Web pages have become more complicated. No longer is it permissible for your company “home page” to contain a picture of your offices and a simple text menu for the services you offer. Now you have to have drop-down or pop-up menus with myriad links, graphics (preferably animated), and dozens of headlines that lead to press releases, new product details, or testimonials of your services.

All this is fine if your visitors can look at the page and easily identify the areas that interest them, or scan up and down the links to other pages looking for what they want. And, should they stray to the wrong page, it’s usually pretty obvious from a quick glance. However, things are nowhere near this easy for all visitors.

A proportion of visitors will have difficulties with most current Web sites, which are designed almost without exception for people who have reasonable eyesight and are using a pointer device such as a mouse, trackball or graphics tablet. There are many people to whom one or both of these conditions cannot be applied. Often they will be using a specially designed user agent, or maybe a simple text-based browser. Or it might be aural page reader, which reads the contents of pages out loud, or a Braille reader that translates the text into a format that can be read by fingertip on a special output device.

For all these types of device, even the most basic Web site or Web application (designed and tested only in a modern graphical browser such as Internet Explorer) can be hard to read. At best, navigation through the site can be challenging, and certain parts of the content may be meaningless. Graphics and pictures won’t be displayed on text-based devices, while color-blind users may not be able to distinguish between the different lines or pie segments in your charts. At worst, it may be completely impossible use online forms, to even access parts of the site at all.”

Read the full article hosted by 15 Seconds. Information specific to .Net is found in the second part.

You can customize the alternative text displayed for images by setting the alt attribute of the appropriate <IMG> tag in SharePoint ASPX user pages such as the Home page or list view pages. For example, you can set the alternative text used for the Home logo and other images contained within these pages by modifying the respective Default.aspx or AllItems.aspx page. Alternative text for logos can be customized within the following ASPX pages of a site definition:

• Default.aspx. The Home page.
• AllItems.aspx. The page for viewing all the items in a list.
• NewForm.aspx. The page for creating a list item.
• EditForm.aspx. The page for editing the contents of a list item.
• DisplayForm.aspx. The page for viewing a list item.
• Site application pages in the Local_Drive
:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\Locale_ID directory. For a list of possible values for Locale_ID, see LCID Property.

When you create a site definition, as described in Creating a Site Definition from an Existing Site Definition, the new site definition directory includes one Default.aspx file, as well as AllItems.aspx, NewForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx, and DisplayForm.aspx files for each list type (for example, announcements, tasks, document libraries, and so on). Each list you create in turn creates an instance of one of the list types, whose supporting XML, ASPX, and other files reside in one of the subfolders of the Local_Drive”

Read the full article at Microsoft’s own Developer Network.

• Specify that accessibility is essential in your requirements definition.
• Arrange that the site is tested for accessibility.

The first requires a bit more than just saying “the site must be accessible” but there are lots of examples of such requirements and people who can help you write them.

However, the second is much more difficult because:

• Defining what needs to be tested is complex: what disabilities, what functions, what assistive technology, what browsers.
• There are a variety of ways to do the testing: automated testing, desk checking by people who understand accessibility, testing by people with a variety of disabilities, testing by end-users.
• The testing cannot be done solely by the developers because a developer is unlikely to have a sufficiently detailed understanding of the issues to test adequately.

“

Read the full article at IT Director and get tips to improve your web site’s accessibility.

There are a couple ways to go about making your podcasts more accessible. Podcast transcription services and closed captioning services are available. Podcasting accessibility not only opens up your podcast to individuals with disabilities, it allows consumers who like to receive their information in a different media type the opportunity to do so. I’m not saying that accessibility for the disabled is not a good enough reason to do some of the things I’m going to mention, but there are many other benefits that you have to consider.

Since this issue is so large, I’m going to dedicate this week to discussing it with you. If you have any questions surrounding the accessibility of podcasts, be it this week or in the future, email them to me. I’ll try to answer all the questions that I’ve received so far, as well as give you a run down of the services out there with my recommendations. I also will focus on a day on building your own transcription studio.”

Read the full article at Jeffery Daniel Frey’s personal blog and make your pod casts accessible today!

This is old news, but why do I consider it noteworthy? Because it’s the #1 application where media-dependent CSS, on top of media-independent HTML, ought to come into play… and yet, and I’m guessing, only 5% of all pages make use of it. You’d think after years of evangelizing done by web developers, the likes of CNN or Wired would have gotten the point.”

Read the full article hosted by the Google Blogoscope.

“The essence of Pixy’s Fast Rollovers involves creating one image for each navigation item that includes normal, hover and active states stacked on top of each other. Later, we’ll use CSS to change the background-position to reveal each state at the appropriate time.Figure 1.1 on the right shows an example image that I’ve created and used for Fast Company’s new navigation. Each state is 20px tall with a total image height of 60px. The top 20px is the normal state, the next 20px shows the hover state and final 20px shows the active state (which is also used for the “you are here” effect). There are similar images for each tab we’d like to use.

Using one image for each state allows us to toss out ugly Javascript and instead make use of simple CSS rules for hover effects. This is good. It also eliminates the “flicker” effect that other CSS methods suffer from, where separate on/off images are used. This is good. We also don’t have to pre-load any additional images. Again… this is good.

The CSS: This is Where the Magic Happens

First we’ll set up the rules that all navigation items will need. This will save us from writing duplicate rules for each tab. Then we’ll add a separate rule for each list item id, giving the li it’s own background-image and width — the only two variables that will be different for each tab.”

Read the full article from SimpleBits.

Providing for keyboard access also creates better usability, because many people who can use a mouse nonetheless prefer to use a keyboard for certain tasks or at certain times. These tend to be power users — people who are generally more familiar with how their computers work, and expect to be able to interact with functionality using either the mouse or the keyboard as their needs dictate.

If you’re not in the habit of navigating sites with the keyboard, try it now! Spend some time on your own site, and on other sites you visit regularly, to get a feel for what it’s like to surf without a mouse. Discover where difficulties arise, and think about how those issues could be avoided.”

Read the full article from Sitepoint and make your web site more accessible today!

Then there are W3C technologies such as cascading style sheets (CSS) which are compatible with SMIL, which means CSS can be created for media-based SMIL, with CSS code complementing SMIL layout. So why not simply use CSS?

There is a difference between CSS’s text-flow and SMIL’s time-flow documents. Although the XML nesting tells a lot about text layout, it tells very little about temporal layout, which is what SMIL is good for. The non-modularised nature of CSS also induces too much overhead and there are conceptual limitations to CSS for time-based presentations.

SMIL, on the other hand, is basically an XML document with defined XML DTD (document type definition) and schema. It is a declarative, integration language with the media elements referred to and not included. This allows SMIL documents to be hand-authored, though probably few would try since there are already many tools available, such as an SMIL authoring tool known as Fluition and RealNetwork’s RealProducer G2 Authoring Kit.”

Read the full article from Deaf Today.

When in Virtual PC Cursor mode, JAWS responds inconsistently to client-side scripting events. JAWS is able to respond to basic events in Virtual PC Cursor mode, such as click and keypress, and will refresh the Virtual PC Cursor snapshot to reflect any changes made to the content. The problem when using Ajax is that new content isn’t usually added directly in response to these events; instead, the content is usually added through the onreadystatechange event of the XMLHttpRequest object. Interestingly, JAWS 7.0 responds to the onreadystatechange event with Firefox, but not with Internet Explorer. The lack of response to the onreadystatechange event along with authors failing to focus on the parts of the document that has changed is essentially why most Ajax applications are reported to either not work at all, or behave inconsistently. For changes to be reported successfully to JAWS in Virtual PC Mode (the default mode and the mode that allows the user to interact with the content), the only reliable method of adding new content in Virtual PC Cursor mode is as a direct result of a click, keypress, or mouseover event, which obviously isn’t good enough for an Ajax solution.

From version 6, JAWS introduced a command to refresh the Virtual PC Cursor using the keystroke combination Insert + Esc. This means that a JAWS user can use this keystroke combination to gain access to content that has been added dynamically. The problem is letting the user know that the content has changed. A solution we considered was to add content that prompts the user to refresh the virtual buffer as a direct response to a click/keypress event, and replace that content when the onreadystatechange event is raised in the XMLHttpRequest object. The thinking behind this approach was that users of JAWS 6 and later could use the Refresh Virtual PC Cursor command, and users of earlier versions of JAWS and other screen readers that use a virtual buffer would be able to respond to this by toggling virtual mode on and off — for example, using the keyboard combination Insert + Z twice would toggle the Virtual PC Cursor mode on and off in JAWS, refreshing the virtual buffer.”

Read the full article from Juicy Studio

Keywords: COMPUTING JOURNALS; Computing Science, Applications and Software; Internet and Web Services

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2007.012638

Affiliations: 1: Istituto di Ricerca sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via Nizza 128, 00198 Rome, Italy. 2: Istituto di Ricerca sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via Nizza 128, 00198 Rome, Italy

source : http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ind/ijwgs/2007/00000003/00000001/art00005