I was just recalling a recent firsthand experience with web accessibility ignorance, and thought I’d share, to kick off 2010.

Not long ago, I was involved in a conversation about incorporating security measures to a registration process on an e-commerce website. One solution that emerged was using CAPTCHA.

For those of you not familiar with the term, CAPTCHA is a process used to protect web sites from automated agents (bots, scripts, etcetera). This is most often done through adding a step in which a user must decipher distorted or obscured characters, or solve a puzzle.

The traditional implementation of CAPTCHA has met with significant outcry from the accessibility minded. Quite simply, how can a blind or visually-impaired user be expected to discern garbled characters on the screen? In such cases, the visually disabled are simply unable to do whatever it is that the CAPTCHA stands in front of, such as registering on a site before purchasing and accessing information.

Alternatives have emerged such as providing an audio equivalent, like reCAPTCHA does.

Anyway, when CAPTCHA came up in my scenario, I quickly pointed out that, whatever solution we seek, we must ensure we’re using a security method that doesn’t render the site inoperable by the visually disabled.

One person responded by pantomiming being blind, finding himself to be hysterical in the process. Another person said — and to get the full effect, be sure to insert dripping sarcasm — “Yeah, because blind people use the Web”.

Even as I typed that, it sounded ridiculous and made up. Needless to say, I was floored by such over-the-top ignorance. I don’t expect everybody to suddenly embrace accessibility because I have, but still hoped that my insight would be taken somewhat seriously, not met with jokes and quips.

I’d like to think that such reactions are rare and will only decrease in the web industry, as accessibility becomes more and more a hot button issue. Some businesses and web services are better than others.

My response, by the way, was something to the effect of, “I imagine there were people at Target.com who made light of accessibility before the multi-million dollar lawsuit.”

Tags: accessibility, CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA

Come November 12th, it’ll be one year since my first blog post here at theaccessibility.com. Last time, I shared some general thoughts from my rookie season as a blogger. From the ease of WordPress to the struggle of posting frequency (and with quality), it’s been both challenging and fun.

What about, specifically, accessibility – the subject I’ve chosen for my adventures in blogging? I can’t begin to capture all that I’ve learned, but a few revelations immediately struck me when I first tackled the subject.

The visually impaired aren’t the only web users with disabilities
Perhaps in part because of well-publicized stories like Target getting sued by the American Federation of the Blind, there seems to be a large focus of accessibility attention on visual disabilities. At times it seems to overshadow the fact that there are many other disabilities that require web designers to be diligent in their standards and best practices.

Even among the visually disabled, there are more obstacles than not being able to see. Those with color blindness encounter their own problems — certain color combinations can make it very difficult for them to effectively make out what’s being communicated or conveyed on a page.

Individuals with neuromuscular restrictions, brain damage, or just difficulties fully using their hands rely on other means to use their computers and get around the Web. This can be keyboard navigation, or even sip-and-puff technology. Whatever the means, it is an entirely different user experience with its own trappings and limitations depending on how accessible the site is. As one example, if a site’s tabbing progression is out of order, these users will have a heck of a time trying to get where they need to go.

Deaf users encounter their own obstacles, such as lack of captions or text recaps for many online video. The Web is still way behind television, where closed captioning is prevalent. Video is becoming more and more commonplace, particularly as social media flourishes….and while progress is being made, there’s a long, long way to go.

There are also many cognitive disabilities that make web surfing challenging. Those with attention disorders can be distracted or disrupted by excessive movement, blinking or flashing. Those with reading or problem-solving limitations will be able to more easily navigate a web site if the messaging is clear, and the navigation consistent and easy to follow.

Tags: blindness, cognitive disabilities, deafness, disabilities

I just realized that I’m fast approaching my one year anniversary of blogging about web accessibility. Time sure flies! I’ve learned a lot about the subject, discovered many very impressive, admirable figures through other blogs and social media like Twitter, and all around have had a lot of fun.

Here are just a couple of the lessons and insights I’ve gained about web accessibility, blogging, and developing a web presence in general. I’ll be posting more over the days leading up to November 12th, one year after I made my first entry.

Blogging is not as easy as it sounds
I figured that getting into a routine and blog-blog-blogging away would be a breeze. I’ve since learned  that effective, consistent blogging is a commitment. The challenge of posting often — but posting quality material — can be overwhelming.

I asked a few bloggers what the magic number is for volume of posting. I got one answer that 2-3 per week was a good, realistic goal. Another answer was 2-3 per month. The former struck me as too much; the latter too infrequent.

I set my own goal to be one post per week. There have been stretches of time I’ve been really good about it; there have been plenty in which I’ve faltered. In particular, since late July I’ve really slowed down. Life, work, and all that good stuff gets in the way.

WordPress is awesome
My foray into blogging showed me firsthand how great WordPress is. From the easy-as-can-be dashboard to slick plugins like Akismet (holy cow does the spam come pounding at the gates!), All in One SEO Pack, Sociable and Bookmarkify, WordPress really has impressed me.

All I did was find a simple enough theme, and work my own design into the markup and CSS. In the matter of a couple days, my blog was designed and ready to go. Using GoDaddy as hosting made it even easier, since WordPress is one of many applications they have an auto-download feature for.

Currently, I’m trying WordPress as a CMS for a non-blog site I’m designing and creating, for a freelance project. In that scenario, it’s been easy going as well.

Google Analytics offers a whole lot for a free product
Despite never having been a “math guy”, I’ve always had a weird fascination with stats and numbers. When I was a kid, I used to run entire seasons of a made-up 30-team baseball league with Micro League Baseball II on my Mac Plus. Not only that, I manually kept track of all the stats for  every team, every game! Similarly, to this day, one of the aspects I dig most about games like Madden NFL is the tracking of stats season to season

I’m glad that I set up Google Analytics right away on this blog. My traffic has been modest, and goes up and down (currently down because of the aforementioned mini-hiatus I’ve taken!), but it’s always interesting to track how many visitors I’m getting, what countries they hail from, what keywords they are using, and what browsers and operating systems power their journey.

“web accessibility iphone” and “expedia accessibility” have by far been my top keywords, but 664 total have enabled visitors to reach this neck of the woods.

More thoughts and insights to come soon. For those of you reading this entry, I give tremendous thanks for the time, attention and interest!

Tags: blogging, google analytics, web accessibility, WordPress

As I eluded to in my post about getting accepted into the Guild of Accessible Web Designers, I had to make some edits to this site to strength its overall accessibility.

Some of these changes stemmed from WordPress limitations and others were just things I missed or wasn’t aware of. All in all, though none of the changes were out-of-this-world complex or obscure, it was an excellent learning experience for me. While this site’s accessibility no doubt isn’t “perfect” yet (is such a thing possible?), I feel better knowing that I’ve made definitive strides forward.

Here are some of the changes that were recommended to me by GAWDS:

Skip Navigation option
This is perhaps less of a must-have on a site like mine without header navigation, but it is advisable to provide an option at the top of your site for skipping straight to the main content.

Screen readers read from top down, and as such, when a visually-impaired navigator hits each page of a site, he or she has to hear the navigation spoken aloud before getting to the meat of the page. Providing the ability to skip past that to the meaningful content makes the experience much more straightforward and less tedious.

What I did: I added the “Jump to Content” anchor link you see at the top right of this page.

Proper Header Order
Correct usage of header tags (<h1>…<h2>…<h3>…etc) provides greater accessibility on a couple fronts. One, screen readers like JAWS offer a key command for reading off headers in order. They also announce the number of headers up front.

The WordPress template I’m using followed proper procedures like having only one <h1> tag, and subsequent <h2> and <h3> tags. However, there were a few instances, based on certain content showing in certain situations, where <h2> was missing. Skipping from an <h1> to an <h3> can cause confusion for screen reader users.

What I did: I straightened out some of the inconsistencies to ensure that on all pages of this site there is one <h1> followed by <h2>’s. I didn’t find the need to go beyond <h2>’s.

Link Focus
For those navigating through a site via a keyboard, making it obvious what link they are focused upon is good accessibility. The unformatted dotted-line box around the focused-upon link isn’t the most visually discernible, across the major browsers.

What I did: I chose a distinctive orange color to clearly denote what link you are focused on when you tab through the site.

a:focus, a:active {
text-decoration : none;
background: #ffce00;
}

Color Contrast
When you have text on top of a background image or solid background color, if there isn’t a strong enough contrast between the respective colors, certain visual disabilities such as color blindness may prevent users from properly differentiating the elements.

WCAG 2.0 call for a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 (3:1 for large text).

What I did: Using an online contrast ratio calculator, I followed the most stringent Level AAA WCAG requirement by ensuring that my “the art of web accessibility” header text was at least a 7:1 ratio from the blue cloud background image.

Likewise, I made sure that my aforementioned link focus background color adhered to a 7:1 ratio from the text on top of it.

Ambiguous Linking
Last and certainly not least, the WordPress usage of “No Comments” or “X Comments” linkage for all blog posts is a link that provides no clear-cut direction as to where it will take the user. Links on the same page should also be worded uniquely and specific to the target.

When you see “No Comments”, you don’t intuitively know that clicking on it is your avenue to posting a comment on a specific topic, much less when there are 5 identical “No Comments” on the same page.

What I did: Given the handy code below, I changed the offending link in the Main Index Template so that, as you can now see on any post on this site, it reads something like “Comment on X topic”. That way, it is more obvious from the link that clicking on it takes you where you can post a comment on the specific post “X topic”.

<?php if('open' == $post->comment_status) : ?><p
class="comment_link"><?php comments_popup_link('Comment on
'.$post->post_title, '1 Comment on '.$post->post_title, '% Comments on
'.$post->post_title,'postcomment','Comments are off for
'.$post->post_title); ?></p><?php endif;?>

I made a few minor tweaks here and there, but these suggestions from GAWDS were very helpful and set me in a good direction for making this site closer to practicing what it preaches.

Tags: color contrast, gawds, guild of accessible web designers, h1, h2, h3, header tags, link focus, skip navigation, WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WordPress

I’m excited to say that today I was accepted into the Guild of Accessible Web Designers. Upon submission of my application, I received a number of suggestions on how to make the art of web accessibility more compliant with WCAG 2.0.

As I’ve mentioned, I knew when I went the content management system route that I was putting my accessibility, in part, in others’ hands….and I really appreciated getting some meaningful feedback from an accessibility expert. And again, to their credit, WordPress does seem to take accessibility seriously.

And so, I knocked out the problem areas (I may recap them in a future post) and my application was approved.

Though I still would rank myself as more of a novice in web accessibility, I’ve learned a ton in the past months. In the time to come, I’ll be learning a lot more!

Tags: gawds, guild of accessible web designers, WCAG, WordPress