+ What is Web Accessibility?

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web.

Web accessibility also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging, which means all of us!!

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Why is Web Accessibility Important?The Web is an increasingly important resource in many aspects

of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. It is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities. An accessible Web can also help people with disabilities more actively participate in society.

Aside from a moral and ethical obligation:

Is it legal for the web to be inaccessible??

Web accessibility is required in many countries by law and public policy.

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What is being done about it? The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organisations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C's mission is:  To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

+ WAI

The role of Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is to develop guidelines and techniques that describe accessibility solutions for Web software and Web developers. These WAI guidelines are considered the international standard for Web accessibility. Web "content" generally refers to the information in a Web page or Web application, including text, images, forms, sounds, and such. More specific definitions are available in the WCAG Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

+ WASP:Web Standards Project

+ So what are we talking about?

Web software includes:

Web browsers, media players, and other "user agents"; for more information, see User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG)

Authoring tools that creates Web sites; for more information see, Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) Overview.

Evaluation tools that determine if a Web site meets standards and guidelines.

Assistive Technologies: also often referred to as “user agents”.

+ Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) documents explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. The current version is WCAG 2.0.

WCAG is primarily intended for:

Web content developers (page authors, site designers, etc.)

Web authoring tool developers

Web accessibility evaluation tool developers

 

WCAG and supporting resources are also intended to meet the needs of many different audiences, including policy makers, managers, and others.

+ What’s in the guidelines?

WCAG 1.0 had 14 guidelines that are general principles of accessible design. Each guideline has one or more checkpoints that explain how the guideline applies in a specific area.

Also provided are:

Core Techniques for WCAG 1.0

HTML Techniques for WCAG 1.0

CSS Techniques for WCAG 1.0

 

The Core Techniques, CSS Techniques, and HTML Techniques provide implementation guidance, including explanations, strategies, and detailed markup examples.

+ WCAG 2.0 and supporting documents

+ Transitioning to WCAG 2.0

4 general principles

12 guidelines

61 success criteria

Websites/Content should be:

Perceivable

Operable

Usable

Robust

+ Improvements in WCAG 2.0

Principles, guidelines and success criteria are technology-agnostic.

WCAG 1.0 “Guideline 11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines” “Where it is not possible to use a W3C technology, or doing

so results in material that does not transform gracefully, provide an alternative version of the content that is accessible.”

WCAG 2.0 can be applied to W3C and non-W3C technologies (as long as they're accessibility-supported)

+ WCAG 2.0 accessibility-supported

You can use non-W3C technologies such as PDF, Flash, and JavaScript

The introduction of WAI-ARIA http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/

If a technology isn't fully accessibility-supported, you can use the parts that are. As long fallback content is provided where needed.

+ Improvements in WCAG 2.0

Removes all “until user agents...” clauses

Each success criterion is more easily testable

Success criteria give clearer advice than WCAG 1.0

Success criteria focuses more on outcomes, not how you get there

+ Improvements in WCAG 2.0

Techniques cover general technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WAI-ARIA

Sufficient and advisory techniques

Techniques are informative, not normative

List of techniques is not exhaustive – invent your own as long as success criteria are fulfilled

+ Transitioning to WCAG 2.0

WCAG 1.0 had duality of priority 1,2,3 that mapped to levels A, AA, AAA

WCAG 2.0 just uses A, AA, AAA model for both SCs and conformance levels

Many of the techniques learned for WCAG 1.0 are still relevant!

The needs of people with disabilities haven’t changed, although the guidelines have moved on *

*Thanks for Patrick Lauke for some of this content

+  WCAG 10 Quick Tips for Web Accessibility 1. Images & animations: Use the alt attribute to describe the function of each visual.

2. Image maps. Use the client-side map and text for hotspots.

3. Multimedia. Provide captioning and transcripts of audio, and descriptions of video.

4. Hypertext links. Use text that makes sense when read out of context. For example, avoid "click here."

5. Page organization. Use headings, lists, and consistent structure. Use CSS for layout and style where possible.

6. Graphs & charts. Summarize or use the alt and longdesc attribute.

7. Scripts, applets, & plug-ins. Provide alternative content in case active features are inaccessible or unsupported.

8. Frames. Use the noframes element and meaningful titles.

9. Tables. Make line-by-line reading sensible. Summarize.

10. Check your work. Validate. Use tools, checklist, and guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG

+ What are the advantages of designing with web standards?

+ Complying with web standards can give your web pages greater visibility in web searches. The structural information present in compliant documents makes it easy for search engines to access and evaluate the information in those documents, and they get indexed more accurately.

 

+ Standards are written so that old browsers and other User Agents will still understand the basic structure of your documents.

+ Compliant code gives you the opportunity of validating your page with a validation service. Validators process your documents and present you with a list of errors. This makes finding and correcting errors a lot easier, and can save you a lot of time.

+ What are the advantages of designing with web standards?

+ Compliant documents can easily be converted to other formats, such as databases or Word documents. This allows for more versatile use of the information within documents on the World Wide Web, and simplified migration to new systems - hardware as well as software - including devices such as TVs and PDAs.

+ Accessibility is an important idea behind many web standards, especially HTML.

+ Not only does this mean allowing the web to be used by people with disabilities, but also allowing web pages to be understood by people using browsers other than the usual ones - including voice browsers that read web pages aloud to people with sight impairments, Braille browsers that translate text into Braille, hand-held browsers with very little monitor space, teletext displays, and other unusual output devices.

+Stability

Most web standards are generally designed with forward- and backward-compatibility in mind — so that data using old versions of the standards will continue to work in new browsers, and data using new versions of the standards will “gracefully degrade” to produce an acceptable result in older browsers.

+ Making the Web a better place

Web standards are not arcane laws decreed by ivory-tower organizations. the standards are for the most part decided by representatives of the same people who use them — browser makers, web developers, content providers, and other organisations.

 

Writing web pages in accordance with the standards shortens site development time and makes pages easier to maintain. Debugging and troubleshooting become easier, because the code follows a standard. No longer do you have to worry about the coding and maintenance for several versions of code that are supposed to accomplish the same presentation. One version of your site, and that is it.

 

The universal adoption of web standards is becoming of paramount importance. The mission of The Web Standards Project is to make the Web a better place, for developers and for end-users, by encouraging browser and web page editor makers to follow the standards in their applications.

+ HTML Key concepts

 

HTML is a declarative markup language, not a display language.

HTML standards demand proper content structure.

Properly structured content is more accessible. Good code is accessible code (or at least less likely to be inaccessible )

Use content structure HTML to mark up structure and not for appearance.

+ HTML Key concepts

Do not use text formatting, such as font size or bold to give the visual appearance of headings - use actual heading (H1 - H6) for all content headings. Assistive technologies and other browsers rely upon the literal markup of the page to determine structure. Items that are bolded or display in a bigger font are not interpreted to be structural elements.

CSS Key concepts

 

The strength of CSS lies in the ability to separate content from presentation, and to allow for more precise control over layout.

 

CSS is for Styling the Presentation, Not Conveying Meaning

+Summary

User testing is a great way to educate designers and developers about accessibility.

User testing is important prior to final release, in order to catch problems before they cause damage. Make sure to allow time for fixing any problems found.

Auditing covers more accessibility issues and more of the functionality.

Auditing is quicker and therefore cheaper.

+PDF and offline document Accessibility/ADD Stuff from training

+PDF and offline document Accessibility

When people talk about "accessible" PDF files, they usually mean "tagged" PDF files.

PDF tags provide a structured, textual representation of the PDF that is presented to screen readers. They exist for accessibility purposes only and have no visible effect on the PDF file.

HTML tags and PDF tags often use similar tag names and organization structures, thought they are different – it can help to think of them in similar terms.

+PDF: Overview

PDF files are not typically created in Acrobat. They are usually created in another program and converted to PDF.

There are dozens or probably hundreds of programs that can create PDF files, but very few of them produce tagged PDF files.

If you are using Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, OpenOffice.org Writer, or Adobe tools such as InDesign, you can often create accessible, tagged PDF files without opening Acrobat. Of course, the accessibility of the PDF depends on the accessibility of the original document.

+PDF: Microsoft Word

The accessibility and conversion settings of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint are essentially the same. You can follow the instructions below for Word to convert PowerPoint files to PDF as well.

The majority of the PDF files on the web were probably created in Microsoft Word. The good news is that it is possible to create accessible PDF files in Office, as long as the following requirements are met:

1) The file must be accessible. That includes providing alternative text for images, proper headings, appropriate link text, etc. For more information, read our tutorial on Microsoft Word.

2) Office 2000-2003 users must have Acrobat installed, as well as the add-in. Office 2007 users must have either Acrobat or the Microsoft PDF add-in installed.

3) The file must be exported correctly. If a file is created by printing to PDF, it will not be correctly tagged.

+PDF: Overview

PDF files are not typically created in Acrobat. They are usually created in another program and converted to PDF.

There are dozens or probably hundreds of programs that can create PDF files, but very few of them produce tagged PDF files.

If you are using Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, OpenOffice.org Writer, or Adobe tools such as InDesign, you can often create accessible, tagged PDF files without opening Acrobat. Of course, the accessibility of the PDF depends on the accessibility of the original document.

+What Can I do?

Inform yourself and others about accessibility

Debunk myths: such as its expensive etc

Create accessible, well structured documents in your day to day activities

Get involved