Ryan's Journey » Accessibility

New Accessibility Checker

Ryan — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:03:22 +0000

I am not sure what to say about the AChecker by 34a Labs… Nice first try maybe?

Why am I so harsh?

Well, I instinctively put in my site. One of the “potential problems” reported is the following”

Tabular information may be missing table markup.

Well I am sorry to say, nothing on the page in question has a table, nor data of any kind that makes it look like a table. So if you try this checker, I wouldn’t take the results to heart quite yet.

With that being said, it has some hopes. The information is quite complete, with samples of valid code. I would however make the code in question highlighted somehow (color, a border, background color) within the code block. Currently it gives a full source code sample, which is a bit tedious to skim through if you don’t know what exactly is wrong.

Reply to a Comment

Ryan — Wed, 09 May 2007 09:18:55 +0000

On Tuesday afternoon, I was greeted with a charming comment from somebody named Sharon. I wanted to just say thanks. What she did was went to a “random” post and told me how much my blog sucked. Well see her randomness isn’t too random. She picked the first post on page two to leave her note. In response to her, yes I blog, and will blog in the future about accessibility. Why? Cause I care about it, and oh yeah, I get paid to think about it. Also, not too many people know about it, so providing my insights will just help others learn.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, blog, blogging

Are People Really Interested in Accessibility?

Ryan — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 04:02:22 +0000

I was just browsing around looking at other computer labs that are comparable to mine across the nation. One lab that I found, who’s name I won’t say, has a contact form. We’ve all seen them, your name, e-mail, and an area that you type your question or comment, and hit send. Nothing fancy.

The lab has the following sentence above the text area field:

Please describe your needs as specifically as you can in the space below. There is no limit on length for this section of our form, but please remember to press the return key before your text starts to scroll beyond the right boundary of the field. Otherwise, we will not receive your request properly.

Just a heads up, this site is for accessible technology. On top of that, this lab covers accessible web design. So saying hit the return key if the form begins to scroll is merely impossible if you are blind. However that request (to hit return) makes no sense because textareas automatically wrap unless you don’t use spaces. Also if you use long(er) words near the edge of the textarea they may not break. Again if you are blind, you cannot know this, unless you know how many characters wide the textarea is, and you track the character count in your head.

Technorati Tags: accessible, accessibility, access technology, web design

Facebook Face Lift

Ryan — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:08:39 +0000

I just checked Facebook, and it has done a face lift on the site, and let me just say whoever designed it should be fired. Why? To quickly sum it up: Very very bad coding practice.

Facebook has started to put structure into their site. What I mean is using the various heading tags. Well, they did put a

tag, but it is empty. That is completely useless, and bad coding for putting in empty tags that do nothing. Considering how big Facebook is now, they cannot make such errors. My only guess is they put it in to improve accessibility? If so, it just shows how little they actually know about accessibility. Header/heading tags DO NOT work like anchor tags, they are contextual!

Background on Headers

Think of headers as chapters in your average math or science book. You have Chapter 1, then part 1.1, and sometimes section 1.1.1 or 1.1.a, well “Chapter 1″ would receive an

tag. “Part 1.1″, “Part 1.2″, etc would receive an
tag. Sections, such as 1.1.1, would receive an
tag. There are six heading tags in all, but unless you are doing something in the legal or scientific realm, I don’t think many people would have, for example, “Section 1.1.1.1.1.1″, but I may be wrong.

The way this has ties to the accessibility realm is mainly with individuals who use screen readers, such as JAWS. JAWS is a very popular screen reader for Windows. (Macs are stuck with the built-in screen reader.)

Next, they redesigned the sidebar menu. Once again, bad coding practice. Instead of making a simple unsorted list (without bullets), they did it all with divs. The genius who coded this named the class for each div list-item. On top of that each, link in the menu needs two divs to get it to look that way. Ok, this could be done dramatically easier and cleaner with a simple list!

I haven’t looked at the accessibility at all really, but seeing that they cannot design the simple elements, why on earth should I think they even consider accessibility. I wish there was a way to get these issues up with Facebook.

Technorati Tags: facebook, design, web design, standards