversation with the audience and a group of people in the trenches who had helpful ideas on how to talk to peers and create change in academia.

Panel

The panel included Glenda the goodwitch Sims, Jeff Brown, Leslie Jensen-Inman,  Nick Fogler and Bill Cullifer. Steph Troeth facilitated. They began by focusing on success stories.

Glenda mentioned having competitions around accessibility. Jeff mentioned having final exams. Leslie talked about teaching best practices every day. Bill told about web design contests for community college and high school students. WOW is now giving nine $20,000 scholarships each year to students who succeed in creating the best accessible web sites.

Steph asked how we determine which technologies are long lasting and which are trends. Nick said he thinks the battle to accept web standards has been won, and now the question is how do we professionalize the profession. Bill said that introducing this into middle and junior high school would be good. Make it digestible skill development. Jeff said we should teach non-vendor specific technology: the concepts transcend. Leslie talked about teaching students how to teach themselves. Glenda talked about getting advisory boards of customers who want students after they graduate. Bill pointed out that most web professionals work for small business and advisors can add a lot when they describe what kind of training they need.

There was discussion about whether or not there should be certification. Interesting but nothing close to universal agreement on the issue.

Report from WDN 09: Educating the Next Generation of Web Professionals, IV

Live blogging the 2nd afternoon session . . .

Chris Mills returned for the education implementation part of the talk about JavaScript and what Derek had shown us.

The accessibility session

Derek Featherstone lead this session. He began by playing the audio from a screen reader reading a web page at full pace. A powerful demonstration for someone who had never heard a screen reader before, which included quite a few people in the room.

He showed a slide of a sign for deafblind literacy that demonstrated concepts of best practices such as high contrast lettering, the angle of the plate that the braille was on, the raised lettering on the words. Every aspect of how people might use the sign had been taken into consideration. Accessibility isn’t just about the web site. It’s about every other aspect of that business: the support line, customer service and everything else. Accessibility isn’t just about screen readers.

He showed some low vision magnifiers and keyboards. He showed someone typing one character at a time with a head wand. A good teaching idea related to the keyboards was to show students a particular type of keyboard or headset or switch and ask them who would use it and how. What does the hardware tell you about the person’s disability?

The spectrum of disability includes visual, hearing, motor, speech and cognitive.

He repeated his previous statement that JavaScript can be used in accessible solutions. Used correctly, JS and Ajax and actually help people with disabilities. It helps maintain context and doesn’t require a full-page refresh.

He talked about Universal Design. If things are better for people with disabilities, they are more useful for everyone.

Outdated techniques that are no longer needed: access keys, tab index, place-holder characters in text boxes, text-only versions, use onkeypress with onclick.

New things we do that we shouldn’t do: put content in CSS as background images, focus entirely on the JavaScript on/off scenario.

Testing techniques: expert review, automated testing, technical testing with assistive technology and other tools, user testing. Do them all if you can.

Talk to students about the legislation around accessibility. Legislation is good motiviation.

Steph Troeth did the education applications follow up about accessibility. She discussed the education challenges in getting across the message that accessibility isn’t just one thing, and that it benefits many people.

Glenda Sims talked about the Target accessibility case.

Steph outlined the core competencies: understand various disabilities, understand issues around assistive technologies, learn how to evaluate accessibility compliance, identify tools used by disabled people.

Finally, she went through the assignments handout and talked about the accessibility assignment.

During the session, Leslie Jensen-Inman sent me the URLs of three YouTube videos that can help students “get” the whole idea of accessibility.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQT9yVeu_js
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDJt-dp–Oo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2VVxrWun6A

Useful links: purchase behavior, accessibility in a recession, eduWeb conf, and hAccessibility

A Razorfish study about social behavior and buying decisions, recession accessibility tips, the eduWeb Conference and a look at hAccessibility. More . . .

New Razorfish Data Ties Consumer Social Media Activity To Purchase Behavior about the relationship between social behavior and purchasing decisions concludes,

Clearly this early data reflects our belief that content distribution, especially among social networks, positively impacts a publisher’s monetizable web traffic — which helps explains why ESPN, Hulu, YouTube and the like put such effort into widget distribution. And this is also why retailers and manufactures, of which Amazon.com is clear leader, should be actively creating and distributing value-add widgets across social networks to drive revenue.

Testing times: recession bustin’ accessibility tips from the Opera Developer Network is good reading.

Are you going to the eduWeb Conference? (In July in Chicago.) The eduWeb Conference is an annual event for the higher education community, attracting those who are involved in online strategy, marketing and technology. This includes recruiting, website design/development, CMS, social media, marketing communications and the integration of traditional marketing channels into this new medium.

Microformats, hAccessibility and Moving Forward from A Blog Not Limited offers some pragmatic code examples for an accessibility issue related to the use of the abbr design pattern when expressing dates in microformats.

Useful Links: CSS Calendar, Unreadable, Accessify

A Semantic List=Based CSS Calendar at CSS Newbie is an interesting tutorial.

Unreadable by Joe Clark at Scroll Magazine argues that the difficulty of reading at length on a computer screen is an insurmountable problem that is actually rewiring our brains.

The future of the web is one of an initially unwitting species-wide rewiring of the brain. The western world has carried out a Tuskegee-style experiment in which citizens’ neurology is permanently – and involuntarily – altered. At the dawn of the web, we could rationally have claimed not to know what we were doing. We don’t have that excuse anymore, but the experiment is still under way. In fact, it’s full steam ahead.

If you’re looking for a T-shirt slogan (a nice concise pithy bit of text from which you can glance away immediately), try ‘This is your brain on RSS. Any questions?’

Clark’s position about rewiring the human brain reminds me of some points made in the SXSWi Keynote by Jane McGonigal last year. Her topic was virtual reality, but she discussed how online gaming is changing the way our brains work. Knowledge about how online activity affects brain interaction can be important to designers, educators, and perhaps even to therapists.

A redesign at Accessify looks very spiffy and boasts new functionality, such as a JQuery Function Builder Wizard and updates to my eternal fav on Accessify, the List-O-Matic wizard. Nice update!

Review: Universal Design for Web Applications

by Web Teacher
get this book from amazon.com

Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone (Amazon affiliate link)

★★★★★ Universal Design for Web Applications by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May is from O’Reilly (2008). This is a great little book. It manages to take a new approach to accessibility that includes HTML, CSS, scripting, AJAX, RIAs and does it briefly in a clear and simple way. A perfectly accessible book.

Anyone teaching HTML, CSS, scripting, AJAX, RIA or topics such as creating iPhone apps should have this book on hand. The thing I like most about this book is that it does so much with so little space. I didn’t really learn anything new about accessibility—I’m fairly well informed on the topic. But someone who was not already knowledgeable could get the essentials with ease from this book. Although the authors stress that the book is not a WCAG 2.0 tutorial, they also make it clear that the information in the book can be used to achieve Level A success with WCAG 2.0.

If every student coming out of a class on HTML, CSS, scripting, AJAX, or some RIA had the background in this small book, the web would be well on the way to universally accessible.

Here’s a look at the table of contents:

  1. Introduction to Universal Design
  2. Selling it
  3. Metadata
  4. Structure and Design
  5. Forms
  6. Tabular Data
  7. Video and Audio
  8. Scripting
  9. Ajax and WAI-ARIA
  10. Rich Internet Applications
  11. The process

There’s also an appendix with a cross-reference to universal design for web applications that uses 20 questions based on Level A Success Criteria on WCAG 2.0 specs.

Summary: Easy, practical, and comprehensive. Good for reference or a course in accessibility.

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