Talking with clients & potential clients is always tricky. The last thing I want to do is offend someone, but there are some things I wish I could say up front and with frankness. As the saying goes, sometimes the truth hurts, so in the interest of politeness these messages are often skipped or glossed …
With the upcoming eventual issuance of a Final Rule for Section 508 Refresh and deadlines for compliance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), as well as increasing rate of Web Accessibility-related lawsuits, I’ve become increasingly aware of people’s frequent misunderstanding of the purpose of what the term ‘Level’ represents in the Web …
On May 10, 2013, HiSoftware issued a press release: HiSoftware Gives the Cynthia Says Web Accessibility Testing Tool a Makeover . Eager to find out more about this new version, I eagerly went to the site to check it out. This is what I saw: Who puts a CAPTCHA on an Accessibility Testing Tool? CAPTCHA’s …
Quick: what is this? If the word “Button” comes to mind, you might be right. Unfortunately we’ve been seeing a lot of instances in our testing where an image or CSS styling is used to trigger an action of some kind. Here are some markup samples: 
Continue readingLinks are not buttons. Neither are DIVs and SPANs
Often when I talk to clients, I am asked the following question: “Can we track how many users with disabilities access our site?”. The question itself is always asked with good intentions. The client wants to be able to provide an improved experience for persons with disabilities. Here’s my answer to a recent similar query: …
4.1.2 Name, Role, Value: For all user interface components (including but not limited to: form elements, links and components generated by scripts), the name and role can be programmatically determined; states, properties, and values that can be set by the user can be programmatically set; and notification of changes to these items is available to …
“For any technology with a percentage market penetration of X, protecting a benefit/resource with a relative worth of Y, and possessing a relative security strength of Z, the probability that said technology will eventually be compromised is X + Y.” Brian Huisman Below is a list of resources I dug up that illustrate that CAPTCHA …
Many academic papers dealing with web accessibility make use of automated tools as part of their research. For instance, one recently published paper did a comparative analysis of the Forbes 250. Unfortunately, the tool in use did not test the DOM of the pages it analyzed. On one hand, you can say that at least …
I could fill a book with transcripts of frustrating conversations I’ve had with executives, project managers, and developers who – to put it politely – exhibited an amazing mastery of stopping a constructive conversation in its tracks by offering up excuse after excuse about why they couldn’t buy or develop an accessible ICT product or …
In which I say a whole bunch of things that are unpopular. “I find your lack of faith disturbing” Let’s face it, there are some people who have read the previous posts in this series and thought “This advice is fine and dandy, but there are so many roadblocks to accessibility where I work that …