Articles

An ARIA alert Test Case

I put together a few examples of ARIA alerts and tested them with JAWS and NVDA in Firefox 3.6, Internet Explorer 7 and 8. The interesting bit is how alerts can be improved for JAWS 10 in Internet Explorer by adding an aria-live attribute value of “assertive”. Continue reading

Not All ARIA Widgets Deserve role="application"

There are currently some great examples of WAI-ARIA-enabled widgets out there making the rounds. In particular, there’s Hans Hillen’s JQuery Widget Samples and the collection from the OpenAjax Alliance. These are nothing short of very useful. After all, ARIA is yet to be a full W3C recommendation (or standard, if you prefer), and we are all, or at least I… Continue reading

Programmatically Determined

The phrase “programmatically determined” features prominently in six of the 61 WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria. It’s a bit of a mouthful, for sure, and perhaps a little daunting to those getting into accessibility and WCAG for the first time, but it’s really not that complicated. Whatever the case, I think “programmatically determined” is a very useful concept for explaining, particularly to web developers, something about WCAG, what web accessibility means and why the proper use of HTML is so important. Continue reading

An HTML5 plus ARIA "Sanity Check": Working Around Bugs in AT

Dennis at WebAxe recently called for developers to take a “sanity check” when working with HTML5. His point was not to dissuade us from developing with HTML5, but to remind us to do so “caution and care”, in particular because of the current level of support among different browsers and assistive technnologies (AT) for HTML5 and WAI-ARIA. But what do we do when faced with a user agent or AT that, as a result of a bug in its software, and instead of simply ignoring what it doesn’t understand, actively misbehaves when it comes across this or that HTML5 construct or ARIA attribute? Continue reading

VoiceOver and Tables with an Empty First Header Cell

The Problem I noticed some interesting behaviour with VoiceOver 3 when working with data tables whose first cell in the first, or header, row is an empty td element. In these cases, VoiceOver does not correctly associate data cells with their proper column th header cells. Instead, VoiceOver seems to shift the header cells one column to the left, such… Continue reading

Title Attributes as Form Control Labels

Sometimes, often as a result of a web page’s layout or design, a label element cannot be used to identify a form control. Certainly, one can always use a visually hidden label, which is my preferred approach: you never know how the design might change in the future, at which point, if you’ve already got the label in the markup,… Continue reading

Header Elements Removed

A few weeks ago, it was discovered that JAWS 10 and 11 (and so far, JAWS 12 beta), when used in conjunction with Firefox 3.6 (or Firefox 4 beta), simply cannot find or use any content contained within the HTML5 header element. Terrill Thompson’s test page makes this clear. It turns out that it is a bug with Freedom Scientific’s… Continue reading

Accessible ARIA Tabs

The WAI-ARIA specification remains unfinished and its implementation incomplete. All the same, some of it, e.g., landmark roles, can be used right now to improve the accessibility of web content and applications without causing a detrimental effect in older browsers or assistive technologies. I’m a big fan of WAI-ARIA, and think it is already a very useful collection of techniques… Continue reading

"Continue Reading" Links in WordPress

I recently rebuilt this site using WordPress 3.0, which was a lot of fun. Part of the fun was developing my own theme to try and make greater use of HTML5 and to improve accessibility. I did this by making changes to the various template files that come with the default Twenty Ten theme. One of the changes I made… Continue reading