I’ll try to list off all of the relevant sites/tools that we discussed today. I’ve also uploaded the actual powerpoint presentation file if anyone wants to view it.
- Good explanation of the principles of Universal Design: Universal Design Principles
- Adaptive Computing Technology (ACT) Center
- University of Missouri Web Policies and Guidelines
- Missouri IT Accessibility Standards (MITAS) - pdf file
- University of Nebraska-Lincoln Architect Website (example of a “bad” site)
- JAWS for Windows (Screen Reader)
- Dragon NaturallySpeaking (Voice Dictation software)
- ZoomText (Screen Magnification software)
- Mobile Phone Emulator - doesn’t play nice with Firefox but should work properly in IE as long as you have Java installed
- The “cleaned” version of the Columbia Daily Tribune
- Class-action lawsuit against Target, and another article about the lawsuit
- Cynthia Says (ADA evaluator)
- Functional Accessibility Evaluator (ADA evaluator)
- Wave 4.0 (ADA evaluator)
- Wave Firefox Extension
- Fangs - the screen reader emulator Firefox Extension
- HTML Validator Firefox Extension
- Color blindness checker
- My blog post on Firefox Extensions for Accessible Web Development
- Josh Nichol’s blog post on color blind accessible sites
It appears that I was incorrect in a statement I made yesterday. After doing some testing today, Josh (Nichols) noticed that FANGS was not displaying the items he had hidden using display:none in his CSS. According to the research we have done (see links below), JAWS from version 6 on will respect the display:none CSS and not read the contents of the element that has been hidden. The current solution is to use the same trick Josh showed for the links for skipping to the main content and skipping to the main navigation: offsetting the element to the left using position:absolute;left: -999px;
http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ScreenreaderVisibility
http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/2007/02/14/why-left-9999px-is-better-for-accessibility-than-display-none/
http://www.access-matters.com/screen-reader-test-results/
In my defense, I guess we were using JAWS v5 when I tested this last since it did not recognize display:none and read the element. I assumed incorrectly that subsequent versions would behave the same. My apologies.