Accessible Rich Media: SXSW 2008
As a designer, I rely on my vision to impart a hierarchy of data within web pages. It takes a jarring reminder from the smart folks at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival to remind me that not everyone can see the colors I painstakingly deliberate over, the varied and specific shades that I cross-browser test for universal appeal. Even color contrast can be lost to a slight case of color-blindness.
Assistive technologies are on the rise, and we learned about a full spectrum that are available now. Fortunately resources exist, and the Panel at this year's SXSW, led by Susan L. Gerhart of apodder.org, Beck Gibson from IBM, Lisa Pappas of the SAS Institute, and Sharon Rush from Knowability, educated a room full of eager designers.
Color Contrast Analyzer
A color contrast analyzer is an application that can test for the level of color contrast present in your text and background colors in order to allow the content to pass minimum standards to be viewed by all.
Accessibility extensions are available for Firefox, the developer's favorite open source software, that will scan for image tags, alt tags, titles, and even test the logical hierarchy of your header tags. When screen readers are involved, this logic and attentiveness is crucial.
Accessibility tools
Dreamweaver even offers accessibility reports that will keep your code up-to-date. This movement has many practical business benefits. Aside from basic usability standards, your content can reach a larger potential audience, raise public opinion of your company, allow scalability across devices such as the increasingly affordable mobile web.
A lack of attention to these factors pose a potential litigation risk. Target.com is embroiled in a lawsuit due to the fact that the online clearance section is inaccessible for screen readers. This effectively denies a segment of the population the resources to shop equally.
There is a paradigm shift occurring towards the over-used term Web 2.0 (sorry I don't have a glossy shiny button here to illustrate my point...) but this is primarily among the tech savvy population. The majority of the population of the world is still on web 1.0 terms, with javascript turned off, slow modems, and old flash players.
ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) adds role semantics to user interface elements. It can update state information dynamically, and add keyboard event handling to minimize tab navigation, allowing logical arrow keys to be used by screen readers for the visually impaired.
Dojo is another technology that relies on open source javascript toolkit to create core widget accessibility. Now that you have the resources, get out there and learn the tools!
