Accessibility and Section 508 Compliance in 2009

What you need to know.

John Whalen, PhDDirector, User Experience and Design, e.magination

Agenda

• Thinking 'accessibly’ … why would I care?

• What are the most common accessibility needs?

• Evaluating your site's compliance and accessibility

• Latest best practices for ensuring compliance

• Standards for interactive applications

It’s the Law

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act:

All electronic and information technology used, procured, developed, or maintained by agencies and departments of the U.S. Government must be accessible to people with disabilities.

Includes:• 120,000 Federal workers• 54,000,000 Americans

There’s a big audience out there…

And its getting older…

Disabilities truly make the Web difficult…

Web users with disabilities are 3 times less likely to succeed than users without disabilities at:– Searching for information– Making purchases

Coyne & Nielsen (2001)

You don’t like lawsuits…

You like the benefits of accessible design…

You want the advantage of being a leader…

You want to support mobile devices…

You appreciate great SEO…

Agenda

• Thinking 'accessibly’ … why would I care?

• What are the most common accessibility needs?

• Evaluating your site's compliance and accessibility

• Latest best practices for ensuring compliance

• Standards for interactive applications

Most Common Accessibility Needs:

Visual disabilities• blindness• low vision• color blindness

Hearing impairments• deafness• hard of hearing

Aging-related conditions

Physical disabilities• motor disabilities• speech disabilities

Cognitive and neurological disabilities

• dyslexia and dyscalculia• attention deficit disorder• intellectual disabilities• memory impairments

Assistive Technologies

• Alternative keyboards or switches

• Screen readers• Speech recognition

Assistive Technologies

• Braille and refreshable Braille

• Screen magnifiers• Tabbing through

structural elements• Voice browsers

Scenarios and Accessibility Solutions

• Online shopper with color blindness (user control of style sheets)

• Reporter with repetitive stress injury (keyboard equivalents for mouse commands; access-key)

• Online student who is deaf (captioned audio portions of multimedia files)

• Accountant with blindness (appropriate markup of tables, alternative text, abbreviations, and acronyms; Braille display)

Scenarios and Accessibility Solutions

• Classroom student with dyslexia (use of supplemental graphics; freezing animated graphics)

• Retiree with aging-related conditions, managing personal finances (magnification; avoiding pop-up windows)

• Supermarket assistant with cognitive disability (clear and simple language; consistent design)

• Teenager with deaf-blindness, seeking entertainment (user control of style sheets; accessible multimedia)

Agenda

• Thinking 'accessibly’ … why would I care?

• What are the most common accessibility needs?

• Evaluating your site's compliance and accessibility

• Latest best practices for ensuring compliance

• Standards for interactive applications

Core Principles – WCAG 2.0

1. Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive

This means that users must be able to perceive the information being presented (it can't be invisible to all of their senses)

2. Operable - User interface components and navigation must be operable

This means that users must be able to operate the interface (the interface cannot require interaction that a user cannot perform)

3. Understandable - Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable

This means that users must be able to understand the information as well as the operation of the user interface (the content or operation cannot be beyond their understanding)

4. Robust - Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies

Overall check for your pages

• Try WebAIM’s WAVE: Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool http://wave.webaim.org/

Use the Web Accessibility Toolbar

• http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html

• Check HTML• Resize screen• Disable CSS• Review image tags• Check color• Review tables

1. Perceivable: Best contrast / color checkers

• Contrast Analyzer v2 http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrast-analyser.html

• tool for determining if foreground & background color combinations provide good color visibility

• Vischeckhttp://www.vischeck.com/

2. Operable

• Try your site with no mouse

• Use Accessibility Toolbar to try site without pictures, without CSS

• Try site in small sizes, or with magnification turned on

• Try site using screen reader

• Accessible CAPTCHA? Try simple math problem.

2. Operable: Screen Readers

• JAWS: http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp

• NVDA - new free screen reader: http://www.nvda-project.org/

• Comparison of Screen Readers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screen_readers

3. Understandable: Creating Captions on the Web - Multimedia

National Center for Accessible Media

• http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/tools/index.html

3. Understandable – test reading level

• http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php#readweb

• Is your text at the right level? Take a look at the last number – the grade level.

Agenda

• Thinking 'accessibly’ … why would I care?

• What are the most common accessibility needs?

• Evaluating your site's compliance and accessibility

• Latest best practices for ensuring compliance

• Standards for interactive applications

Classics

• Use “good ‘ole” H1, H2, etc.– Good for screen reader, good for SEO.– Easier for mobile phone to display page– Use CSS to format the tags visually

• Use CSS

• Keep text brief

• Use bulleted format

ALT Tags – Context is Crucial

Source: http://www.webaim.org/techniques/alttext/

ALT Tags

Include table of content, skip links

Make tables simple, or make them accessible

• http://jimthatcher.com/webcourse9.htm

Many more suggestions

Adobe Acrobat: http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/reader/

Adobe Flash:

http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash/

Java: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-access/

• http://webaim.org/products/training/• http://jimthatcher.com/webcourse1.htm

Latest Updates on Section 508/255

Agenda

• Thinking 'accessibly’ … why would I care?

• What are the most common accessibility needs?

• Evaluating your site's compliance and accessibility

• Latest best practices for ensuring compliance

• Standards for interactive applications

WAI-ARIA

• Making sites with JavaScript and updates without screen refreshes accessible

Great introductory article:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-to-wai-aria/

WAI ARIA

• Create “live area” that captures changes (without screen refresh)

• Can set tab index to “-1” to allow focus when needed• Allow keyboard control• “What am I?”, State, Property

[included in IE 8]

Example: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/menu/menuwaiaria.html

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/3608798/9955360

Accessible Drag and Drop

• http://devfiles.myopera.com/articles/735/example.html#kbdinstructions

Toolkits incorporating WAI-ARIA

• JQuery UI• Yahoo! YUI• Google Web Toolkit• Dojo• ASP.NET “Q2 2009”• ExtJS?

Best practices

1. Use XHTML when possible

2. Apply ARIA role attribute when needed

3. Set ARIA states and properties

4. Support full keyboard navigation

5. Make the visual UI match the browser states

See also: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/waiaria

Agenda

• Thinking 'accessibly’ … why would I care?

• What are the most common accessibility needs?

• Evaluating your site's compliance and accessibility

• Latest best practices for ensuring compliance

• Standards for interactive applications

How e.magination can help

• Accessibility Audit• Training• Coding Consulting:

– General– Tables– ARIA

Great Accessibility Resources

• http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria • http://www.w3.org/WAI/

• http://www.456bereastreet.com/• http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/• http://juicystudio.com/index.php• http://webaim.org/

John Whalen, PhD

Director, User Experience

Twitter: @johnwhalen

Email: john.whalen@emagination.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnwhalen

Thank you!