Accessites.org
The Art of Accessibility

Accessibility and web accessibility are often highlighted as issues for people with disabilities. This is no surprise, all things considered, given the common definition of accessibility. “Disability” is, however, an almost meaninglessly broad term. Many of those who could be considered disabled would not choose to self-identify as disabled. “Disability” is a label, and like any label, the members of the labeled group are diverse and may exhibit the label in unexpected ways.

Continue reading “Leveling the Playing Field: We’re all Differently Abled” »

WordPress’ handling of empty site search inputs is far from satisfactory. Because the search form references the overall site address, submission of an empty search causes the site’s home page to be displayed. No error report. Nothing to indicate what has happened. Nada. Zilch. Nothing!

The solution, however, is blindingly simple and merely involves a few, fairly simple, changes to three WordPress theme files.

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Many sites are built using WordPress (WP) as the content management system (CMS). Not just blogs but full-blown ecommerce sites and others. The power and flexibility of WP is evident by these implementations. And speaking of implementations, it was used as the CMS for a site recently built as a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 implementation, to the level of AAA (one of two in the world with the other being Vision Australia). To learn more about that, here’s a short summary of the experience. This article is about WordPress’s end of things.

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Sooner or later, you’re bound to come across an article, or blog entry, that talks about text size widgets. What exactly are these widgets and are they of any real use? A text-size widget is a link, input or user control that allows users to view the site via an alternative style sheet with a larger, or smaller, relative font. The widget itself may be a short piece of text such as “Large Text” or it could be a small icon. Some sites offer a whole range of small, medium and large ‘A’ icons that change the text size. But, at the end of the day, it has to be said that this kind of accessibility option does replicate functionality that is probably best accomplished through the user’s own browser. So do these widgets offer any practical user support?

Continue reading “Wrangling Widgets” »