Accessible web applications

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.

http://developer.yahoo.net	42
http://developer.yahoo.com	17
http://www.webteacher.ws	9
http://www.slideshare.net	8
http://bertrandkeller.info	7
http://www.bertrandkeller.info	7
http://icant.co.uk	3
http://www.wait-till-i.com	3
http://feeds.developer.yahoo.net	2
http://www.hanrss.com	1
http://onwebdev.blogspot.com	1
http://209.85.229.132	1
http://stevensongraphicdesign.webs.com	1

by Christian Heilmann on Mar 27, 2009