Accessites.org
The Art of Accessibility

Guest author, Jen Rohrig, looks at online video captioning on US TV networks.

Although I am hard of hearing myself, there was a time when I didn’t consider captions for online videos to be of great importance, since I rarely watched videos online. More recently, I’ve been watching some new online shows and would have been disappointed if captions hadn’t been available. In addition I’ve become more annoyed that interviews with favorite actors are being put online without captions as are clips and previews from TV shows or movies. Interviews can be especially troublesome because some actors either have strong accents or talk very fast — either of which can make it nearly impossible for me to understand them, even with the volume turned up on both the computer and my hearing aid.

Continue reading “Online Video Captioning” »

Le Web Accessible, the web site of web accessibility consultant Jean-François Naud, offers numerous touches which demonstrate a solid accessible web site. The site exhibits conscientious application of semantic HTML and headings, links are clearly evident on mouse-activated hover, and the layout is streamlined and simple, keeping distractions or potentially confusing content sequences to a minimum.

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Meeting the diverse needs of your site’s visitors is likely to mean a great deal more than ticking off individual accessibility checkpoints. You cannot just rely on an automated accessibility parser.

As Grant Broome explained, whilst automated testing is useful, it cannot replace a manual review or direct user testing. At Accessites, every site that meets our entry criteria is subjected to a manual review by a panel of Team Access members.

At no point do we rely on automated testing alone. Why?

Continue reading “Don’t Just Tick Boxes” »

When guest author Roger Hudson presents accessibility seminars or workshops, he usually asks those attending to indicate if they have seen a screen reader being used. Several years ago, it was not uncommon for only about 10 percent of the audience to indicate that they had. Recently, often more than three quarters of the people attending say they have seen a screen reader in use. However, nearly all assume a screen reader is an audio output device and when asked if they have seen a Braille device, the answer is usually no. So Roger and Braille user, Bruce Maguire, decided to create a video demonstrating a refreshable Braille device in use. They hope that this will provide viewers with both a basic understanding of how the device is operated and a feeling for what it might be like to access the web without relying on the senses of sight and hearing.

Continue reading “Refreshable Braille” »