What are captions?Everybody’s using YouTube. Government departments, media corporations and individuals with bright ideas all broadcast themselves. YouTube might be everywhere, but is your content reaching everyone? Knowing about audio description, captions and transcripts, is the way to reach an even wider audience. In the third of a series of articles on multimedia accessibility, we take a [...]
What are Transcripts?Whether you broadcast yourself on YouTube, or showcase yourself on Vimeo, multimedia content is the way to go. It’s engaging, it’s captivating, and the ultimate aim is to make it go viral. Knowing about audio description, captions and transcripts, is the way to reach an even wider audience. In the second of a series of [...]
What is Audio Description?Multimedia content is everywhere on the web. YouTube has single handedly transformed it into a global pastime, and everybody’s at it. Armed with a webcam and a bright idea, everyone’s free to broadcast themselves. Knowing about audio description, captions and transcripts, is the key to accessible multimedia. In the first of a series of articles [...]
Writing an accessibility statementIncreasingly, people are including declarations on their websites that define the level of web accessibility the website aims to achieve. Known as Accessibility Statements, these declarations take the form of a short information page which is available via a link from every page of the website.
Using CSS focus pseudo classFocus is one of the lesser used Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) pseudo-classes. People familiar with CSS should be aware of the more commonly used pair, link and visited, but will often find that the focus and active pseudo-classes have been missed out. This article aims to explain why they are important and how they can [...]
Why is good quality code important?Checkpoint 3.2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 recommends that developers “create documents that validate to published formal grammars”. In other words, the checkpoint encourages people to use code that follows the official rules for that language.
Practical plans for accessible architecturesThe United Nations recently commissioned the world’s first global audit on web accessibility. The study evaluated 100 websites from 20 different countries across five sectors of industry (media, finance, travel, politics, and retail). Only three sites passed basic accessibility checkpoints outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0), and not a single site passed all checkpoints.
Designing for the webOne of the main tasks web developers face on a regular basis is the challenge of turning a design storyboard into accessible HTML/CSS templates for a website. This task is made more difficult when the web designer has not thought about accessibility. Trying to create accessible templates from a poorly thought out storyboard can be a frustrating experience. It is one that can be easily avoided if the web designer has thought about the medium they are designing for, the web.
