http://www.communis.co.uk/blog Notes from the sharp end of web accessiblity Wed, 08 Mar 2006 19:42:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Communis’ site for the Environment Agency’s SMURF Project website has been awarded the Special Award for Innovation at the Visionary Design Awards presented by the National Library for the Blind. Held at the Russell Hotel in London on 2 March 2006, the Visionary Design Awards recognise organisations that have worked to ... http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2006-03-03-visionary-design-innovation-say-nlb Had an interesting conversation with Google code research the other day, regarding their fascinating analysis of tag usage on websites. In December 2005 they analysed a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. Hours of fun. I wanted to know ... http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2006-02-16-heading-for-nowhere Poor contrast between text and background is one of the most common accessibility problems on websites, and one of the hardest to instantly diagnose. If you have normal vision, a mid grey on a white background may be perfectly readable, and it is often used to colour, for example, copyright ... http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2006-01-04-the-art-of-contrast This unusually helpful Microsoft article about IE text sizes is required reading for pixel-perfect elastic designs. http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2005-12-19-ie-text-size-values An interesting post on Slashdot about browser share suggests that around 85% visits to the BBC homepage over a week in September were made by browsers identifying themselves as Internet Explorer. Firefox has a respectable 9.7% share of visits. A couple of caveats apply, however. Firstly there are automated web ... http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2005-10-24-bbc-homepage-browser-share-figures Some recent user testing of ours has suggested some ways to further improve the way we implement skip links. Unlike many others, our recommended method of implementing skip links ensures that all keyboard users ’see’ the skip link, as it appears visually on screen when a user tabs to it, and ... http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2005-10-19-skip-links-the-saga-continues Our implementation of the Incident Decision Tree went live today. It’s a tool for NHS managers and senior clinicians to follow a decision-making pathway after certain types of incidents occur in the (UK) National Health Service. Communis were invited to transform a CD-ROM kiosk application (containing content for the secondary healthcare ... http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2005-10-04-accessible-web-application-for-the-nhs Within the last few weeks, Macromedia released Studio 8, including All indications are that it’s Flash which has received the biggest overhaul, with relatively minor evolution in Coldfusion 8. But will it be more accessible? Well, there’s no mention of accessibility in the flash Flash intro <sigh>, but… Macromedia’s own accessibility ... http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2005-09-29-flash-8-is-it-more-accessible We are now fairly certain that we have the perfect skip link implementation, after much discussion and testing. There are several problems that may be found in skip link implementations. The skip links themselves Most problems here derive from the fact that many designers like to hide their skip links. Problematic implementations ... http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2005-08-18-the-search-for-the-perfect-skip-link The profile of accessibility barriers for older users is getting raised at the moment, with revisions to W3C WAI documents to mention aging specifically, and also work such as OlderWiserWired. It’s hardly rocket science, but it’s about time design was approached from a more general ‘accessibility’ point of view, challenging ... http://www.communis.co.uk/blog/2005-08-12-heuristics-for-sites-for-older-adults