For Web Developers

A long road to web accessibility

Making a website accessible. People often ask how difficult it is to do. Actually, it’s not as difficult as most people think. All websites are accessible from the get-go if they’re built with well-structured, semantic HTML. If you add colours with good contrast, fonts that are easy and big enough… Read More

It’s official. Time to add WCAG 2.1 Guidelines to your workflow

After many years of development, WCAG 2.1 is now an official recommendation. (Remember to add WCAG 2.1 guidelines to your workflow!) The new guidelines focus on a few key areas: improving user interaction on mobile improving visual perception for users with low vision making things clearer for users with cognitive… Read More

Designing for Accessibility – Quick Tip

Understanding all the nuances of designing an accessible website can be overwhelming.  If you’re just getting to know the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), it can be even harder to grasp. Posters for Dos and Don’ts Thankfully, the Digital Office for the UK has developed a series of posters that provide easy to… Read More

How will you mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day?

The idea of a Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) was hatched by Joe Devon’s blog post in 2011. It didn’t take long for the accessibility community to jump on the idea and make this day an annual event. This year, over 50 in-person and virtual events are planned to get people… Read More

What’s involved in making websites accessible?

It’s not unusual for people to think that making a website accessible requires complex code, fancy tricks, boring design and a lot of money. In fact, making websites accessible is straightforward once you know what’s involved. The World Wide Web Consortium (affectionately known as W3C) has developed Web Content Accessibility… Read More

PDF Accessibility Testing

The 3rd Annual Accessibility Camp Toronto was held this past weekend at OCAD University. For anyone interested in digital accessibility, it’s a must attend event. If your organization uses PDFs to any extent, either on your website or internally, you’ll want to watch the presentation given by Denis Boudreau. In this… Read More

There is no quick fix for web accessibility

We often come across service providers who offer tools they say will make your web site accessible. These tools usually require software or a plugin to be downloaded and installed by the end user. More often than not, these tools will only work on Windows but not a Mac. While… Read More

Quick Tip: Web Accessibility. Test with automated tools but …

It’s always good practice to test your pages or WordPress templates for accessibility before you release them to the world. There are all kinds of great tools for checking your site’s web accessibility. Test your site with WAVE from Web AIM, check the colour contrast of your site. These tools are effective… Read More

Misconceptions about Web Accessibility

Despite the best efforts of so many web accessibility champions, there still exist many misconceptions – and much misunderstanding – about what it all means. Just this week, I had a conversation with a colleague who needed to include accessibility in the scope of the project. “We need to make… Read More

Web accessibility starts with the design

An accessible website is made up of more than clean, well-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript.  Yes, the code behind the scenes is important.  If it’s not written with accessibility in mind, chances are the site won’t be accessible. However, the visual design of a site is just as important when… Read More

Accessible websites start with a solid foundation

Is it possible to build an accessible website with beautiful graphics, cool JavaScript widgets and fancy forms? Sure, but it’s a real challenge if you don’t start with a solid foundation. A robust website starts with a bare-bones website stripped of it’s bells and whistles. It’s a website that is… Read More

Olympic sites fail to deliver on accessibility & universal design

The winter Olympic games have been an exciting, and sadly tragic, viewing experience for fans around the world.  The developers of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter games and CTV Olympics have built sophisticated websites offering a vast amount of information.  They’ve also opened up new ways to follow the games… Read More

New Year’s Resolution – An Accessible Website

A new year feels like a fresh start for many of us.  It’s a time for breaking old habits or starting new ones.  And, it’s an opportunity to commit to doing things better.  Has making your website accessible been added to your list of resolutions? An accessible website can be… Read More

3 Common Web Accessibility Mistakes that are Easy to Fix

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time this past week looking at websites – big and small – to see how accessible they are and where they tend to fall short.  It hasn’t been a scientific survey but 3 common areas have stood out: Missing form labels Missing alternative… Read More

Web Accessibility vs. Usability

It can be very easy to get caught up in the process of making a website accessible.  There are many technical details that a web developer needs to pay attention to and content writers need to consider.  But web accessibility doesn’t always guarantee usability.  Web accessibility is really a sub-set… Read More

Font Size Switchers – Are they a good idea?

It’s not uncommon these days to see font size switchers (and other style switchers) on websites.  They certainly make the task of increasing font sizes a bit less cumbersome.  But, from an accessibility standpoint, do you add any value?  I’d say that’s a discussion open for debate. On the plus… Read More

WCAG 2.0 – The Simple Version

Trying to get a handle on the WCAG 2.0 from the W3C website can be an onerous task.   The guidelines are quite comprehensive but it can take hours to wade through all the details.   In a nutshell, here’s what you need to keep in mind when building or… Read More