This assessment is very simplistic and constitutes a basic preliminary review. It is not comprehensive nor exhaustive. I chose themes from the Free Theme Directory and searched for Web Accessible and Accessibility. I narrowed my selection by considering which theme would be easily customizable, have good contrast between foreground and background, have elements in a [...]
Have you ever been on a site that the text was simply unreadable. You know what I’m talking about! The colour of the text and the colour of the background just makes it hard to read, or either the font is just too small or the width of the line is too long. Well now [...]
Google cleaned up their search experience with their accessible search engine. Fairly similar to the regular search, but with some subtle differences that can aid a visually impaired person to search better. The system is still being developed but basically it prioritizes results that are accessible. Check it out a: Accessible Web Search at Google [...]
The new and beautified World Wide Web Consortium website is proof that it can be done. Those of us that visit that site regularly know how extensive the site is and a task this big is daunting. Nevertheless, the improvement is welcomed. Things to notice: It’s scalable width size, More breathable (meaning that there’s less [...]
It is more and more apparent that accessibility can be beautiful. I came across Accessibility in Focus, a website for an accessible web award. There was 4 finalist, one of them was the Salford City Council. A fairly large website. Its navigation is straightforward even if at first glance the site looks overwhelming. This site [...]
www.checkmycolours.com is a website for you to easily check if the colours on your website are accessible. This tool takes all of the references to colour from your web page including your CSS and nicely compares the background colours to the foreground colours. The report that gets tabulated shows very bluntly what instance is acceptable [...]
So I recently re-did one of my old websites. My client wanted to had some images so I took the opportunity to give her an accessible site. I had done this site a few years ago. I wasn’t aware back then of web standards and web accessibility. I must confess of using tables for layout. [...]
Don’t you just love Firefox add-ons. I do! Especially because they make my life easier. As a developer it is important to have a feel for what the user is getting out of your site. I found a good way to use a screen reader on any operating system (OS) without paying a dime. I [...]
So I saw this story on the news by Chris Brown and was happy to learn that assistive technologies are being researched actively in Canadian Universities. The University of Victoria has a unit named CanAssist, they develop technologies and provide services for people with disabilities. Naturally this is relevant in terms of web accessibility because [...]
The W3C have a super neat online demonstration of visually representing web accessibility. The inaccessible pages have several “barriers”, key elements that make the page inhospitable. For example, the before home page demonstrates a lack of alternative text for each image, an inconsistency in the content order, a negligence with headings and lists, an inaccuracy [...]
Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 let the user add plugins to the browser. There are about a million of them that you can find either on the menubar under Tools and Add-ons or at their website at addons.mozilla.org. The add-ons that any web developer must have are Firebug, to debug the code and make adjustments [...]
