Last week, a second United States federal judge ruled that state anti-discrimination laws do not apply to airline websites and kiosks. Following this decision, JetBlue staff have reacted rather crassly to the court’s decision, posting Twitter messages like the following: “We’re glad that the court validated our position that state law should not impact a …
In my post “Barriers to Improving the Accessibility Game Plan”, one of the things I said was: There is a shocking lack of independent and open knowledge out there on accessibility. If we were to assemble a full compendium of information that exists on accessibility on the web, what we’d find is that the information …
Download your Section 508 Waiver Download Your Free Section 508 Waiver Now! (PDF) OK, seriously now, where can you get a Section 508 Waiver? Information in the rest of this post is subject to change when the new revised Section 508 comes out sometime later this year or early next whenever the Access Board gets …
Introduction The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, or VPAT, was created by the Information Technology Industry Council as a means for vendors to supply information to government agencies regarding the level of compliance with the Technical, Functional Performance, and Documentation & Support requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. This documentation format can help procuring …
This past March, Jared Smith moderated a session at CSUN titled “Do We Need To Change the Web Accessibility Game Plan”. The discussion at and after the session was filled with interesting perspectives. The diversity of viewpoints demonstrates what a complex topic this really is. I’d like to take my stab at addressing this topic, …
During my career, I’ve performed scores of audits and expert reviews to look at the accessibility of web-based systems (websites, web-based applications, intranets, etc.). Of those, I can count on one hand the number of systems tested that were pre-production. In nearly all cases, the testing was performed on systems that were already released to …
As I sit here today, running through unit tests on the automated testing capabilities on AQUA (which later became Tenon), I’m left with the feeling that I owe it to anyone who uses such tools to tell them that nothing can replace the eyes of a skilled professional. The issue, in short, is that so …
During my 8+ years working in web usability and accessibility, I’ve frequently been party to or witnessed numerous conversations relating to the “business case” or “cost justification” of usability and accessibility efforts. In my opinion, the conversations usually don’t go well – particularly on the side of the usability/ accessibility advocate. Here’s how they usually …
Frequently on mailinglists, blog posts, and Twitter, I read about accessibility advocates decrying the sins of what they call “Checklist” accessibility. What the arguments attempt to assert is, essentially, that “Checklist” accessibility is not good enough, either because the checklists themselves are flawed or that the checklist takes the disabled user out of the equation …
As far back as August 2008, I’ve been aware of Ian Hickson’s fallacious arguments that elements and attributes of HTML4 should not be included in HTML5 merely because web authors misuse them. In the case of the longdesc attribute for img, similar arguments go back even farther. My feeling on such an approach has been …