Accessible
web applica,ons
Chris,an Heilmann ‐ European Accessibility Forum, Frankfurt/Main, 27/03/09

A lot of web applica,ons
are not accessible.

There are several
reasons for this.

Changing exis,ng web
applica,ons is possible,
but a pain.

In a lot of cases,
maintainers of web apps
are simply not aware of
the issues they cause.

So we need to
find and tell
people the real
informa,on.
hJp://scrip,ngenabled.org/presenta,ons/

And then show in easy
proof of concepts that
the change can happen
and have an impact.

This can have a massive
impact.

hJp://icant.co.uk/easy‐youtube/

hJp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHBvqwRAduw
hJp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwsDKaalgq8&
hJp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiuT0y0KR6I

hJp://video.yahoo.com

Do you need to be a
coding wizard to show
how changes can be
made?

hJp://www.nicosteiner.de/archives/118‐YQL,‐YUI‐und‐
Yahoo!‐Pipes.html

hJp://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/

This can help you with an
exis,ng app, but what
about new ones?

What we should
concentrate on is how do
we create new apps in a
way that is accessible.

Here are some ideas...

Simplicity

List of links?
ARIA enabled tab control?

How about radio group?

Data table?
Grid control?

What about a
heading structure
with lists and
clever CSS?

Excellence

hJp://finance.yahoo.com/currency‐converter?u#from=USD;to=GBP;amt=1
hJp://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/01/accessible_converter.html

Re‐use

Web applica,ons can be
built using exis,ng lego
bricks of controls.

We’ve already created all
of these bricks in
libraries: Dojo, YUI,
jQuery...

And now more and more
of those get ARIA
support for accessibility.

hJp://yuiblog.com/blog/category/accessibility/

And we share our
findings and ideas.

All we want is for you to
make it worth our while
by building upon our
efforts.