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[tutorial] Further Reading
Here's a list of a whole bunch of resources, tools, and information for you to do more reading about accessibility and accessible design. (This was done with the help of the ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_accessibility community, who are a bunch of very lovely people!)
They're roughly divided into categories, more or less.
If there's something I've missed, or another tool or resource you're fond of, leave a comment! (If you're commenting anonymously, or logged in with OpenID, you can leave links in the comments, but they'll be rewritten to display as bolded text followed by bare URLs: that's an antispam feature. I'll try to come through behind people and turn them into clickable links. Or you could create a Dreamwidth account!)
Links to standards documents themselves, or the documents explaining them or giving advice on how to implement them.
A random sampling of some of the arguments as to why the current standards are inadequate or insufficient. There are many more criticisms! This is just an introduction to some of the most common, and why you might not want to look to the standards as the be-all and end-all.
Links to, and information about, the commonly used screenreaders, and information on how to simulate the screenreader experience if you don't have access to one of the commonly-used ones.
dw_accessibility community, who are a bunch of very lovely people!)They're roughly divided into categories, more or less.
If there's something I've missed, or another tool or resource you're fond of, leave a comment! (If you're commenting anonymously, or logged in with OpenID, you can leave links in the comments, but they'll be rewritten to display as bolded text followed by bare URLs: that's an antispam feature. I'll try to come through behind people and turn them into clickable links. Or you could create a Dreamwidth account!)
Accessibility Standards
Links to standards documents themselves, or the documents explaining them or giving advice on how to implement them.
- World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative
- W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
- US Government's Section 508
- US Government's Section 508 Standards
- WebAIM's Section 508 Checklist
- WebAIM's WCAG Checklist
Criticism of Standards
A random sampling of some of the arguments as to why the current standards are inadequate or insufficient. There are many more criticisms! This is just an introduction to some of the most common, and why you might not want to look to the standards as the be-all and end-all.
- What Follows WCAG 2.0
- The future of WCAG – maximising its strengths not its weaknesses
- Guidelines are Only Half of the Story: Accessibility Problems Encountered by Blind Users on the Web
Screenreaders
Links to, and information about, the commonly used screenreaders, and information on how to simulate the screenreader experience if you don't have access to one of the commonly-used ones.
- JAWS (runs with IE on Windows)
- NVDA (runs with Firefox on Windows)
- Voiceover (runs on Mac)
- WebAIM Screen Reader Simulation
- WebAIM: Using JAWS to Evaluate Web Accessibility
- WebAIM: Using NVDA to Evaluate Web Accessibility
- WebAIM: Using VoiceOver to Evaluate Web Accessibility
- WebAIM: Testing with Screen Readers: Questions and Answers
- WebAIM: Color Contrast Checker
- WAI: Complete List of Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools: Bills itself as 'complete', but is actually somewhat outdated, and missing a bunch of stuff that's been developed more recently. Still, some useful info.
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Functional Accessibility Evaluator
- WebAIM: WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool: Out of all these, this is the one that requires the most background knowledge: much of what it points out is not "this is a problem", but "this requires someone to make a decision about whether it's a problem or not".
- Web Developer extension: Not accessibility-specific, but still very useful when writing and debugging HTML!
- Firefox Accessibility Extension
- TextCAPTCHA: This is the one we use on Dreamwidth! Very easy to implement, good selection of questions.
- Honeypot CAPTCHA: How to implement the technique.
- Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)
- WAI-ARIA FAQ
- WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices
- HTML5 and ARIA
- A List Apart's Accessibility Topic: Slightly out of date and not frequently updated, but their archives have a lot of useful information for learning to think accessibly.
- WebAxe
- Marco's Accessibility Blog
- AccessIQ: Australia-specific discussion and information
- Jim Thatcher
- Yahoo! Accessibility Library
- Stack Exchange - User Experience: Not accessibility-specific, but often has accessibility discussions
- 456 Berea Street: Also not accessibility-specific, but talks about it often
- Karl Groves
Automated Tests, Tools, & Checkers
Useful automated checking and testing tools that will help point out accessibility-related problems and let you evaluate your site. Most of these do require some background knowledge: they'll point out things that may or may not be problems, but you need to know whether or not to take their advice, and be able to spot things they've missed.
CAPTCHA alternatives
Two alternate approaches to the standard image-based CAPTCHA, which is completely inaccessible to people with disabilities (and also people who are bad at reading garbled letters and people whose keyboards can't type the Greek, Russian, etc, words that have been showing up more and more with reCAPTCHA lately).
WAI-ARIA
This is just a sampling of resources on WAI-ARIA, but hopefully enough to get you started!
Accessibility Blogs & Discussions
The most hodgepodge collection: people who blog about accessibility, collections of articles and resources on accessibility, and everything else I couldn't figure out where to put.