Welcome
Gian Wild has been working in accessibility since 1998. She worked on the very first Australian accessible web site and was the accessibility consultant for the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games. For six years she was actively involved in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.
Content:
Twitter and accessibility
For more information see the eGovernment Accessibility Toolkit on Twitter and accessibility.
Facebook and accessibility
For more information see the eGovernment Toolkit on Facebook and accessibility.
Accessibility presentation - WCAG2
I ran a short presentation on WCAG2 on the 17th December in Brisbane for the Computer Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG). This was the same presentation that I ran for Web Directions South 2009 in Sydney a few months ago.
For more information see the CHISIG Events website or listen to the WCAG2 presentation.
Website Redesign conference
I’ve just finished running a short presentation on the accessibility of social networking tools for the Website Redesign conference in Melbourne, 7- 8th December.
I mentioned my work on the eGovernment Accessibility Toolkit, and the Web Manager’s checklist and Web Developer’s checklist.
Introduction to accessibility
Videos
Koorie film with audio descriptions
Flash
Indonesian learning activity transcript
PDFs
eGovernment Accessibility Toolkit
Web 2.0 technologies
Making Links conference
I’ve just run a short workshop at the Making Links conference in 2009. I went through the Office for Disability factsheet for Web Managers; specifically how to test a web site for accessibility compliance. The document, Web Manager’s Checklist, is one of a series of factsheets that I developed for the Office for Disability and spoke about at a Victoria Online seminar.
Add your comments to the AGIMO PDF enquiry
The Australian Government is seeking input to inform its policy about the use of the Portable Document Format (PDF) for the provision of government information online.
The Australian Human Rights Commission, responsible for administering the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) currently states on their DDA Advisory Notes:
The Commission’s view is that organisations who distribute content only in PDF format, and who do not also make this content available in another format such as RTF, HTML, or plain text, are liable for complaints under the DDA.
We are seeking feedback about the accessibility and ease of use of PDF files on the internet, especially via assistive technologies. We are seeking to understand common access issues or problems encountered when using PDF files on the internet.
The Australian Government is also interested in receiving feedback about creating tagged PDF files, including resource intensiveness and complexity. We also want to understand any related accessibility issues of tagged PDF files.
Vote for accessibility
Plone - a Content Management System - is currently asking for people to vote for their desired improvements.
At the moment, “Improve accessibility” is at the number two spot. Help it to become a top priority by voting now. Vote for Plone accessibility.
FullCodePress results
I have just finished testing both the Australian and New Zealand web sites for accessibility. The Australian client is the NSW Disability Discrimination Legal Centre Inc., which assists people with disabilities with their legal rights. The New Zealand client is Rainbow Youth, which assists queer youth and their families in Auckland.
The testing process
Due to the severe time constraints (only two hours to test two sites), I concentrated on finding accessibility errors. I did this using both manual and automated testing, although I only used one automated testing tool: WAVE. I tried some basic user techniques, such as turning style sheets off, turning images off and increasing text size. I also checked ALT attributes (although both sites were quite low on images), heading levels, use of JavaScript, style sheets, text links, field labels and use of PDFs.
NSW Disability Discrimination Act (Australian team)
The biggest problem with the site is that increasing the text size kills the navigation. As the text size increases, the Search box begins to overlap the right hand side of the horizontal navigation. With images turned off, the Search disappears entirely.
There is a field label on the Search but it is incorrect, therefore the field label is not associated with the Search field. Field labels were also a problem on the Membership page.
Unfortunately the link text is very small. This problem is compounded by the link hover colour which is a yellow and difficult to read on the white background.
I was pleased to see that the site functioned correctly with style sheets disabled, and that all PDFs had Word equivalents. The site also used skip links on every page. There were also accesskeys, which are a bit of a no-no nowadays due to conflicts with screen readers, however I didn’t take off points for that. Headings were used appropriately but navigation sometimes wasn’t consistent.
Rainbow Youth (New Zealand team)
The biggest problem with the site is that both the navigation and the footer disappears when images are turned off.
Small text was used in the navigation, and some links were not unique (”Read more”). The links to Flickr, Twitter and Facebook on the homepage use JavaScript to open in a new window. There is no warning that the links will open in a new window, however they do work properly with JavaScript disabled.
As with the Australian example, the site functioned correctly with style sheets disabled. All fields had appropriate field labels. This site also used skip links on every page. Headings were used appropriately and navigation was consistent.
Conclusion
Both teams lost many points for their navigation issues, however in total, the New Zealand site fared better in accessibility stakes. This tallied with the final decision as the Code Blacks (the New Zealand team) won!
Victoria Online seminar
On Friday I ran a seminar on “Accessibility and new technologies” for Victoria Online. Around 120 Victorian Government web staff attended. It was also the launch of the Office for Disability Factsheets, which I have spent several months writing. There are eight accessibility factsheets:
- PDFs
- Video
- Flash
- JavaScript
- Web 2.0 technologies
- What about WCAG2?
- Web Manager’s checklist
- Web Developer’s checklist
The presentation is available in PowerPoint and in HTML. There are also a list of example links used in the presentation
Full Code Press
I am very pleased to report that I am the accessibility judge for the Full Code Press competition.
I was lucky enough to be a judge in the previous competition and some of you may remember me as the haiku twitterer. I’m not sure if I’ll be doing that again this year - sounds like I might be locked out for the night. FCP is at CeBIT this year and the conference locks down at night, so I’ll be locked in or locked out. My choice.
I’m not sure if I can stand being up for fifty hours straight (when the contestants are sleeping I have to be awake for the judging, and I’m guessing people would appreciate me being awake for that!)
