Checking colour contrastThis is a quick guide on how to check the colour contrast on your website. A simple way to check colour combinations meet the requirements set by version two of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Inline styles and why they are considered harmful for accessibilitySince the mid 1990s web developers have had an ever increasing amount of control over the presentation of the web pages that they develop. This is largely due to the introduction of CSS (cascading style sheets) and its adoption amongst major browser vendors, both past and present. Although the adoption of the CSS specification has not been without issues it has made it possible for web developers to build visually imaginative and engaging web pages and user interfaces.
Hiding contentIn this post I will identify some of the common techniques that are used to hide content and will attempt to identify the implications of using these techniques. I will also attempt to identify appropriate situations in which each technique could practically be put to good use. All of the techniques that we have identified below have been tested with Jaws 12 and NVDA 2011.1 using Firefox 4, Firefox 5 and Internet Explorer 8. In addition the examples were tested with voiceover on Apple OSX 10.6.4 with Safari.
Keyboard traps, Flash and Firefox 4Introduction On the 22nd March 2011 version 4 of the ever popular Firefox browser was released. With this release came a myriad of additions and improvements. On the whole the team at Mozilla have done a great job. However, this is not to say that the browser has been improved in all areas. After updating [...]
If accessibility got the deciding voteWith the elections and referendum on the voting system used in the UK happening today, we at Nomensa have been wondering what would happen if the deciding vote were based on the level of accessibility achieved by each of the three main political parties websites. To a certain extent, accessibility has the potential to have more of an effect on individual voting than you would first expect.
Creating Accessible ChartsIntroduction I was recently tasked with the challenge of creating a series of accessible charts and graphs for an internal project. We were attempting to present some graphs showing site usage statistics pulled from one of our google analytics accounts. Charts and Graphs can be tricky to implement on web pages in such a way [...]
Accessible Tabs – Part 2: The SolutionAs we saw in Accessible Tabs Part 1 – The Problem, there are several accessibility issues with tabs created for the web compared to those created for use in software applications. Tabs on the web should ideally replicate the functionality used in applications, so they are more intuitive for everyone. In this article we will look at three existing scripts for creating accessible tabs.
Checking colour contrastConsider the links, headings and other text content on your website. Do you think the colours you’ve chosen contrast well against their background? More to the point, how can you tell?
