Institutional Knowledge

A very subtle change occurred on campus today. No, it wasn’t the mysterious JunkMail Digests that appeared in our inbox, rather a step forward toward a better future.

At the request of Public Affairs, we updated the Public Facilities page. With the ATI we’ve been cleaning up some of the pages on the campus web server as we go just to make sure we’re covering our basis. I noticed that the Public Facilities page was using a University template that appeared to be from the late 1990’s.

So, I cleaned-up the page and made it accessible and valid HTML, etc. In addition, I tossed the content into one of our “beta” templates that’s built upon the YUI Reset/Fonts/Grids foundation.

We hope that this foundation will eventually be made available to other web contributors on campus. Right now, we’re still finding corner cases and looking for ways to abstract CSS into components for more of an ala carte option. (more…)

For those who missed it or were unable to attend, You can view the slides from Accessibility Evaluation of Next Generation Web Applications.

I was glad to see that someone used S5 and gave a link to the slides. The best tidbit that I took away from this session was that WebAIM’s Wave 4.0 (when released) will be a great tool for testing applications for different accessibility checks without having to send data over the network. This is a big advantage to those application using AJAX technologies or sites that are password protection or on a secure network. I’m anxiously awaiting the public beta version.

Technorati Tags: csun, accessibility

The Accessibility Experience

The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect – Tim Berners-Lee

The presentation by representatives from the User Experience Team at Google was a very insightful look into how they’re approaching accessibility.

Accessibility is more than just code compliance

Google is spending a fair amount of resources researching how people with disabilities interact with their products, and the Internet in general, to ensure they can have a similar experience to those without disabilities.

One of the great aspects about their approach to accessibility testing was that they brought in engineers to watch the test, and even in some instances provide a translator who can explain to engineers what the screen reader is saying.

I was also pleased to hear that accessibility efforts were being applied to Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, and Google Video. Simple things like headers can go far toward improving the Google experience for those with visual impairments.

Technorati Tags: csun, accessibility

Evolution of Firefox Accessibility provided some excellent insight into how the Mozilla Foundation is working to make Firefox accessible for those will all different types of disabilities. I was blown away at how many grants had been given to various individuals to work on accessibly for different components of Firefox.

One of the best resources that I found out about was the Access Firefox which provides themes, extensions, keyboard shortcuts, and much more that all help those with disabilities use Firefox to navigate the Internet. I will be gathering tons of resources from this site, or linking heavily to the site, in the upcoming Accessibility web resource site that we’re building for the ATI project.

Overall, it sounds like Firefox is a very accessible application and works well with several applications such as: Jaws, WindowEyes, Drago, Firevox, and ZoomText. I think it’s high time that CSU Chico start to officially support Firefox 2.0 simply because it has such great support for making the web accessible.

Technorati Tags: csun, accessibility

• People dress up a lot nicer at CSUN than SXSW
• If you’re going to host a conference, involving technology, provide free wi-fi
  • Wi-fi with a Signal to Noise Ratio of 1 == LTO
• If you’re presenting…
  • Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse
  • Make your slides available online and list the URL at the end of your presentation
  • Less is more when it comes to slides. Less words, less graphics, more simplicity. See the 10/20/30 rule
  • Allow for questions/comments at the end