I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is. Terry Pratchett on alt.fan.pratchett
You are currently browsing the recent entries for July, 2005
A Change of Heart by Sitemorse?
Sitemorse has again come under fire regarding its automated testing tool and the publication of ‘ league tables’ based on results obtained with this tool. The main focus of the complaints was that attempting to rank accessibility using an automated tool alone was, at best, highly confusing and, at worst, potentially harmful. Only about 40% of the WCAG 1.0 Guidelines can be tested using automated tools such as Sitemorse’s. Therefore attributing a percentage accessibility score to a site using a tool that can only check for less than half of the relevant checkpoints is a recipe for confusion and misunderstanding.
PAS 78: Update
The draft of the Publicly Available Specification document, PAS 78, is about to enter the third and final phase of its development. The initial draft, having been collated by the Steering Panel, has now been circulated to all members of the Review Panel for comment. Review Panel comments are to be returned to the British Standards Institute by July 22nd for consideration by the Steering Panel.
Automated Accessibility Testing
There has been a great deal of discussion recently on the role of automated accessibility testing software. Much of the discussion has centred upon whether these tools are really useful and whether they do more damage than good.
First of all, it should be pointed out that all automated testing software has limitations. Every single tool has its bugs and blindspots. There isn’t a tool on the market that doesn’t have the potential to report false positives (i.e. highlight errors where none exist) , and to report false negatives (i.e. completely miss genuine accessibility barriers).
Popups
I’ve just come across another reason why popups should be avoided like the plague.
According to the ScanSoft Dragon Knowledge Base, when using Dragon 7 with Internet Explorer , the application is unable to access popups. ScanSoft don’t offer any real solution to this problem , other than recommending using a keyboard – which is hardly helpful.
I’ve been unable to find out whether Dragon 8 suffers from the same problem but in the meantime, remember – popups are almost certainly bad for a dragon’s health!
Mouseless Browsing
I’ve recently added the Mouseless Browsing extension to Firefox in an effort to make Web browsing a little easier when using Dragon.
The goal of this extension is to enable browsing by using the numeric keys on the Number keypad instead of using a mouse or repeatedly using the Tab key.
How does it work?
Link text should be unique
WAI Checkpoint 13.1 (Priority 2) states:
Clearly identify the target of each link.
It then goes on to explain:
Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context – either on its own or as part of a sequence of links. Link text should also be terse.
The usual reason given for this checkpoint is that screen readers often have a facility to list links separately, so it is important that links within this list are meaningful and relatively unique.
But is that the only reason?