webqem blog

webqem is committed to standards and accessibility when developing websites.

As part of that commitment, Rob and Chris attended the WIPA (Web Industry Professionals Association) Accessibility 2.0 Seminar in Sydney on 12 November, to discover the latest news about accessibility.

The seminar covered three main areas:

1. Moving from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0
2. Preparing accessible Flash
3. Preparing accessible PDFs

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which a recommendations from W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. This covers physical, cognitive and technical disabilities.

The WCAG 1.0 Recommendations, have been in effect since May 1999 and needed revision to address changes in technology and future flexibility. WCAG 2.0 is in “Proposed Recommendation” status, and considered highly likely to be approved as a “Recommendation” by the end of the year.

The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) (1992) says it is unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their disability. The Australian Human Rights Commission notes that provision of information and online services through the Web is covered by the DDA. The Australian Government Information Management Office has a guide to minimum websites standards for accessibility.

The old WCAG 1.0 Priority Levels of 1,2,3 are to be replaced with WCAG 2.0 Levels of Conformance (A, AA and AAA). These levels are not directly equivalent. Conformance is determined by fully meeting a level, for full pages, complete processes, accessibility supported, not interfering with the ability to access the rest of the page.

WCAG 1.0 was more concerned with specific technologies, such as HTML and CSS. To cater for future technologies, WCAG 2.0 requirements are technology neutral, phrased in terms of content being supported by assistive technology (such as screen readers) and having available accessible user agents, such as browsers or plugins.

Whereas previously PDF documents, Flash and Javascript were considered inaccessible, WCAG 2.0 no longer automatically precludes used of these. Not all Javascript, Flash and PDF documents are accessible, but components can be made accessible, or deemed accessibility supported.

Improved use of labels, tags, titles, summaries and captions can assist in making forms, tables and buttons more accessible. Skip links are encouraged, for navigation. Guidelines for making audio and video accessible are included.

Accessible PDF documents
This was a presentation by Andrew Downie, who is totally blind and uses screen readers to access computers. He amazed everyone with the speed with which he listens to screen readers. His primary recommendations for people creating PDF documents were:

• Focus on document structure
• Use structured headings rather than font sizes (in both Word Documents and PDFs)
• Provide alternative text for images
• Provide document and table summaries
• Provide table of contents
• Use bookmarks
• Use tagging
• Not to use text boxes
• The importance of reading order, and how to correct it

Accessible Flash
Simon Reid from Adobe gave a presentation on creating accessible Flash. Since CS3, accessibility features have been a feature, and it has improved in the new CS4 release.
He emphasised features such as:

• Using accessible components
• Enabling control over reading order, tabbing order
• Giving each item a unique instance name

Flash accessibility features unfortunately are not turned on by default, when installing Flash. Editing the config.xml file can turn them on.

For more details we were referred to the Adobe Flash accessibility design guidelines
Simon said he was happy to come to our workplaces to demonstrate the use of Flash accessible components.
Adobe also has a page on PDF accessibility guidelines.