accessibility

Written at 20:51, on Saturday 5 August 2006. Tags: accessibility dutch webdesign .

(In Dutch only). Changes in the accessibility guidelines for governement websites in the Netherlands.

Written at 11:06, on Wednesday 12 July 2006. Tags: accessibility webdesign .

If you think the text size on this website is too small, there are several things you can do about it. In almost every browser, you can choose View – Text Size to increase or decrease the text size; most browsers even provide keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+ and CTRL-. Some browsers, like Firefox, Safari and Opera, even provide a convenient way of setting a minimum text size. Not many people know these commands though. And Internet Explorer won’t let you resize text which is set in pixels. A designer must use a unit like em’s or percentages to set font sizes in the CSS, like the Fonts CSS in the Yahoo! UI Library has cleverly done (and which I thankfully use on this site).

To provide people an additional means for font sizing, I’ve implemented two links at the top of the logo – not too ubtrusive, but still easily discoverable (I hope at least – feedback welcome!). Clicking the “Large” link will dynamically grow the fontsize 40%, clicking the “Regular” link will shrink it to the original size. It’s a nice effect with obvious accessibility enhancements. I used the excellent moo.fx Javascript library for the effects; I have very little Javascript skills so I was glad it was ready-made. It even retains your choice by setting a cookie. It has some important disadvantages though:

Written at 16:54, on Friday 9 June 2006. Tags: accessibility webdesign .

Last year, I supervised an accessibility review of the websites of 19 local Dutch councils. The research was executed by students from the Hogeschool Zuyd, Communication & Multimedia Design, who were instructed to use the web guidelines from our governement. These guidelines form a framework with localized transcripts of international accessibility guidelines, best practices and some suggestions on how to use them for evaluating websites. Decent background information on this field proved to be essential for the students to complete their research, hence I was consulted frequently. The results were dismayal, to say the least. There was just 1 website which used a valid Doctype, a large majority used frames (directly against all guidelines) and some even used Javascript browser sniffing! None of the pages we tested validated, and we saw a lot of copy-paste from MS Word. Keyboard navigation was extremely difficult in some cases, forms were submitted with Javascript instead of a POST, and fly-out menu’s were used in the worst kinds of ways.

A couple of months ago, Ellen finished the final report (I’ve only written the chapters which were directly about the research) and we sent it to the local councils. Unfortunately, there were few reactions and even fewer intents of improving the websites. Half a year after the research, we finally decided to go public with it and sent a press release. Besides some local fame (Ellen got interviewed on tv, I was interviewed for a local newspaper), we also received some reactions from the technical people at the councils, who were more then interested to use our results to improve their websites.

Written at 17:15, on Friday 7 October 2005. Tags: accessibility usability webdesign website .

This is just a collection of hacks I’ve implemented for my Textpattern installation, and a note on update management..

Written at 12:41, on Sunday 18 September 2005. Tags: accessibility webdesign .

Joe Clark’s article on ALA, entitled Big, Stark and Chunky didn’t attract much attention at first. However, during his @media2005 presentation, he pitched the idea again and gave the audience a homework assignment to create zoom layouts for their personal websites and weblogs. Douglas Bowman was already half done when the presentation ended, and his is a beautiful example indeed. Apart from Joe Clarks’ original article, various resources, experiments and best practices have come up. But what is a zoom layout exactly?

Written at 16:51, on Tuesday 30 August 2005. Tags: accessibility webdesign website .

Garret wrote about his Textpattern hacks quite some time ago. One which I’m surprised which wasn’t integrated into the recently released first stable version, aptly named version 4 yet is that there are no <label> tags for the comment form. Adding these in the presentation comment form is trivial, of course, but then your site won’t validate anymore because Textpattern doesn’t automatically generate the id parameter for the form elements. And as everyone knows, the reason for this is that it provides an explicit association to the form control for assistive technologies. For example, a screen reader will read the associated label for a particular form element if it has been marked up with a label.

So, how do you add <label> tags for the comment form while still keeping your site validated? Here’s how.