WebAIM: Screen Reader Survey Results
http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey/

In December 2008 through January 2009, WebAIM conducted a survey of preferences of screen reader users.

In December 2008 through January 2009, WebAIM conducted a survey of preferences of screen reader user

Pesquisa recente feita pela WebAIM com usuários de leitores de tela

about captioning

Mobile phone users struggle mightily to use websites, even on high-end devices. To solve the problems, websites should provide special mobile versions.

Comparison of the mobile web to what we use(d in 1998).

An article about html semantics and accessibility

"Recently my coworkers and I have been discussing HTML headings and heading hierarchy. This may not sound like something you need to spend a lot of time discussing, but there are some situations when it seems very difficult to find a solution without compromises."

Should logo be H1 and similar issues

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Have you ever come across a web site that you could not access and wondered,"Am I the only one?" Herdict Web aggregates reports of inaccessible sites, allowing users to compare data to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem. By crowdsourcing data from around the world, we can document accessibility for any web site, anywhere.

检测一个网站是否可以访问的服务

"Have you ever come across a web site that you could not access and wondered,"Am I the only one?" Herdict Web aggregates reports of inaccessible sites, allowing users to compare data to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem. By crowdsourcing data from around the world, we can document accessibility for any web site, anywhere."

WCAG 2.0 Checklist

s a very simple and flexible HTML ma

While a lot of Tabs-Scripts claim to be accessible it turns out, most of them are really not. While developing this jQuery Plugin with my coworker Artur Ortega, we tried to find a single existing Javascript powered Tabs-Interface that Artur, using his Screenreader, would actually be able to use properly. We eventually gave up the search.

Valid, flexible, and portable form foundation with XHTML/CSS

Bookmarklet

Bookmarklet para ler páginas ilegíveis

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into Section 508 or the Rehabilitation Act or any of the rest of that stuff. It’s all about politics and has nothing to do with what I’m going to talk about.”

The issues of accessibility are a daily reality for my family. For us, it’s not a political issue at all. Our oldest daughter, Ramona, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around.

in which accessibility is about people, not checklists.

Accessibility is NOT a checklist. Accessibility is about usability.

Typically, a mega menu is a single drop-down that appears on hover, shows all the options in one large panel, groups options into related categories, uses icons or other graphics to help the user.

megadropdown

Mega drop-downs are half-way between the two concepts and similar to the ribbon introduced in Microsoft Office 2007

"Accessible Forms using WCAG 2.0" is the first of a series of documents to help web professionals use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2.0 to develop accessible websites. This document aims to provide web developers and others with practical advice about the preparation of accessible HTML forms. It compares the WCAG 1.0 accessibility requirements relating to forms with those contained in WCAG 2.0. I wish to thank Chris Bentley, Andrew Downie and Russ Weakley for their considerable knowledge and assistance in preparing this document. NB: This document is a work-in-progress. Please send feedback and any suggestions about errors and omissions to rhudson@usability.com.au Introduction Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) is primarily concerned with advocating the use of W3C Technologies such as HTML and CSS to prepare accessible websites. Version 2.0 of the Guidelines is technology neutral. That is, WCAG 2.0 does not explicitly relate to the use of

"Accessible Forms using WCAG 2.0" is the first of a series of documents to help web professionals use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2.0 to develop accessible websites. "

How to make your website accessible

Formularios accesibles

Whether it’s your portfolio, a blog, a marketing web site, or a collection of games, we all want to attract visitors to our website and to ensure that they have a pleasant experience. Usability measures the level of a user’s experience and can be characterized by how easily a given task can be completed; whether it’s done with prior knowledge, or by having the user learn a new way to interact. I think Jakob Nielson probably explained it best when he said: “Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease–of–use during the design process.” In this article I hope to give you some form of a usability checklist, covering topics from form design to simple navigation tips that you can apply to any Web project.

10 Tips to Create a More Usable Web

for future exploration

It is a tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits.

What is CheckMyColours? It is a tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits. All the tests are based on the algorithms suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

website accessibility tools

Although designing usable systems requires far more than simply applying guidelines, guidelines can still make a significant contribution to usability by promoting consistency and good practice. We use this list of guidelines in our consultancy work. For best results, remember to interpret the guideline in context — this requires a bit more thought but ensures you will get a lot more from your review. —  DAVID TRAVIS, JULY 6, 2009

Although designing usable systems requires far more than simply applying guidelines, guidelines can still make a significant contribution to usability by promoting consistency and good practice. We use this list of guidelines in our consultancy work. For best results, remember to interpret the guideline in context — this requires a bit more thought but ensures you will get a lot more from your review. — David Travis, July 6, 2009

Accessibility is commonly touted via some text and a small hyperlink that leads to Section 508 at the bottom of a web page, a practice which upholds the spirit of the law. It usually reads something like this: “We are committed to making our site accessible and continue to test and modify the site for accessibility. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any problems accessing any of our content.” Some quick accessibility checks reveal that many site owners and developers consider the second part of that statement a convenient “get out of jail free” card. Developers sometimes think that using standards-based development principles, separating presentation and behavior via external CSS and DOM-based scripting techniques, and applying alt attributes to images creates Section 508 compliance. They don’t want to spend more effort on accessibility until they get feedback from users who have problems with the site.

"In universal design, perceived affordance—that is, the implicit understanding of how to interact with an object—actually coincides with the user’s ability to execute the action. Universal design is, therefore, inherently accessible." - yes!

Over the past few weeks we’ve been showcasing some amazing articles, tools, and videos in our Resources section. Our twitter followers have gotten a taste of these resources and have let us know they are really enjoying them! Today I would like to share some tools with you that focus on accessibility, a very important sector of user experience.

The Most 10 Common Mistakes Web Designers Make

It’s time we came to grips with the fact that not every “document” can be a semantic “web page.” Some forms of writing just cannot be expressed in HTML—or they need to be bent and distorted to do so. But for once, XML can help. Joe Clark explains.

e

"The creation myth of the web tells us that Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML as a means of publishing physics research papers. True? It doesn’t matter; it’s a founding legend of the web whose legacy continues to this day. You can gin up as many web applications as you want, but the web is mostly still a place to publish documents."

More people are surfing the Web via mobile device than ever before. It’s just so convenient to have that mobile access to anything you need. Sadly, most websites have not yet considered their mobile visitors, who probably move on to the next site before trying to make sense of a jumbled mess.

Stop ignoring your mobile visitors! Be a part of the thriving Mobile Web by making your site mobile-friendly. This tutorial explains everything you need to know!

総まとめ。まさにいま役に立つ

15 Tools for Testing your Website

If you want to have the same experience over multiple browsers and different machines then testing your website is vital. In this article I’ve gathered some of the most important tools that you can use in testing your site against various errors – CSS Errors, HTML Errors, Crossbrowsing Errors etc.

SitePoint Blogs: News, opinion, and fresh thinking for web developers and designers

some colour review tools for websites

If you are designing, or re-designing your web site, it is time well spent running your website through the color accessibility tools below to ensure that your site can be seen correctly by as many people as possible. Most of these tools use WC3 guidelines to perform their various operations. If you can actually read and understand them, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 requires, amongst other things, that there is sufficient contrast between text and background color. For a person with a color disability, the colors used on a web site can mean the difference between being able to read text and images or not. 1 in 12 people have some sort of color deficiency.

ideas for design

Research shows that poor product information accounts for around 8% of usability problems and even 10% of user failure (i.e. the user gives up and leaves the website) (Prioritizing Web Usability).

People tell us that they don’t mind scrolling and the behaviour we see in user testing backs that up. We see that people are more than comfortable scrolling long, long pages to find what they are looking for. A quick snoop around the web will show you successful brands that are not worrying about the fold either:

The importance of download speed, for most Web users, has long been established (King 2008). Fast response times foster higher flow states (Skadberg

In a recent usability survey, researchers from Southern Illinois University found that after ease of use, men prefer fast download speed to easy navigation. Women prefer ease of use, easy navigation, and accessibility. The researchers hypothesize that these different usability criteria are due to differences in how men and women use the Web

vitesse accès conditionne utilisation services

In a survey of 301 undergraduates on the importance of different web usability criteria, researchers from Southern Illinois University found that after ease of use, men prefer fast download speed over easy navigation (Pearson & Pearson 2008). Women prefer ease of use, easy navigation, and accessibility. Figure 1 shows the differences among genders for the most important factors in assessing web usability.

"In a recent usability survey, researchers from Southern Illinois University found that after ease of use, men prefer fast download speed to easy navigation. Women prefer ease of use, easy navigation, and accessibility. The researchers hypothesize that these different usability criteria are due to differences in how men and women use the Web." (via Zeldman.com)

Applause For Finland: First Country To Make Broadband Access A Legal Right http://bit.ly/aQmc6 (via @synopsi, @janrosa, @ScienceIreland) [from http://twitter.com/matushiq/statuses/4863041209]

Starting July 2010, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection as an intermediate step, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications. By the end of 2015, the legal right will be extended to an impressive 100 Mb broadband connection for everyone.

Kudos to the Finnish government, which has just introduced laws guaranteeing broadband access to every person living in Finland (5.5 million people, give or take). This is reportedly a first worldwide. Starting July 2010, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection as an intermediate step, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications. By the end of 2015, the legal right will be extended to an impressive 100 Mb broadband connection for everyone.

for presentation

Go Finland: First Country To Make Broadband Access A Legal Right http://ow.ly/uIHE [from http://twitter.com/barbhd34/statuses/4908282395]

Broadband Access a Legal Right in Finland...http://tiny.cc/aytXA [from http://twitter.com/matebestek/statuses/4898523869]

A List Apart: Articles: Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients

It's hard for clients to understand the true value of user experience research. As much as you'd like to tell your clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call you back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. David Sherwin creates a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise.

25 Normas de accesibilidad relativas a las CSS

25 reglas para hacer buen css

25 reglas para hacer un buen archivo css

Olga Carrera ha creado un listado de 25 reglas para hacer un CSS mas accesible, la lista incluye notas de porque evitar el uso de hacks y alternativas para mejorar tu codigo CSS, asi como muchos tips para mejorar la accesibilidad del mismo, un articulo muy recomendable y en español.

This blog entry shows you how to create automatic captions for you YouTube videos.

"In addition to automatic captions, we’re also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. [...]"

"To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time."

YouTube now does automatic captioning in some cases and automatic timing in all cases. Automatic timing lets you upload a transcript with a video and YouTube will do speech to text and figure out when the various parts of the transcript need to be displayed.

In October 2009, WebAIM conducted a survey of preferences of screen reader users. This was a follow-up survey to a previous survey. We received 665 valid responses to the screen reader user survey.

First type article I've read in ages that doens't leave me thinking that I'm just a font snob

<a href=" portfolio.html" title="Some artwork of the artist">Portfolio</a>

If you are designing web sites in the UK, you probably already know that the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) mandates web sites be accessible by visually

Accessible

Usability Testing Resources

Using this visualization, Bruno confirmed that about 10% of users couldn't see the download button without scrolling, and thus never noticed it. 10% may not sound like a lot, but in this context it turns out to mean a significant number of people weren't downloading Google Earth. Using this data, the team was able to redesign the page to good effect.

show to Chad

Browser Size, hoeveel procent ziet een bepaald element van je website..

Reveal new window links and links to non-HTML files with a user stylesheet |

user stylesheet

Nützliche Informationen über W3C-Standards und allgemeine Tipps rund um Typographie und Barrierefreiheit.

Nützliche Kurzübersichten und Suchfunktionen für W3C-Standards.

Lookup various W3C code bits.

"Is there a middle path—a way to provide feedback and reduce password errors that doesn’t sacrifice the user experience? At least two design patterns address this issue in offline applications, and with a little JavaScript, we can bring them to the web. [...] The simplest solution is to mask the password by default while giving users a way to switch the field to clear text. [...] Apple adopted an interesting approach. The last letter typed into the field remains visible for a couple of seconds before turning into a dot. This creates an opportunity to catch errors without showing the entire password at once."

task in mind. This means their tunnel vision is already on, they

Introducing EnhanceJS, a JavaScript framework designed specifically to deliver a usable experience to the widest possible audience, by testing the browser to determine whether it is capable of correctly supporting a range of essential CSS and JavaScript properties, and delivering features only to those that pass the test.

The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.

How Accessible is Your Website? 8 Tools to Analyze Your Website’s Level of Accessibility

Designing a website that's as much successful as it is effective takes time, skills, and a lot of testing. Normally, when we're talking about web design and we hear the word testing, the first thing that comes to mind is usability, and that's fine, but when was the last time you sat down to analyze the level of accessibility of your website? Testing on other aspects of your website are important, however, a lot of us seem to neglect our websites accessibility. This can ultimately lead to the loss of a wide range of users and poor elements of design. But not to fear, below we've compiled a set of tools that will help you combat poor accessibility. Every tool is free to use and has been chosen because it's easy to use and offers quality testing.

8 Tools to Analyze Your Website’s Level of Accessibility

effective

Designing a website that’s as much successful as it is effective takes time, skills, and a lot of testing. Normally, when we’re talking about web design and we hear the word testing, the first thing that comes to mind is usability, and that’s fine, but when was the last time you sat down to analyze the level of accessibility of your website?

usabilidad arquitectura libros

Descubre cómo mejorar tus sitios web, software, hardware y productos de consumo para que sean más útiles para más personas en más tipos de situaciones. “Simplemente pregunta: Integración de la accesibilidad en el proceso de diseño” te ayuda a desarrollar de forma adecuada soluciones de accesibilidad efectivas.

Libro online

The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

Uma visão sobre padrões web e o futuro dos sites em Flash

As we build more and more Ajaxy applications, and our apps reside on a single page, the browser’s native back button can get more and more broken. This episode will show you how to re-enable the back button on your apps.

lling the visualize() method

how to deep link, and much more!

How to 'deep link' to exact time within a YouTube video (append e.g. #t=1m15s)

Directions on how to link to a specified time within a video.

FAQ QA

It has become very popular to use the Google Maps API to add maps to websites. While the maps work fine for most users, unfortunately Google Maps does not by default work without JavaScript – when there is no JavaScript support, you don’t get a map.

How to easily make google maps accessible with the fall back Google static Maps API

It is quite easy (but not very common) to provide a fallback for users who do not have JavaScript enabled in their browser by using the Google Static Maps API.

I would really like to go thru this tutorial! It has some really neat features, but what I worry about is that this method of creating content does not lend itself to deep understanding on the part of the reader according to much of the recent research. The hyperlinks could be construed as distracting -- would be worth looking at though.

Semantic CSS3 Lightboxes - http://sixrevisions.com/css/semantic-css3-lightboxes/

Weg met de captcha's met afbeeldingen http://textcaptcha.com/ #accessibility #textcaptcha

"This site provides a web service to generate text-based CAPTCHAs, based on simple logic questions."

Text Captcha is an accessible alternative to standard captcha methods and relies on logic.

One task drives web professionals to distraction more than almost any other: testing whether their design works equally well in a multitude of browsers and on different devices. The list of browsers and platforms to verify against keeps getting longer, and as designers, our tempers are getting proportionally shorter; IE6 will probably feature in nightmares for years to come! Yet doing our work in an ever-widening range of situations is becoming increasingly important. This article highlights the most common issues that arise when testing with “the usual suspects” and explains why a change in tactics may soon be needed. Your entire perspective on compatibility testing could change.