At CSUN 2012, the ATIA, Microsoft, and other companies laid forth a proposal plan to create a professional organization around the Accessibility profession. Among the topics of discussion on that day was certification. The next day I posed the question on this blog What does it take to call yourself an accessibility expert?. Cyndi Rowland …
My name is Karl Groves. I’ve been involved in Web Development, Usability, and Accessibility since the late 1990s. Living in the Washington DC area, and working in accessibility my professional career in this field has always involved Section 508. In 2006 I was excited to hear about the Refresh process. As a web developer, the …
A few weeks ago, Asa and I added a page to Tenon’s documentation that lists What Tenon Tests in reaction to questions about “How much WCAG coverage” Tenon has. I had already covered, at a high level at least, what can be tested and how quite a while ago and, while Tenon only tests a …
On my site and on Twitter, I try to exude positivity and pragmatism. I try to tone down my admittedly strong personality as a way to ensure that what I write is well received. Sometimes I succeed. For the most part I tend to frown upon random bitch sessions about how bad everything is on …
One of the more frustrating things about accessibility is how ridiculously easy most things are to do. While most developers tend to see accessibility as nebulous and time consuming, the truth is some of the most impactful issues are actually easy to deal with. As a case-in-point: consider simple keyboard accessibility for custom controls otherwise …
I’ve historically been very critical of the various Business Case arguments for accessibility given their lack of actual evidence. There’s one business case argument that I think is rock solid: The cost of remediation. The cost of remediation actually has two faces: The actual time-on-task it takes to fix issues, of course, but also the …
Yes, that was a purposefully click-bait headline. One of the most frustrating things for users is unclear or unintuitive form constraints. My personal pet peeve are phone number, credit card, or SSN/ EIN fields which ask for numeric-only entry. While it may very well be necessary that your field use only numeric data, you don’t …
Several weeks ago, Bryan Garaventa made a post to the WAI-IG mailing list. The email thread went somewhat sideways, because some list members didn’t “get it” but it died down quickly enough. AccessIQ reignited the issue, wondering “…do web accessibility professionals have a sense of humour?” My response? Clearly the answer is NO. Even when …
Today I came across a post by Simon Harper titled Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools Only Produce a 60-70% Correctness which is essentially a response to my earlier critique of a seriously flawed academic paper. I submitted a response on Simon’s site, but I want to copy it here for my regular readers. One thing that …
I’ve had an epiphany. Accessibility Consulting, that process where a client hires us to go through their system, test it for accessibility issues, and submit a report to them, is fundamentally broken. My personal interpretation of our goal, as professionals, is to make money doing Good. Our advanced level of knowledge, skills, and experience can …