Archive for the 'accessibilty' Category

Any­body who knows me, knows I am not a morn­ing per­son. So break­fast reviews will be a rare occurrence, …

At the Gov2.0 taskforce road­show I ended up in con­ver­sa­tion with a rep­res­ent­at­ive of one Depart­ment bemoan­ing the fact the Gov­ern­ment will not give them extra money to make their web­sites WCAG 1.0 level 2 compliant.

I am look­ing for your views on an issue I am hav­ing with a design for a new web­site at work. I am a fan of elastic design (which you might of noticed if you are read­ing this via my blog). The ori­ginal inten­tion was to have a basic design for the smal­ler (< 900px […]

The site of the West­ern Aus­tralian Premier is one of the alarm­ing num­ber of web­sites that are built just for broad­band users, while ignor­ing those on dia­lup or those on expens­ive mobile broad­band net­works. The home page in ques­tion weighs in at over hefty 750kb. Which is fine for busi­ness and home users with decent broad­band, but not every­body has access to fast and cheap broad­band in West­ern Australia.

I am not just talk­ing about out­back West­ern Australia …

Up until a couple of years ago, I mis­takenly believed that cap­tion­ing was just a souped up ver­sion of sub­titling. I was very wrong.

I learnt a lot about cap­tion­ing work­ing with a hear­ing impaired col­league to arrange cap­tion­ing of a work video, a few years ago.

One of the main issues is there is no stand­ard or even code of prac­tise for cap­tion­ing in Australia …

Or at least the Web Con­tent Access­ib­il­ity Guidelines (WCAG) Work­ing Group are. I have just read­ing the latest changes to the WCAG 2.0 last call draft and I am impressed, it looks like a lot of mine and other people’ con­cerns have been address. It requires fur­ther read­ing, but it looks like a big improve­ment over the last draft.

Joe Clark is using micro­pat­ron­age to sup­port the fund­ing of a research pro­ject. Micro­pat­ron­age is get­ting lots of small dona­tions from many people. If you par­ti­cip­ate you will not be fund­ing the Open and Closed Pro­ject, but sup­port­ing Joe as he tries to raise the money some $7 mil­lion dol­lars cana­dian for the life of the pro­ject (or at least CA$400,000 for the first year).

I par­ti­cip­ated, not because I am friends with Joe. From what I know about Joe, if we phys­ic­ally meet, viol­ence (of a verbal nature) is the most likely out­come. But because I believe in what the Open and Closed Pro­ject is try­ing to do write stand­ards for cap­tion­ing, audio descrip­tion, sub­titling, and dub­bing. And know that Joe is pas­sion­ate about the cause and is the best per­son for the task.

aka things I learnt this week part 2

I am cur­rently read­ing Web Access­ib­il­ity: Web Stand­ards and Reg­u­lat­ory Com­pli­ance and I am learn­ing a few inter­est­ing things. I have been select­ively read­ing chapters, the chapter I have found most inter­est­ing so far is Access­ible Flash. Which says for flash to be access­ible to a screen reader, the user must have:

Unfor­tu­nately, I spent a too much time pre­par­ing my Access­ib­il­ity Law in Aus­tralia present­a­tion and not enough time pre­par­ing this present­a­tion. What should of been 30 minutes plus on tech­niques to make forms more access­ible and usable, end up being 10 minutes or so going through a num­ber of points that should of been expanded…

Some people who listen to pod­cast or read the tran­script (both avail­able soon) of my present­a­tion on Access­ib­il­ity Law in Aus­tralia to the Perth Web Stand­ards Group may think I was down­play­ing the import­ance of access­ib­il­ity law (the Dis­ab­il­ity Dis­crim­in­a­tion Act 1992) in Aus­tralia. That was not my inten­tion, what I wanted to do was reflect the cur­rent situation.

Very few people make com­plaints about web­site access­ib­il­ity in Australia…