Measuring accessibility

Determining the accessibility of websites is often polarised around two simplistic choices: A checklist-compliance based approach or user testing by people with disabilities. This article considers the pros and cons of both approaches.

‘Fluro’ Colours

My attention was recently drawn by Jenny Bruce to the relatively large number of sites that use bright ‘fluro’ background colours for navigation menu items and buttons. The combination of these ‘fluro’ background colours and white text often fails to meet the minimum colour contrast requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, whereas, when […]

Ten Common Accessibility Problems

Over the years, I have reviewed the accessibility of a number of sites. This document outlines ten common accessibility issues I have encountered which could result in a site’s failure to fully comply with WCAG 2.0. The document includes links to some of the WCAG 2 advisory Sufficient Techniques provided by the W3C for addressing […]

WCAG Rethink?

The slides and speakers notes from my CSUN 2010 presentation: “Ten Years of Web Content Accessibility Rules: Time for a Rethink?” Following my talk at the CSUN conference in March 2010, several people have asked me to make available the slides. They also asked if it would be possible to get a transcript since many […]

WCAG 2 – Don’t Panic

After nearly a year of deliberation, the Australian government has finally decided to move from using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) to WCAG 2.0 as the benchmark for website accessibility. On Wednesday February 24, The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) announced: “Government agencies will transition to WCAG 2.0 over a four year […]

Australia goes WCAG 2

On Tuesday 23 February the Minister for Finance, Lindsay Tanner, announced the Australian Government had endorsed WCAG 2.0. The press release by Minister Tanner contained few details, but said all government websites would need to comply with WCAG 2.0 by 2015. “These new standards will improve the ability of people with a broad range of […]

WCAG 2.0 and Accessibility Supported

Web accessibility is at the cross-roads. The WCAG of 1999 is not able to meet the needs of the web today, with its enhanced interactivity, greater community engagement and the proliferation of new technologies. WCAG 2.0 is supposed to address this problem by looking not at the technologies used to generate web content, but at […]

Adopting WCAG 2

It is six months since the release of WCAG 2.0 and I thought it might be interesting to see how extensively it has been adopted as a bench mark for determining web content accessibility. Over this time, I have felt that the rate of adoption has been relatively slow and the number of countries and […]

WCAG 2.0 Released: At last

After a long and sometimes tortuous process, the W3C has finally released Version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines on December 11 2008. PRESS RELEASE “Today W3C announces a new standard that will help Web designers and developers create sites that better meet the needs of users with disabilities and older users. Drawing on […]

Accessible forms using WCAG 2.0

Accessible Forms using WCAG 2.0″ is the first of a series of documents to help web professionals use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2.0 to develop accessible websites.