Inspired by Al Duggin’s browser based tests for accessibility in his kick ass post building a web page with accessibility and interoperability in mind, I thought I’d put some tests together for mobile. This is intended as a guide you can use in day-to-day testing – you should be able to answer ‘yes’ to each question.
Huge thanks to Tim Kadlec and the Breaking Development team for interviewing me for their Freshly Squeezed podcast series about mobile accessibility (including a transcript).
In it we chat about being caught with your pants down, choosing your own chocolate biscuits and staying employable as a web developer. All important stuff. Oh, and bit about mobile and responsive design too.
For more information about how people with disabilities use the web check out the Web Accessibility Initiative’s freshly updated mobile accessibility resources.
A lot has been written about how to technically implement WAI ARIA Landmarks but from a human perspective just how usable are they for screen reader users?
Landmarks are a way of providing semantic markup to areas of a page that otherwise are not signposted for screen reader users. By carving up your page into areas marked up as application, banner, complementary, contentinfo, form, main, navigation and search you provide an outline that screen reader users can navigate using a keyboard shortcut. Done well this means users can navigate between content areas such as the main content, navigation and footer, in a similar way that sighted user rely on layout to inform the eye.
While the use of Landmarks becomes the norm I’m not convinced that we are really thinking about the user when we add them. Here are few thoughts based on some of the implementations I’ve seen on the web recently.
I first got to know Kim Patch when we worked together on the W3C User Agent Accessibility Working Group. As a resident of the Web since it’s inception and a long term voice input / non mouse user I was always fascinated to hear what she had to say about making web content, and how a browser interprets that content, accessible.
In this chat Kim discusses barriers of access and highlights what we as web designers and developers should be thinking about when building websites and apps for people who may not use a mouse.Continue Reading Hands free browsing – an interview with Kim Patch
Good news for mobile voice output users as this week the guys over at Mozilla released further accessibility enhancements for Firefox in a nightly build. In addition to this Chrome was released into the Apple App store and also comes with accessibility baked in complementing it’s counterpart on Android which also recently became more accessible.Continue Reading Accessible Firefox and Chrome on Android and iOS
I was honoured to be invited to keynote at Mobile Monday London on inclusive and accessible design. It’s a topic that needs more air time within the mobile community so it was great to share a few thoughts and pieces of research.
I was sad not to be there in person and have to give a huge thanks Kath Moonan and Nisha Valand who moved heaven and earth so I could Skype in last minute as my daughter was poorly. Thanks also to Mobile Monday, Vodafone, Jo Rabin and everyone who attended and put up with a small interruption from my daughter…
Below is a copy of my slides, and if you’re looking for something more meaty check out my Mobile Accessibility slides presented from CSUN 2012. Any questions please get in touch (henny at iheni dot com).