taff — Wed, 09 Jul 2003 13:35:37 +0000

ooh! Thanks for this thread. Searching is a good thing

I'm on an accessibility crash course right now for an upcoming project so any other nuggest of wisdom would be appreciated. Actually the criteria is "should adhere to Section 508 Guidelines". From what I've been reading so far, Section 508 is either less stringent or more vague than other sandards such as W3C - I just can't determine which.

Watchfire seems to have a pretty good online scanning tools although it only does a page at a time:

http://webxact.watchfire.com/scanform.aspx

Busy — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 19:44:57 +0000

http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/overview.htm is a handy little accessibility checker

and here is a site on disability statistics http://dsc.ucsf.edu/UCSF/ (US stats but still helpful for non US people)

Megan — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 16:41:36 +0000

That's what those scope and header and attributes do for tables - help them know what header goes with what. Even if things aren't 100% supported it may be a good idea to start implementing them.

Oh, and this is another big argument in favour of proper coding, and against frames and pop-ups unless necessary and especially appropriate.

My notes are at work so I can't really add much now.

Busy — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 09:11:42 +0000

label and fieldset isn;t fully supported but is good to use them, also summary for tables (acts like a alt tag for the screen reader).
There are a few types of screen readers, some that can read or adentify html and javascript and others that can't understand any html so would display yor page as if tables, css etc were turned off.

when a screen reader reads a table it starts top left and worls right until the read of the row then down one

1 | 2 |
3 | 4 |
5
6 | 7 |

so if you wrote the text to go downwards (1,3,5,6 - 2, 4,7 ) it wont get read that way, would be read - 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 so people using screen readers have a real tough time sometimes trying to make it understandable. links are another issue, links for screen readers should have a note or image displaying its an outside link.

disaster-master — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 08:02:11 +0000

Hi Meg,

Yes, great topic!! I wasn't aware of that bit about the alt tag for the nav. Thanks.

I would like to hear more if you have time to post some things. Suzanne gave some great links as well. I have spent a lot of time at dive into accessibility.

Will check back for class #2.

Suzanne — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 00:07:45 +0000

http://diveintoaccessibility.org/
http://secrets.synapticimpulse.com/index.php?code=rcsubway (sample accessible and valid forms)

For some real life pages to poke around in.

Joe Clark has some big time reading on Accessibility as well (and writing -- he wrote a book on the topic), but it can be heavy reading. If anyone is interested, I'll post the ./ interview with Joe Clark as well as the url for his book.

Mark Pilgrim (who wrote Dive Into Accessibility) edited Joe Clark's book.

Thanks for the topic, Megan!