I’ve been questioning the use of access keys for a while, all our sites including those that have been tested with positive results by AbilityNet use them.  The characters used are a mash of the government standard keys (1 through to 0) and obvious choices for the skip links (N = skip to navigation, S = skip to content).

How on earth can I say for sure that these don’t collide with existing browser and assistive technologies use of keyboard shortcuts? It seemed to me skip links and tabbing does work, they are practical and unobstrusive.

With a quick search I found various opinions and guidance on the subject of which widely agreed.

A good example is an article by Nomensa’s Alastair Campbell, What are Access Keys? (Note the date).

Although access keys are intended to improve site navigation, it is shown they actually can interfere with web accessibility. In terms of implementing a common standard, it would require a universal understanding of access keys to be applied to every site. Joe Clark, an accepted expert on accessibility, says access keys are: “severely compromised in practical application…” he continues to add, “If you add access keys, then, you are really coding for a future utopia”.

So do I stop implementing access keys on our Government and commercial websites?

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.

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.

More site settings as the British Dyslexia Association see things.

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.

It’s important for web designers and developers to know how to write good ALT and TITLE attributes. Practices like these should be employed into each web page element as it’s created.

Alternate text is not meant to be used as a tool tip, or more specifically, to provide additional information about an image. The title attribute, on the other hand, is meant to provide additional information about an element…. Many people seem to confuse these two attributes. – Roger Johansson

As Roger notes, we should be including accessibility features when initially creating web pages rather than going back to add it later.

Better Connected is failing to accomplish anything other than paint a gloomy picture of play and upset Local Authority rulers and those of us really making an effort. When does it get positive? Dan Champion is in a similar position to me and the Web Access Blog makes him an example and issues a kind of apology. 466 failures to comply is frankly depressing. But then, it isn’t accurate is it, which is frankly useless.

Small selection of web design, usability, and accessibility related results of research, most of them derived from Human Factors International (newsletter). Fortunately, some of them are relatively popular, while others will surely enrich your professional self-conception.

Note: Also see Stanford University’s “Guidelines for Web Credibility”. Must-read.

In this article, I’d like to provide a little gratification to those attempting to make their web applications accessible. To achieve this, I’ll talk about some of the more basic, solvable issues relating to JavaScript accessibility, as we take an introduction to device-independent scripting.

The article Beyond the Mouse then leads to Making Elements Focusable with Tabindex from Snook.ca

Please sign it and join us. With so many Local Authorities making the effort through genuine desire or possible arm bending, the time is right for the high profile government sites to be held to task and pull up their bloody socks.

The “digital divide” refers to the fact that certain parts of the population have substantially better opportunities to benefit from the new economy than other parts of the population. Most commentators view this in purely economic terms. However, two other types of divide will have much greater impact in the years to come.

With such a simple attribute promising a whole lot of accessibility, it’s easy to muddy the workings of a page and its accessibility if its use isn’t considered correctly.

To be frank, I’ve rarely seen the TABINDEX attribute applied without it creating more problems than it solves.

Too much accessibility – TABINDEX, pertinent musings that is well worth a read.

As interesting finding out who the grand winner will be, the short-list of five is way more interesting. In alphabetical order:

• Drupal
• e107
• Joomla!
• Plone
• Xoops

The Judges will be choosing from the five Content Management Systems that received the most nominations, during the nomination stage. They will be selecting their top three based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.

I hope we get to see their score cards, knowing who scored highest in terms of accessibility will be of great interest.

SOURCE Royal National Institute of the Blind

A landmark ruling in the States for web accessibility as www.target.com is successfully sued by the National Federation of the Blind under the American Disabilities Act (ADA).

The court has ruled that “clicks” as well as “bricks”, are covered by the US Americans Disability Act (ADA) and E- commerce is now a “place of public accommodation”.

The full new release reads:

PR Newswire, Thursday, September 07, 2006

Legal Precedent Set for Web Accessibility

By SOURCE National Federation of the Blind

A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. (Northern District of California Case No. C 06-01802 MHP) The suit charges that Target’s website (www.target.com) is inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act.

Target asked the court to dismiss the action by arguing that no law requires Target to make its website accessible. The Court denied Target’s motion to dismiss and held that the federal and state civil rights laws do apply to a website such as target.com.

The suit, NFB v. Target, was filed as a class action on behalf of all blind Americans who are being denied access to target.com. The named plaintiffs are the NFB, the NFB of California, and a blind college student, Bruce “BJ” Sexton.

The plaintiffs are represented by Disability Rights Advocates (www.dralegal.org), a Berkeley-based non-profit law firm that specializes in high-impact cases on behalf of people with disabilities; Brown, Goldstein & Levy (www.browngold.com), a leading civil rights law firm in Baltimore, Maryland; and Schneider & Wallace (www.schneiderwallace.com), a national plaintiff’s class action and civil rights law firm based in San Francisco, CA.

The court held: “the ‘ordinary meaning’ of the ADA’s prohibition against discrimination in the enjoyment of goods, services, facilities or privileges, is that whatever goods or services the place provides, it cannot discriminate on the basis of disability in providing enjoyment of those goods and services.” The court thus rejected Target’s argument that only its physical store locations were covered by the civil rights laws, ruling instead that all services provided by Target, including its Web site, must be accessible to persons with disabilities.

“This ruling is a great victory for blind people throughout the country,” said NFB President Dr. Marc Maurer. “We are pleased that the court recognized that the blind are entitled to equal access to retail websites.”

Dr. Maurer explained that blind persons access websites by using keyboards in conjunction with screen-reading software, which vocalizes visual information on a computer screen.

Target’s website contains significant access barriers that prevent blind customers from browsing among and purchasing products online, as well as from finding important corporate information such as employment opportunities, investor news, and company policies.

The plaintiffs charge that target.com fails to meet the minimum standard of web accessibility. It lacks compliant alt-text, an invisible code embedded beneath graphic images that allows screen readers to detect and vocalize a description of the image to a blind computer user. It also contains inaccessible image maps and other graphical features, preventing blind users from navigating and making use of all of the functions of the website. And because the website requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, blind Target customers are unable to make purchases on target.com independently.

The plaintiffs originally filed the complaint in Alameda superior court on February 7, 2006. The case was removed to federal district court and assigned to Judge Marilyn Hall Patel. Target responded to the suit by filing a motion to dismiss the case, which argued in part that no civil
rights laws apply to the Internet.

“We tried to convince Target that it should do the right thing and make its website accessible through negotiations,” said Dr. Maurer. “It is unfortunate that Target took the position that it does not have to take the rights of the blind into account. The ruling in this case puts Target and other companies on notice that the blind cannot be treated like second class citizens on the Internet or in any other sphere.”

Explaining the ramification of the ruling, Mazen M. Basrawi, Equal Justice Works Fellow at Disability Rights Advocates, noted that: “the court clarified that the law requires that any place of public accommodation is required to ensure that it does not discriminate when it uses the internet as a means to enhance the services it offers at a physical location.”

“I hope that I can soon shop online at Target.com just like anyone else,” said UC Berkeley student BJ Sexton, who is a named plaintiff in the lawsuit. “I believe that millions of blind people like me can use the Internet just as easily as do the sighted, if websites are accessible.”

Joe Clark points out that he’s been on top of this issue for a couple of years now. The comments posted are interesting, so don’t skip ‘em.