Posted by admin on Jun 29, 2009 in
browsers,
design Refreshable Braille and the Web came up as a search result when I was looking for CSS language accessors and IE. While it’s not what I was looking for, I took a few moments and watched the video. I know there are screen readers out there, as well as language translators and more, but this was very compelling to me. I did not know that there was a braille reader which is essentially either a keyboard or an attachment to a keyboard which allows the reader to read just as if they were reading a book. Instead of reading lines of braille, there is a single line at a a time which is available.
Articles like these remind me of why great HTML markup is SO VERY important to accessability, and forward thinking. One of the points which is made is that the HTML outline is used by the screen readers to not only describe where the reader is, but also describes the importance of that information which is being read. Ironically, I do not believe I have ever worked for a company which specifically targeted their audience which may require the accessability standards which are now in place. Just like you and me, people who need the accessability standards work, shop and play online. It is important to make sure that we test not only for the vast majority of our users, but we also test for those who may need that extra little push of our time at the end of the day.
I hope that you find the video as compelling as I did.
Tags: accessability
Posted by admin on Dec 9, 2008 in
browsers It goes hand in hand with unobtrusive javascript, and really is just another name for the same thing. Here are some quotes from some decent articles on the subject:
from Dan’s Web Tips by Daniel Tobias
“Graceful Degradation” is an important principle in Web design. It means that, when you put in features designed to take advantage of the latest and greatest features of newer browsers, you should do it in a way that older browsers, and browsers letting users disable particular features, can “step down” to a method that still allows access to the basic content of the site, though perhaps not as snazzy in appearance.
from Augmentative authoring
- a different look at “graceful degradation” in Web authoring
The phrase “graceful degradation” is often used to describe the idea that a Web page that uses special technologies for presentation enhancements, animation, interactivity, etc., should “degrade” to a simpler, yet fully functional page in circumstancies where the technologies are not applicable. This document takes a somewhat different view: instead of considering how to provide “fallbacks” for various advanced constructs, we consider how to create first a robust document that works always, then augment it by providing optional alternatives to the simple constructs. We’ll discuss the different techniques that are needed for different enhancements.
We currently have a lot of old legacy javascript menus which contain all of the links to the various places on our sites. In our latest efforts, dubbed T2, we have introduced Spry and YUI libraries which use non-obtrusive javascript to manage the menus, sliding panels, collapsible panels and popups. In the article JS Menus – Good or Evil? the author highlights a few good reasons to get rid of those old javascript only menus and replace them with the new-fangled way of doing things in the Web 2.0 world, like Suckerfish. This article was written sometime in 2003, so it is quite old (as is the Suckerfish reference), however you will find after looking at the Suckerfish article that the SpryMenu we are using is actually uses this exact unobtrusive theory.
Tags: accessability, css, graceful degredation, javascript
