Web Accessibility For Developers
Recently, I polled people via Hacker News and Twitter about the things they’d like me to share about web accessibility given my experience as both a web developer and a daily user of assistive technology. The questions I received are great, and I’ll be writing a series of posts over the next few months about various ways developers can improve the accessibility of their sites for not only disabled users, but for everyone.
To kick this off, you can read my latest article in the October issue of PragPub Magazine, entitled “HTML5: Accessibility For All” where I discuss some of the new accessibility features in HTML5 that make sites easier to use for both screen readers and mobile devices.
In the coming weeks, you can expect to see articles on
- Improving audio and video for the web
- Colorblindness
- Learning disabilities
- more concrete progressive enhancement
- Motor impairment issues
- low vision issues
and many more.
I hope you follow along.
I don’t expect any author to give me the answer to all the problems I’m going to face when constructing an application, but I was wondering if this blog or your PragProg book cover any of the following:
*How to handle designing for two paths: the one with JavaScript and the one without
*Accessible Validation or Accessible Attention Getting
*Accessible DOM manipulation: showing, hiding, inserting, and deleting elements
*How to use unobtrusive scripts for pagination and etc.
@Robert:
My HTML5 book covers a lot of unobtrusive JS solutions, and mentions how those improve accessibility, but it’s not a book about accessibility.
The blog posts I’m working on will cover most of those. But if you can do all of those things without using JavaScript (which is not difficult at all) then you’ve done them in an accessible manner.