LessFussDesign blog

Posts Tagged ‘assistive technology’

02 Nov 2009

WebAIM screen reader users follow up survey

Last week the WebAIM team published the results of their latest Screen Reader User Survey [external link] (a follow up to the last one carried out at the end of 2008). As with the first WebAIM survey [external link], the results confirm that many of the things we have assumed are problematic for screen reader users (e.g. Flash – or rather how developers implement Flash – is a massive pain in the backside) are true. They also reinforce that just as there’s no typical web browser user, there’s also no typical screen reader user. Continue reading »

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11 Aug 2009

Web form help text & accessibility

In the last piece I did on accessible web forms, I mentioned that in Forms Mode the JAWS screen reader won’t announce any content in a form that isn’t marked up in a form HTML tag. 90% of the time you can make forms more accessible by using labels for each field, but sometimes you want to provide more information than can fit nicely into the label (e.g. some extra help text) without making a meal of the layout and styling. Here’s a way of styling content in an HTML label tag so it looks like it’s separate from the label, but will still get read out by screen readers. Continue reading »

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31 Jul 2009

Accessible Twitter: how it should have been done to start with

One day the next big thing on the web that has everyone all worked up will be accessible and built to web standards from day one. Until that day, we have people like Dennis Lembree (the man behind Web Axe [external link]) to thank for making what many take for granted freely available to an even wider audience. With the help of some friends [external link], and the Twitter API, Dennis has created an accessible version of Twitter called, unsurprisingly, Accessible Twitter [external link]. Continue reading »

6 comments
25 Jul 2009

Screen readers and radio buttons: using HTML fieldset and legend

You can go a long way to making a web form accessible by making sure every input field has a label. But with a set of radio buttons this ain’t enough. Use labels for each of your radio buttons and the various options will be read out, but how does a screen reader user get the question they’re supposed to be answering? Easy. Use fieldset and legend HTML tags, a simple – yet underused – way of getting your forms to make sense for screen reader users. Continue reading »

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15 Apr 2009

Skip links + tabindex = confusion

Adding features that help improve the accessibility of a website is a good thing. But sometimes accessibility features can conflict with each other when used inappropriately. Providing skip links while also setting the tab index on links is a good example of two common accessibility techniques which, if you’re not careful, can end up doing more harm than good. Continue reading »

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01 Aug 2008

HighSlide & accessibility

Links that open new windows are not great for the accessibility of your site, but if you want to create the effect of opening content in a new window, you can use a javascript slideshow application. But using javascript/AJAX brings its own accessibility issues. This article explains how to make one of the best slideshow applications I’ve seen – HighSlide – more accessible for your users. Continue reading »

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