Tech Notes: DIA update - Days 16, 15 and 17

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Way to go, Parker!

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Tech Notes: Web accessibility

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Tech Notes: DIA update - Day 14

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Tech Notes: DIA update - Days 11 through 13

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Don't you understand you're making this more difficult?

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Tech Notes: DIA update - Days 8 through 10

OK. So it seems I've been a little distracted since my last foray into the web accessibility world. I've completed these:

Day 8: meaningful page titles

• easy to do with websites created from scratch
• unsure of how to implement theory with Blogger (doesn't let you have much control over the page titles)

Benefits:

• everyone benefits -- it's a basic principle of good webdesign
• specifically:
  • some screen readers have special keyboard shortcut (INSERT + F10) which displays (and reads) a list of the currently open windows, by page title.
  • Lynx displays the page title in the first line of output, so it's always the first thing that Marcus reads in Braille.
  • For various reasons, folks sometimes gets confused and momentarily loses track of what he's reading. The page title in the window titlebar acts as a visual anchor; it stays in the same place, even as he scrolls the page. You can always glance back to it to jog your memory.
  • Google displays the page title in its search results, and it ranks keywords higher when they appear in the page title. This is a Good Thing for you, if you're interested in generating site traffic.
  
  Day 9: Providing additional navigation aids
  • only able to add one (home) of the three (home, prev, next) as Blogger doesn't yet do the "next" and "prev" thing gracefully
  
  Day 10: Presenting your main content first
  • Wahoo!! This was really easy to implement as I don't use tables for page layouts! Woot!
  
  

  Benefits:

  • Folks using specialized readers can "see" my main content without having to endure my sidebar lists. (Many specialized readers display content in the order in which it appears in the HTML source. Which means that they have to go through a terribly long menus and sidebars to get to actual content.)
  • It also assists with search engines better able to rank your site -- some give more weight to the content nearest the top of the HTML page (not the page as it is viewed.)
  
  

  Notes:

  You don't have to have the sidebar on the right of the page to make the page accessible, contrary to what this page suggests. (In fact, it is possible, with a poorly configured website, to have the sidebar on the right hand side of the page and still have the sidebar content appear first in your HTML source. For a quick check, load your page without a reference to styles (or a style sheet). What you see, unformatted in the browser, is the order in which your data will appear in a screen reader.)
  
  

Time to make complete these changes: 10 minutes.

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Disability discrimination

Helen Henderson's article in Saturday's Star, "Why the gap between ability, job quality?" highlighted "society's inability to evaluate correctly the talents of people who move or process information differently from the decreed norm."

According to the article:

In 1998, the Canadian Council on Social Development found that 51.8 per cent of men and 41.1 per cent of women with disabilities with post-secondary degrees were employed compared with 82 per cent and 73 per cent of their respective able-bodied counterparts.

Three years later, a Statistics Canada survey showed only 51 per cent of people with disabilities aged 25 to 54 were employed compared with 82 per cent of their able-bodied peers.

Among those aged 55 to 64, 27 per cent of people with disabilities were employed compared with 56 per cent without disabilities, StatsCan said. For youth with disabilities aged 15 to 24, 47 per cent had jobs compared with 57 per cent of those without disabilities.

The mind boggles.

To learn more about what's being done to change these statistics, visit the Canadian Association of Professionals with Disabilities website.

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