Digital Internet Marketing

Technorati Tags: accessible websites, internet marketing, web accessibility

Can i get sued for not using accessibility(508) & web standards? althought my site is marked up to the web standards, i’d like to know if its possible?

If you could I’d be off suing 99.999% of the internet if only so I could get them to get their act together.

No, you can’t. They’re guidelines, not law. The only situation where accessibility guidelines aren’t an opt-in sort of thing is any sort of federal/government website. Anything that receives any sort of federal funding by law should comply with these standards.

That being said, it’s not really enforced except on major sites such as the Mass. Bay Transit Authority (who have an amazingly well built site, they got a Webbie for it).

As with CSS, my first real contact with accessibility came with my job at Salford. Although I was peripherally aware of the concept, and had previously heard mentions of the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), it was never something I thought I needed to concern myself with. However, researching some of the legal requirements involving educational websites in the UK, I inevitably came across SENDA (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Act) and the wider DDA (Disabilities Discrimination Act). To summarise very broadly, the DDA demands, among other things, that the provision of goods and services should be (within reason) accessible to anybody. In its initial state, the DDA did only cover businesses and government bodies, making a special exception for educational establishments. SENDA, which effectively became part IV of the DDA, removed this special status, bringing education back under the general provisions of the main DDA.

Although the Act itself does not directly mention web sites, the ‘Code of Practice – Rights of Access Goods, Facilities, Services and premises’ does, and it is understood that therefore all government, education and business sites need to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure a basic level of accessibility.

So, having started my position as web editor at the University of Salford and realising the legal requirement imposed by SENDA/DDA, I began delving deeper into the subject of accessibility. What I found was that, even among ‘seasoned’ web managers in the UK education sector and beyond, there was a lot of ignorance and confusion – coupled with misinformed management concerned with ‘Bobby validation’ as the be all and end all.

This sorry state of affairs, combined with the fact that, deep down, I feel that accessibility is simply the ethically/morally right thing to do, led me to explore this subject further. I find it fascinating that even though in recent years more and more sites, books and even conferences have been devoted to accessibility, there are still many grey areas once you move beyond the basics, where even experts can furiously disagree. It’s not all cut and dry, and in many instances one has to take a pragmatic approach, weighing up how things should be done (according to things like W3C specifications or even common sense) against how they work in practice (in light of flaky browser or assistive technology support, for instance).

WAI develops…
* guidelines widely regarded as the international standard for Web accessibility
* support materials to help understand and implement Web accessibility
* resources, through international collaboration
–
They are there to help content providers, web developers, graphic designers, and software developers to create accessible websites for the disabled, elderly, and devices other than the normal PC/MAC.

I want to talk with people who design flexible web sites that work on a cellphone, pda, iphone, blackberry, screen readers pwwebspeak, jaws, window-eyes and very large width screens in all browsers.

Are there discussion groups or forums out there?

You can try to use the site bellow:

http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=club&t=61656

The Portable Document Format (PDF) may be one of the most popular formats for posting documents to the Web, but it can also present a variety of barriers to access for people using screen-reading technologies. In this presentation, Sean Keegan, a premier expert on document and web accessibility, will address usability and accessibility issues of the PDF, strategies for the creation of accessible electronic documents, and the appropriate use of software applications to ensure accessibility of web documents.

Sean Keegan is the Web Accessibility Instructor at the High Tech Center Training Unit for the California Community Colleges. The High Tech Center Training Unit provides training and technical support to higher-education faculty and staff on the use of assistive computer technology for students’ with disabilities. As part of this continuing mission to improve access for students with disabilities, Sean conducts workshops and trainings to faculty and staff in the area of accessible web design, web usability, captioning of web-based multimedia, and the use of assistive computer technology.

http://www.htctu.net/

Duration : 1:20:38

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Technorati Tags: berkeley, cal, uc, yt:quality=high

http://www.peachpit.com/webaccessibility – Skip links are an accessibility feature that enable users to navigate a Web document. Author Andy Clarke shows you how to properly implement them throughout your site. This clip is part of Andy’s video Designing Web Accessibility for a Beautiful Web.

Duration : 0:6:6

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Technorati Tags: andy clarke, for a beautiful web, peachpit video on demand, skip links, web accessibility, web navigation, web standards

View a website the way a person with a vision impairment would – using a screenreader – and understand why “Click Here” is bad policy and why using a Skip Navigation link is good policy.

Duration : 0:3:4

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Technorati Tags: Accessibility, ADA, development, disabilities, imparied, internet, reader, screen, screereader, usability, vision, web

WCAG 2.0 Theme Song, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. All Instruments, vocals, video/audio production, videotaping by David MacDonald

Special thanks to Armando Prini, videotaping of David, use of video studio SATB studios.

Duration : 0:4:5

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Technorati Tags: Disability, Eramp, WCAG

is website accessibility is important for a website? if yes, how many popular sites followed this guildelines ?

Accessibility is a difficult topic for many web developers and which is raising questions of whether it is needed for a website. While specifications like Section 508 help drive developers down the correct path, accessibility is a matter of finding the best way to make the most of your site.

I have found that maintaing too much accesibility features for a site sometime gives a negative impact to a regular visitors. Maintaing both web2.0 looks and feel, ajax, accessibility and SEO in same place is a real challenge for a developer. Sure, you can work on about all the business benefits like increased traffic, good PR but what you really need to be able to do is show that it’s possible to do this without compromising on the design. That’s often where the problems begin.

When we think about highly accessible sites, the first ones that spring to mind are not necessarily fantastic looking examples. There are very few sites which maintains all these standards and here goes a list of few I come across reccently:

http://www.wired.com/

http://www.lestout.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

http://www.espn.com/

http://www.onedayfilms.com/

So, in summary, there are many sites which need to follow web content accessibility guildines properly.