Aarron Walter

Recently I’ve been talking a bit with my students about the role of accessibility in their internships/jobs in the web world, and many have said that their employers don’t see a lot of value in it for their site. I found that a bit surprising as so many evangelists have been actively promoting the benefits (a broader audience, search engine optimization, increased support for PDAs/phone display, usability conveniences for all) and ease of writing accessible code. As a teacher of Interactive Design, I have some power to change this thinking by teaching my students the value of accessibility and how to build it into their projects. Below is a bit of an accessibility round up of a few useful tools, articles, sites, and informative podcasts about the topic that may help inform/convince you about the importance of accessibility.

• Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance, a great book from the Friends of Ed with a host of authors who are authoritative on the subject of accessibility. This book has everything you need to know to get started on accessible web design.
• Zeldman on Accessibility: Zeldman does a great job of presenting and counter arguing the major complaints you’ll hear when you bring up the topic of accessibility with you boss. My favorite quote from this presentation: “Google is the biggest blind user on the web”
• Accessify.com tools and wizards for building accessible forms, tables, popup windows, and more. These tools are awesome!!
• Ajax and Screen Readers: When Can it Work? Although web standards are being rapidly adopted by modern browsers today, many screen reader manufacturers have yet to jump on the band wagon. Subsequently, there are no solid solutions for how linearized pages in a screen reader can inform a user when the page has been updated by Ajax. If the reader has passed the area where Ajax will post a response, the browser will never notify the reader of the new content. James Edwards exposes the real issues with Ajax and accessibility in this article.
• Patrick H. Lauke of the Web Standards Project interviewed on Web Axe podcast. Lauke is a brilliant guy who is championing the cause to get screen reader manufacturers on board with web standards. He has some great observations in this podcast including how Flash can actually fill some accessibility needs! You may also want to check out the main Web Axe site and podcast.
• Paul Boag of Boagworld.com has a number of podcasts on the topic of accessibility: Understanding Accessibility Guidelines, Pragmatic Accessibility, Web Accessibility
• It’s no surprise that A List Apart has a host of wonderful articles that explore the big picture and intimate details of accessible web design
• Adobe has a resource center with articles, templates, and other stuff to help you develop accessible content using Flash, Dreamweaver and the rest of their software.
• Dive Into Accessibility is a wonderful site with clear explanations of what accessibility is, what it can do for you and your users, and how to build accessible content.
• Now that you are on board with accessibility, how the hell do you “sell” it to your clients or boss?
• Validate your pages against accessibility guidelines at Bobby Watchfire or Cynthia Says. You can validate against WCAG or Section 508 receiving a priority 1, 2, or 3 seal of approval.
• Joe Clark, a member of the Web Standards Project, is one of the top evangelists of web accessibility, and his site has some great information on the subject. You may also be interested in what he has to say about the WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

The Web Standards Project has some very useful, and sometimes quite entertaining, tutorials setting readers straight on some important topics that you may think you have already mastered, such as (X)HTML forms. Their forms tutorials explain beginner, intermediate, and advanced techniques with a focus on accessibility. Of course they also talk a bit about how CSS can be used to layout and format your forms so they can be as beautiful as they are Accessible. The advanced tutorial talks about the :focus pseudo element, which works in Mozilla browsers and can be used to alter the style of a form element when the user tabs to the element or clicks inside it.

If you are not familiar with label, fieldset, legend, and optgroup then these tutorials are for you.