I'm mid way developing a new web site for a client who has a large percentage of disabled users, this includes people with motor disabilities, blind, colour blind and deaf. Although accessibility is somewhat of a personal passion of mine, I seldom get the opportunity to develop sites for that particular audience.
But I thought it might be beneficial to others to share some of the resources I use when catering for accessibility. Here is my non exhaustive list of resources that might help.
The WAVE Toolbar for Firefox
The only toolbar I know of that checks sites for accessibility issues. WAVE will overlay a series of icons and alerts over your site to notify you of any accessibility issues, such as problematic link text, missing or duplicate alt text, JavaScript reliance and stacks more.
Download it here.
WebAIM
An awesome resource of all things accessibility related with plenty of guides and tutorials.
Visit WebAIM.
WCAG 2.0 Specification
A lot has changed since WCAG1.0 and rightfully so. There are a lot of surprises in there, one of the most notable being that accesskeys are no longer recommended. It's a lot to absorb, so maybe the best place to start is with the guide to understanding and the techniques pages.
Visit WVAG 2.0
Colour Blindness Simulator
Upload a jpg of your design and see how it holds up against the 3 colour blind categories of Protanopia, Deuteranopia and Tritanopia.
Visit the Colour Blindness Simulator
Testing your site
The important thing to remember is that even though we have the WCAG 2.0 spec and all these other tools to guide us, unfortunately there is no validation tool available to make sure we've done our job properly. The day when we can submit a site for accessibility compliance in the same manner as we do for W3C compliance is a long way off, so that leaves us with good old fashioned testing.
This fact is emphasised with the WAVE toolbar mentioned earlier. Even when you eventually see the dialogue informing you that everything is OK, it also says you still need to check to see if the page is actually accessible.
Now with the technical side of things covered, you also need to consider how you present the content to users. I coined the term 'Considerate Accessibility' for this, which is basically a best practices to writing content with accessibility in mind. Read the article here.
If anyone has any other resources feel free to share them below.
Carerra Davis
Nice find with the wave toolbar. Thanks!
Wednesday 3rd June 2009 | 07:21 PM Reply Comment URL Back to top