Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent. Terry Pratchett on alt.fan.pratchett
You are currently browsing the recent entries for October, 2006
Deaf To See Announcements
I was particularly interested in the BBC’s recent article on LAMA (Location Aware Messaging for Accessibility). As someone whose hearing regularly goes from semi-reasonable to profoundly deaf, anything that allows me to see/hear public announcements in train stations would be a godsend. Any sound in an echoing environment is a problem and hearing aids, which tend to make sounds ‘tinny’ at the best of times, just make it worse. I have, literally, missed trains before now because the relevant PA announcement has been turned into a meaningless gabble by my hearing aid.
Definitions of Web Accessibility
There seems to be something of a minor argument raging recently over where ‘web accessibility’ ends and ‘universality’ begins.
Mike Cherim and Gez Lemon have illustrated both sides of the argument beautifully in The Great Accessibility Camp-Out whilst Accessibility In Trouble 2: Standards argues that, whatever personal view developers hold, they should at least agree to abide by the W3C / WAI definition of ‘accessibility’.
Watching this from the sidelines, it occurred to me that the root problem was semantic in nature and revolves around what is exactly meant by the term ‘web accessibility’. So I started off trying to:
- Find an absolute definition for the term
- See if I could spot where the breakdown in communication was occurring
- Consider what could be done to resove the problem
Does W3C Get Its Contrasts Wrong?
If you follow W3C recommendations regarding colour contrast, you could be actively creating problems for as many as 10% of your site visitors.
It is estimated that as many as 1 in 10 people are dyslexic.
The current population of the UK is around 60.2 million.
National Statistics Online
This implies that the number of dyslexics in the UK is likely to be in the region of 6 million.
Reply-To Header Can Create Bounces
If your form email script creates a Reply-To header that doesn’t conform to the examples given in RFC 822, you may find that some of your mails are rejected by SMTP servers – even if your mail headers conform to RFC 2822.