Accessibility

Website Accessiblity - Simulating Colour Blindness

Michael Falconer — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 11:49:00 GMT

Ever wondered how your site looks to someone who is colourblind? Then try the Vischeck on a webpage. It's free and, with 1 in 20 people having some sort of colour vision deficiency, makes for interesting viewing.

Here's how this site looks:

Accessibility and max-width in Internet Explorer

Michael D. Falconer — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 19:10:00 GMT

I'm starting off two fairly major web projects at the moment, and have decided that it's finally time to ditch the good old tables that are so popular for laying out pages. Instead I'm going to develop both sites using stylesheet positioning only. Before I launch into cutting some code, I've been doing some research into the best way to achieve certain desired effects, and come across some excellent resources.

One of those is svendtofte.com, a Swedish site (in English) by Svend Tofte. He's written some very good articles covering various CSS and JavaScript topics, one of which I was particularly interested in; max-width in Internet Explorer.Both sites I'm developing will have a fair bit of readable content and I want to ensure they're as accessible as possible, so I'm going to avoid specifying fonts and element positioning in pixels and use em's. In order to achieve this I want to be able to set a min and max width for the content but, as it turns out, IE does not support the min-width and max-width properties. Luckily Svend has come up with a solution by using IE's expression property. I won't steal Svend's thunder, so why not check out the article...

CSS Float

Michael D. Falconer — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 12:16:00 GMT

I'm in the process of developing a search function for a client which has to be accessible. When looking at how to make the form more accessible I wanted to remove the traditional table used to create the typical layout of label to the left, form element on the right. It's actually remarkably easy, especially when I was sent this link as an example on how to do it. I've also been reading the Floatutorial on css.maxdesign.com.au which gives you all the details you need on the float css element.

It'll be interesting to see how the server controls in ASP.NET Whidbey will make sites more accessible. For a bit of a heads up, check out this article by Scott Guthrie.

Adding a Web browser control to a windows form application : Solution #1

Michael D. Falconer — Thu, 27 May 2004 13:37:00 GMT

As I mentioned here, I've been trying to solve a problem with a web browser control embedded in a Windows Form application. I found that if you use this method to pass the HTML page as a string, when the web browser control gets focus while tabbing, it will not release it until you click on the contents. Not usually a big issue, but when the spec for the form says it must be accessible without the use of a pointnig device, it counts! This was compounded by the fact that when the web browser did get focus, it would not let you scroll the page using the Page keys.

After toiling over it, I found that you have to do four things to make it work in an acceptable fashion (not necessarily the best way):

Add an anchor to the page
Add a form elements to the page
Add some JavaScript to the page to give the form element focus
Not pass the HTML in as a string

So what I did was:

Write the HTML string to a temporary file, and load it in by calling the web browsers Navigate method
Use the following HTML page template to give the form element focus when the page is initially loaded:

<html>

<head>

INPUT { WIDTH: 8px; BORDER-TOP-STYLE: none; BORDER-RIGHT-STYLE: none; BORDER-LEFT-STYLE: none; HEIGHT: 18px; BORDER-BOTTOM-STYLE: none }

</style>

</head>

</form>

</body>

</html>

Phew. And after all that, the user can tab around the windows form, and successfully get the web page to scroll if necessary. It's not pretty, it's not ideal, but it works. The only issue with it is that when the user is tabbing around the form, when focus gets to the web browser control the first stop is invisible (I'm assuming this is when the browser control itself has focus), the second is the form element, and the third is the anchor (when this has focus you can scroll).

Windows form embedded IE browser - tabbing order

Michael D. Falconer — Mon, 24 May 2004 16:15:00 GMT

I've been struggling with this problem all afternoon. If anyone out there can come up with an answer, please post a reply on experts-exchange!!

[UPDATE] : Just added this post with a possible solution...

Disability Rights Commision report on web accessibility

Michael D. Falconer — Tue, 18 May 2004 15:53:00 GMT

The official report published by the Disability Rights Commission following their investigation into web accessibility has been published here.

I've been following the progress of the investigation, largely from the news articles on out-law.com. One of the findings that surprised me the most was the fallibility of the automatic testing tools; while they were never expected to be perfect, the report found that '45% [of accessibility and usability problems] were not a violation of any Checkpoint and could therefore have been present on any WAI-conformant site regardless of rating.'