Web Accessibility Acronyms - Spring Break Conference 2008

Web Accessibility Acronyms (WCAG, WAI-ARIA, JAWS) - WTF? Andrea Hill Resource Interactive [email_address] http://www.afhill.com /blog/

Web Accessibility Acronyms

The purpose of this session is for us to establish a common language so we can discuss accessibility

Feel free to add, edit or argue!

Overview

Regulations and Guidelines

Involved Parties

APIs

Assistive Technologies

How RIA changes everything!

What does “accessible” mean?

Usable by everyone, everywhere

Can be picked up by screen readers

Can be navigated without using a mouse

Follows legal guidelines/standards

Can be found on google

Two Motivating Factors

Usability - the idea that a person can access your content (hopefully easily)

Regulatory Compliance - that you adhere to established protocol

Regulatory Compliance

Section 508

WCAG

ADA

DDA

Section 508 Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998.

Electronic technology that is created, procured or maintained by Federal agencies must comply with established regulations.

Also refers to agencies who receive Federal funding (post-secondary educational institutions)

Institutions have the obligation to secure the “most accessible” solution

Section 508 - VPAT VPAT - Voluntary Product Accessibility Statement.

Essentially a three column table outlining how a product meets or does not meet Section 508 regulations.

Allows the product to be listed on the BuyAccessible website

http://www.bna.com/corp/vpat.htm

WCAG1.0 (Wu-CAHG) Web Content Authoring Guidelines

Section 508 was based on WCAG (released at the same time, 98/99)

Three levels of compliance:

Priority 1: one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document.

Priority 2: one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document.

Priority 3: one or more groups may find it difficult to access information in the document.

There is no official governing body to enforce compliance.

Jim Thatcher’s comparison: http://jimthatcher.com/sidebyside.htm

WCAG2.0 (Wu-CAHG)

In Candidate Recommendation status as of 30 April 2008

Initially met with industry critique as being too difficult to understand and too technology-agnostic.

Sites should be:

Perceivable

Operable

Understandable

Robust

Did incorporate more success measures (color contrast ratio)

ADA

Americans with Disabilities Act on 1990 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability in public and private sections

Target was a landmark case. For many years, web sites were not considered to be included under ADA.

“ This doesn't mean that the ADA applies to all Web sites, but on the other hand, if there's a bricks-to-clicks type of business and there is some integration of the experience between the two, I think the court is saying that those sites need to comply with the ADA,"

Court allows class-action lawsuit against Target Web site - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9040780

DDA

Disability Discrimination Act (United Kingdom)

The main part of the DDA that applied to websites came into force on 1 October 1999.

“ A disabled person who believes they have been discriminated against by a service provider can apply to the County Court for an order that the service provider makes their website accessible and compensation for "injury to feeling" for the discrimination they have faced.”

There are no known cases of sites being cited for non-compliance

Involved Parties

W3C

WAI

United States Access Board

AIA

Involved Parties

W3C

World Wide Web Consortium

“ an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.”

Mission: To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

enables public participation and promotes public accountability

Involved Parties

WAI

Web Accessibility Initiative

Subset of W3C

“ works with organizations around the world to develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.”

Currently working on WCAG2.0 as well as WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)

Involved Parties

Also known as the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board

“ The Access Board is an independent Federal agency devoted to accessibility for people with disabilities.”

Represents the public

TEITAC

Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committee

An advisory committee formed by the Access board to “a federal advisory committee provide recommendations for updates of accessibility standards issued under section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and guidelines under section 255 of the Telecommunications Act”

Involved Parties

AIA

Accessibility Interoperability Alliance

“ Initiated by the accessibility industry, the AIA is a group of leading Information Technology (IT) and Assistive Technology (AT) companies, content providers, and other key engineering organizations, working to create and harmonize standards for accessible technology.”

The first four AIA projects include:

User Interface (UI) Automation

Mapping WAI-ARIA to UI Automation

Interoperability of Accessibility APIs

Common Keyboard Shortcuts for AT Products Used with Web Browsers

Members include: Adobe, GW Micro, HP, Microsoft, Oracle.

Screen Readers

Screen Magnifiers

Pointing Devices

Screen Readers

JAWS - most popular screen reader software available. Very customizable.

Fire Vox - a FireFox extension that recognizes changes to the DOM.

Window-Eyes, HAL

Introduction to Screen Readers

APIs

MSAA

IAccessible2

UI Automation

APIs

MSAA

Microsoft Active Accessibility

The means by which Flash communicates with assistive technologies

Windows only!

APIs

IAccessible2

Developed by the Free Standards Group.

Extends, does not replace, MSAA

“ The standardized interfaces make it far easier for application developers to provide accessible applications to computer users with disabilities, regardless of their OS platform.”

APIs

(Microsoft) UI Automation

Exposes user interface controls for test automation and assistive technology.

Part of the .NET framework starting at 3.0.

Successor of MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility)

Tools are available royalty-free on all operating systems that support Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

While UI Automation is trumpeted as "royalty-free", IAccessible2 claims to be an "open standard".

How RIA Changes Everything!

RIA

WAI-ARIA

AxsJAX

AjaxAID

What does “RIA” mean?

“ The promise of rich clients includes the ability to cleanly separate presentation logic and user interfaces from the application logic hosted on the network. Rich clients should provide a model for easily using remote services provided by back-end components, whether hosted in an application server or accessed as XML Web Services” (J. Allaire, 2002) [1]

A departure from the traditional “page refresh” to retrieve data

WAI-ARIA

Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications

Introduced in September 2006

Roadmap

Roles

States/Properties

AxsJAX

By the creator of Fire Vox, Charles Chen (and T.V. Raman)

User-implemented via bookmarklet, Greasemonkey script or Fire Vox

Injects accessibility-specific DOM properties into existing Web applications via JavaScript, providing a light-weight yet flexible mechanism for experimenting with various design patterns for enhancing the accessibility of AJAX applications.

Pre-requisites:

A modern Web browser like Firefox 2.0 or later that supports W3C ARIA.

Adaptive technologies that respond correctly to the accessibility enhancements introduced by W3C ARIA.

In particular, many of the enhancements injected by AxsJAX depend on support for live regions a feature that enables adaptive technologies like screen readers and self-voicing browsers deal correctly with asynchronous updates to portions of a Web page.

AjaxAid