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).
Automated Accessibility Testing: continue reading …
Published: July 19th 2005
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!
Published: July 14th 2005
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?
Mouseless Browsing: continue reading …
Published: July 14th 2005
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?
Link text should be unique: continue reading …
Published: July 14th 2005
