More Accessiblity Stuff

I was reading Random Acts of Reality today who has started doing audio version of his posts, which I think is really good for accessiblity. If I had the time I would also do it. It's gotta be better than alot of those computer voices.

I was then interested to follow a link to Web Design and Mastery who claims to do accessible websites, and good on them for that. The websites in their portfolio are ok, although personally I think they lack flair, and I'm still not convinced that the use of tables as a presentational aid is a good idea. In my view the HTML should be structural - or at least as structural as possible - and tables should be used for displaying data.

It interested me that the Guild of Accessible Web Designers exists. There are lots of these guilds about. I am quite into videography and there's all manner of guilds available in that field. Basically you pay the GAWDs (gawd, what a name) money (£39 a year), and you get to call yourself a member. Woo. Actually, it's a bit more than that, as you get some advertising space in a database on their site, and get access to a small online library too.

From there I ended up at various other places, such as WebAIM's Screen Reader Simulation. This gives a pretty good idea of what it's like to use a screen-reader for yourself, if you've not used one.

One useful tip I found from using Cynthia Accessibility Verifier, that its a good idea to have a "Skip Navigational Links" link right at the top. If you tried that screen-reader simulation you'd realise that listening to the computer read out the links time after time after time on every page in your website is a real chore, so this link makes it quick for the user of a screen-reader to get straight to the content. I've added it into my websites, and just set it to display: none; in the CSS, so that visual users don't see it.