nortypig

Having recently made the botched decision to enhance a contact form with Ajax (kick me for that in the street), I can really appreciate Brothercake’s detailed rant about the immaturity of Ajax and how we should think before using it. Luckily, in my case, it was only a proof of concept and never went live, but I learned a valuable lesson. Don’t be seduced by sexy technology at the cost of what works accessibly already.

Its time to start using WCAG 2 now its a Candidate Release that’s expected to be finalised by the end of the year.

WebAim (Web Accessibility in Mind) have a useful article titled Using JAWS to Evaluate Web Accessibility which walks us through the basic controls in the JAWS screen reading software. Its also well worth your while reading the associated article on the WebAIM blog from December titled Learning from Screen Readers.

Joe Dolson has a great little guide to the semantic use of HTML elements.

Spoken Text is a free online text to speech converter. It translates PDF (Portable Document Format), Microsoft Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds, emails and web pages.

Email Spambot Buster is an accessible unobtrusive technique to hide your email addresses on the web page from email harvesters (spambots).

Web Axe has been a solid accessibility blog and podcast that most of us should be listening to / reading.

Scott Gledhill’s presentation at Web Directions Government was titled Real World Web Standards.