> I think the hardest part for many web developers to grasp, including
> myself, is how web accessibility is handled in web apps. Just hearing
> the term "web accessibility" makes it sound like a massive task when it
> may be as simple as placing text in ALT or TITLE tags. Since I've never
> coded for this personally, I can't say whats involved but I will be
> looking further into this as I'm sure that my clients, one day, will be
At my old job, we did a large number of government websites, which had
to meet up with 508. In 90% of the cases, you were fine if:
* you wrote the HTML/CSS yourself - no WYSIWIGs.
* you didn't use tables for presentation purposes.
* you didn't use Javascript for necessary features (this wasn't
that bad for me anyways, cos I was never much a fan of JS for
features, and our clients didn't really want them anyways).
* every image that was a link had a text equivalent somewhere.
and yes, title and alt attributes [1] not just on images, but also
on /every/ <a> element. And writing strong alt/title is the key too
- saying "Click here to visit the Features page" is NOT what
you're looking for.
* you validated your HTML and your CSS at validator.w3.org,
and validated every page against Bobby.
Honestly, if you start with a strong and semantic and validated X?HTML
design, adding the accessibility to just that HTML is easy as pie.
Adding accessibility to jQuery would be a whole 'nother issue.
> From an Ajax perspective, though, I'm not sure of what the implications
> are and with the dynamic nature of Ajax-enabled apps, I'm sure that
> there are additional challenges that we'll face.
For my needs, if you can't bookmark the results of an
AJAX application, it's not ready for prime time. Note that
this is the /exact/ metric I applied to "good" Flash apps.
[1] There is no such thing as an "ALT or TITLE tag" - they are
attributes. Please start referring to them as such.
--
Morbus Iff ( omnia mutantur, nihil interit )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
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