Punkchip

The W3C released the Candidate Recommendation of the WCAG 2.0 at the end of last month. Since then there have been numerous posts on this fact, but nothing up-to-date on the guidelines themselves. I haven’t really seen anything new since a draft version I first started looking at in July last year. Here is my super quick overview of the documentation and guidelines – and by super quick I mean just that, there is no specific detail walk through of each success criterion.

Continue reading Super quick overview of WCAG 2.0

May 19, 2008

Read 2 comments about Super quick overview of WCAG 2.0

I think what we all took away from the latest conference is that the Future of Web Design isn’t clear yet. It expanded on a conversation I had with a friend the other day where we decided that in the last few months web standards has hit a lull. During @media2005 everyone was so excited to be there talking shop and swapping ideas that we couldn’t wait to get back to our desks to put into practice what we’d been shown - zoom layouts, microformats, etc. But fast foward 2 years and there just isn’t anything to get our teeth into.

Continue reading The Future of Web Design?

April 25, 2007

Read 2 comments about The Future of Web Design?

Job Access With Speech

On Monday I went to a demonstration of JAWS screen-reader, that I had heard about through The Web Standards Group discussion list a few weeks ago. It was presented by Steve Green, the director of Test Partners who provide manual testing services (functionality, compatibility and accessibility). Steve had enlisted the help of John (registered blind), who I believe is usually involved in the testing of their clients’ websites/applications, to be the “screen-reader user”.

I found the session extremely interesting and learnt a lot from it. The main thing I wanted to come away with was how to use JAWS myself and to understand how a vision-impaired user would go about browsing a website.

Continue reading Free JAWS Demonstration

November 30, 2006

Read 7 comments about Free JAWS Demonstration

Take a straight forward question that is usually asked during any online sign-up form:

Gender: Male Female

It is marked up according to the WCAG Priority 2 checkpoint 12.4 that says you should associate labels explicitly with their controls (i.e. by using the label element).

<input type="radio" id="male" name="gender" />
<label for="male">Male</label>

However, I want to explicitly link the original question (gender) with the 2 possible answers and this isn’t possible using the label element because there can be only one label and one control per line. There are a couple of solutions.

Continue reading Accessible Radio Buttons/Checkboxes

September 18, 2006

Read 9 comments about Accessible Radio Buttons/Checkboxes

This is quite a specific tip, but one that caused me quite a bit of frustration.

The Problem

Each time I run the JAWS screen-reader software (version 7.0) on Windows XP, it nearly doubles the size of some icons on the screen. The ones that you find next to the clock in the taskbar, the quick-launch icons and also the small icon in the top left-hand corner of each window. They remain enlarged even when you exit JAWS and the computer restarted.

I’m not sure if this is a bug in JAWS or just something it should be doing to help users (I’m pretty sure it’s a bug). I can’t find any other documentation on why it would happen, only a couple of other users with the same problem in JAWS 6.0, who were trying to find a solution.

Continue reading Quick Tip: JAWS and Enlarged Icons

September 15, 2006

Read 3 comments about Quick Tip: JAWS and Enlarged Icons