I’ve been giving WCAG 2.0 a hard read over the last few days.  In doing so, I’ve been focusing mostly on the success criteria and the techniques.  Focusing on WCAG 2.0 is not an easy task, because it represents thousands of hours of work by hundreds of really smart people.  With that much knowledge comes complexity.  [...]

About half a year ago, some of my friends at the General Services Administration in DC let the cat out the bag and let everyone know that I’ve been working with them and the Information Technology Industry Council or simply “ITI” (www.itic.org) on a new XML specification for VPATs.  It’s also been confirmed several times by [...]

Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Time: 1:00pm ET
Audience: Corporate / eTail
Duration: 60 minutes
Please join HiSoftware for a free QuickCast Webinar on the new WCAG 2.0 Web Accessibility Guidelines: Effects on Your Web Presence and Strategies for Compliance.
To fully comply with the newest recommendation from the W3C WCAG2 requires web content authors [...]

I want to keep this post short and simple.  Just a quick cheat sheet to myself (and possibly others) about the easy and quick things Jeff suggested to me for quick-and-dirty PowerPoint 2007 accessibility.  After all, Jeff is the guy who spends eight hours a day testing with assistive technology.  And, I’m a busy guy, so the shorter the [...]

The OBJECT tag is the standard for embedding content such as Flash. It is always required to make the original embedded flash content accessible but we also need a way to specify alternate text content for the object itself. The first step is to download swfobject.js. With this one file we can [...]

Earlier last week, I presented to a class at the University of Washington on Disability Law, Policy & the Community.  Miraculously, the date and time that Professors Pat Brown and Kurt Johnson arranged with me months and months ago dovetailed perfectly with my back-to-back trips to Washington, DC.  I was invited to speak on developing [...]

A common design pattern on the web is to use a <select> element for page navigation of a particular site. Typically developers key this off of the <select> element’s onchange event. It has widely been acknowledged that the current behavior is bad for accessibility because keyboard users do not have the ability to easily navigate [...]

 I wanted to take a moment to highlight the great accessibility work coming out from Australia’s NVDA.  NVDA stands for Non Visual Desktop Access and is an open source screen reader that is freely available.  Here is a great overview of NVDA given by the primary developers Michael Curran and James Teh.   In three short [...]

In a few weeks, I will be presenting to a class of graduate students and advanced undergraduates at the University of Washington on disability law and policy, with a focus on how we tried to shape disability policy on internet accessibility at the Department of Justice. As the time draws near, I find myself thinking about all the relevant factors that are really important to understanding the issues. As I put together the list of how and why we are where we are (as a society) on the ADA coverage of the internet, it’s quite a long reading list.

Earlier today, I gave a presentation to a large organization that has hundreds (maybe even thousands) of web content creators—many of whom post directly to production servers. This got me thinking about how many groups we work with that have these kinds of “ad hoc” web content creators—people who post PDFs or HTML content and who “fly under the radar” because they aren’t really web “developers.” Although it’s fun to think about how to make elaborate web-based applications or AJAX sites accessible, the fact remains that a lot of the web is, well, a bit more boring. But, making this kind of content accessible is just as important— and maybe even more important because there’s so much of it. At the same time, anything that ad hoc has got to send shivers up the spines of the guys in the legal department as they worry about whether personal identifying information (PII) is being blurted out on their web sites as casually as inaccessible content.

On the flight back to rainy Seattle, I thought about how these opportunities need to be approached from a more global, holistic approach.