The Accessibility Checklist I Vowed I’d Never Write
by Aaron Cannon
I have said on numerous occasions that there is no simple checklist that, when followed, will give you an accessible site without fail. There are simply too many variables. But, what do you do when you want to create accessible pages and you have dozens or even hundreds of developers who (like most of their peers) have little to no experience with accessibility? What do you do when it just simply isn’t practical to have someone review all of your pages? In short, how do you insure that a very large organization creates pages that can be accessed by the largest audience possible without drastically increasing your budget? This is one of the questions we have been (and continue to) struggle with.
Bloody good stuff. Read the full article and download the check list.
Alzheimer’s Society picks up prize
The Microsoft-led DesignIT 2007 competition has been won by an innovative concept that will help people with dementia.
The winning design, submitted by The Alzheimer’s Society, is called ‘memories are made of this’ and comes in two parts. The first is a customisable screensaver. The user will be able to upload pictures, text and video to create a personalised scrapbook on a computer. The second part is a social networking element, which will provide an easy to use way for people with dementia to talk with each other. Full story from the BBC.
How the Disability Rights Commission does it
Site settingings and colour schemes for accessibility as laid out by the Disability Rights Commission.
More site settings as the British Dyslexia Association see things.
Just listen to your feeds
ReadSpeaker PodCaster is an On-Line service that makes news feeds automatically accessible to more people in a high-quality and cost-effective way.
There are thousands of companies, blogs, government bodies and other organisations trying to make their news and content accessible as a text-based RSS feed. Podcasting and “Pod radio” are technologies where the RSS feed is enriched with a link (called an enclosure) to an mp3 file. This is widely used by radio stations, national and international commercial and non-commercial broadcasting companies, on line news papers, and so on.