Posts in accessibility Category

Sep 26, 2011

India Comes Up With Text To Speech And Web-based OCR

Press release: Technology Development for Indian Language (TDIL) Programme of the Department of Information Technology, under a consortium project has developed this Text-To- Speech system. TTS has also been integrated with Non Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) screen reader and Optical Character Recognition System (OCRA). OCR system developed under a TDIL consortium Project for Hindi & Punjabi was also provided on TDIL Data Centre to get user feedback, while the challenges of computationally intensive technology research are parallely being addressed. [Continue]

Jun 25, 2008

BBC Removing Microformats

BBC is doing away with microformats. Michael Smethurst explains the reasons, and at the root of all of them is the inaccessibility because of the abbr design pattern. BBC is going to try out RDFa as an alternative. [Continue]

Mar 15, 2008

Using JavaScript To Detect CSS Support

Progressive Enhancement is one of the key ways of ensuring accessibility. However, it has been commonly known to be applied to using JavaScript. John Resig explains a method, called Progressive CSS Enhancement. [Continue]

Nov 29, 2007

HTML Email Standards

I really do not like HTML emails. I dislike the composition, I hate the disparity in the way they are rendered, I get irritated with the performance and I lament the lack of standards and accessibility across the email clients. I had not given enough thought to it other than reading good articles on them. [Continue]

Nov 18, 2007

AJAX For Accessibility

Charles Chen writes about AxsJAX – a framework for injecting accessibility using AJAX techniques. Pronounced as Access JAX, AxsJAX follows the W3C ARIA specification, and might work as an active test tool for it. Being the main developer behind Fire Vox, Charles has made AxsJAX available through it, as a bookmarklet and through Greasemonkey script. [Continue]

Nov 16, 2007

Why Should Your Web Design Support All

Just the other day I was trying to explain to someone why should a web design support anyone and everyone who wants to visit it. Unfortunately this is one of the things that does not work purely on the rationale. The person has to see the bigger picture, understand the purpose of Web to really appreciate it. [Continue]

Sep 23, 2007

Resizing Text Widgets And Education

Ian Lloyd is on a mission, to educate people about resizing text using their browser and eventually eliminating the JavaScript based text resizing widgets. Not because they look bad, but because they give a wrong idea to the everyday user. He has gone ahead a step and provided a video (transcript). [Continue]

Aug 22, 2007

Javascript And Accessibility

Javascript is one language which usually gets blamed for the developer’s mistakes. And accessibility is one of the aspects where it gets bashed up. Roger Johansson shows how input-device independent Javascript can improve accessibility. [Continue]

Jul 23, 2007

Accessibility Basics

Frances Forman presents practical plans to incorporate accessibility in the architecture. It is quite interesting to note that global audit on web accessibility failed to find sites that complied to the guidelines. Accessibility is one the aspects that cannot be treated as an addon, it has to be weaved in right from the beginning. [Continue]

Jul 1, 2007

Issues With Testability

Gian Sampson-Wild explains her problem with testability in the W3C‘s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG). Testability is the ability of, in our case, software or content, to be testable either by machines or humans. One of the properties of a good establishment of tests is that it is not dependent on the machine’s or the human’s preference. [Continue]