Google Accessibility Petition

Posted by Eric Stewart Sat, 21 Jan 2006 19:47:00 GMT

All you web developers and users out there should go take a look at the Google Word Verification Accessiblity Petition that was started by Blind Access Journal.

In a nutshell, it’s asking Google to make their captcha scheme used in registering for services accessible. A user that doesn’t see so well hits a roadblock when they are presented with those crazy little captcha graphics.

The typical solution for most cases of this problem is to provide an audio equivalent.

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Label me, please!

Posted by Eric Stewart Fri, 13 Jan 2006 23:21:00 GMT

Imagine you are a good web developer. You like following standards, paying attention to usability, and thinking about accessibility while implementing the latest, greatest whiz-bang next-generation web wunder-site. Yes, I’m talking to you!

Read more...

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Testing Rails Application Accessibility

Posted by Eric Stewart Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:35:00 GMT

As I mentioned previously, I have been working on a Rails plugin to help check the accessibility of pages in a Rails project.

I was inspired by Scott Raymond’s assert_valid_markup plugin for Rails and decided to whip up a similar plugin for testing the accessibility of pages in my current Rails project.

Using

You will be able to write a functional test that does something like: 
def test_index
  get :index
  assert_accessible
end

I had really wanted to polish this some more before putting it out there for others to use, but I have been slow at finding the time so I’m making it available. It has been working well on my current project but there is much that can be done to improve it. It is still really rough around the edges and your mileage may vary.

You will probably get more mileage out of it by pairing it up with assert_valid_markup, as invalid markup usually triggers some sort of accessibility problem.

Installing

Check out the source from Subversion, or preferable use Rails own script/plugin script to help install it. All you have to do (from the root of your rails project) is:

script/plugin source http://www.eric-stewart.com/svn/rails/plugins/
script/plugin install assert_accessible

Or, for those that want to do a straight subversion checkout:

svn co http://www.eric-stewart.com/svn/rails/plugins/assert_accessible/

That’s it! Let me know how it works for you.

Update: The url’s above for subversion weren’t working externally according to an astute commenter. They have been corrected.

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Trojans and Virii in the Name of Accessibility

Posted by Eric Stewart Sun, 04 Dec 2005 02:56:00 GMT

Darrell has reported a new trojan/virus making the rounds that is disguised as software to help those with special needs.

That is just disgusting and appalling. What else can I say.

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Graceful Javascript degredation in Rails

Posted by Eric Stewart Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:53:00 GMT

While I’m on the subject of web accessibility…

If you don’t read Encytemedia, head on over and start reading this series of articles on degradable Javascript. Justin is talking about this technique in general using his new javascript library along with Rails.

This looks to be a promising technique and I can’t wait to try it out. A big part of accessibility for sites that don’t want to skimp on the javascript goodness is making sure that the site degrades nicely and still functions when viewed by a browser (for example, a screen reader) that intentionally doesn’t support all that craziness.

And in addition those crazy people that turn off Javascript for the fun of it will still be supported too.

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