New Browser For Web Video
IBM recently announced that they were developing a new browser with the potential to enable visually impaired users to access multimedia such as streaming video. Currently named A-Browser, the tool will give visually-impaired people the same control over multimedia content that sighted people currently have using a mouse.
Web Accessibility Statements And User Support
My attention was recently caught by a post from Rosie Sherry called Showing web accessibility statements the door. In this post, Rosie wondered if perhaps web accessibility statements were being taken too far? She felt that, in general, accessibility statements were:
- Too long
- Technically orientated
- Focused on displaying of adherence to standards
Web Accessibility Statements And User Support: continue reading …
Headings As Navigational Aids
During a discussion on the GAWDS mailing list, the following was raised:
Screen reader users frequently navigate using heading lists but, is their mental model of a page impaired if a header is skipped? Or are they quite happy as long as there are headers (with clearly associated content) that they can use? Is there a valid argument for deliberately omitting headers?
Table Captions and Internet Explorer
If table captions are block level elements, why doesn’t Internet Explorer 7 honour off-left positioning?
“The caption boxes are block-level boxes that retain their own content, padding, margin, and border areas, and are rendered as normal blocks inside the anonymous box.”
W3C CSS 2.1 Specification
Be Accessible, Don’t Meet Guidelines
Some time ago, Jack Pickard published a very interesting piece in which he questioned whether too much emphasis was being placed on sites failing 1 or 2 WAI checkpoints.
Having had this article drawn to my attention only recently, I felt he had some very good points to make and that, overall, it is exactly this kind of web accessibility discussion we need. Lip service to any set of binary checkpoints is Bad and, far from undermining the accessibility arguments, playing Devil’s Advocate from time to time can only strengthen – not weaken – the case for all sites to be as accessible as possible.