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Alt Text & Universal Design
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- Discussion of Week 5: Basic Multimedia Accessibility Mon, 2011-03-07 23:04
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- Hi guys and girls, let's meet :) Sun, 2011-01-30 19:57
Hi guys and girls, let's meet :)
Go back to: General discussion
I am Lucica, a frontend developer at my own company trying to learn more about WCAG2 for the past few months. Before that, I was implementing WCAG1 but I never tried to use screenreaders and check my own code - I was just relying on web standards to make sure that my code is as correct and semantic as possible.
I am now using NVDA (thank God it's free) and the demo version of JAWS (which I find really difficult to learn) and I am hoping that with your help and Bryan's I will be able to speed up my learning process.
Now, your turn to speak...
Hello,
I'm E.B., I'm a marketing an development coordinator for a nonprofit organization that works with artists with disabilities. Though I don't have extensive programming and web design in my background I am very active in my community, work very often producing content for people of all ability levels and work with social media and web development.
While I know the basics about alt text and making things more accessible I would really like to know a lot more. I'd love to experience the content I create through a screen reader and I'd want to be able to pass information on to other professionals I meet in the community who ask me about web accessibility because I happen to be "the computer person" they know.
I wear a lot of different hats and while web content is just one of them I'm a big believer in keeping everything open to everyone, no matter their ability level, and I want to work hard to make that possible.
Hi Everyone,
Thank you signing up for this course. Reading through your initial comments about yourselves and the results of your screen reader exercise, I see that this will be a very good group.
I'll contact you all early next week with details regarding our first class.
bg
I'm Marsha and I work for the State of Wisconsin. I am very interested in complying with Section 508 standards and in creating usable sites for everyone. However, we struggle a bit in keeping up with the changes and the every-changing landscape of assistive technologies. I admit I have not delved into ARIA much yet. Having access to the screen readers is great! Even though I try to follow the standards, I am never sure what that does for someone using them. Now I have a way to test (once I figure out how to use them correctly).
Hi Marsha and E.B., nice to meet you.
Let's hope everyone else will join us and post some words about them here so we all know each other until the course officially begins.
Hi all, I'm Ed. I've been programming for over 10 years. Even though I've never had a job that requires accessibility, I'm very interested to learn how to create GUIs/websites with accessibility in mind. Eventually, I hope it becomes a part of my design without even thinking about it. Several of you commented about Section 508, WCAG, and ARIA of which I don't know much about.
I took a glance at the web-based guidelines in Section 508. While it provides pretty straight forward requirements, I have a feeling that simply following them won't create a site that is necessarily accessible-friendly. The same with WCAG 2.0. Is there a program that goes through your source code to determine what conformance level it adheres to and/or gives hints on how to improve your code? If your site is WCAG compliant, are you also Section 508 compliant? As far as WAI-ARIA, it appears this specification goes beyond simply alt attributes by adding a library of new attributes that help with navigation. From a glance I'd say ARIA is something I would need to learn. Is ARIA supported by most screen readers?
Ed, I would recommend you to install Wave Toolbar and FireEyes (both for Mozilla) to help test your webpages.
As far as I could see ARIA is supported by NVDA and Jaws. I can't tell if Window Eyes too - I couldn't understand how it works and it didn't read my ARIA example one day (maybe it's just me). I'm curious about other screen readers.
Also, I am not a Section 508 expert but I believe WCAG2.0 is detailed enough (and Section 508 old enough) to be used as a model to follow and that will help you pass Section 508 guidelines also. I am curious what other folks here have to say about this.