Selected Items from Stanford Weekend Reading - 09/04/2009 Evaluating Cognitive Web Accessibility Web accessibility for individuals with cognitive or learning disabilities is varied and complex. It is an area with little definitive research and few concrete recommendations. Even WebAIM's report on cognitive research shows that users with these disabilities are as varied as the common recommendations provided by those in the field of web accessibility. http://webaim.org/articles/evaluatingcognitive/ Accessibility in Web 2.0 technology (IBM) Accessibility, which removes the barriers that prevent certain groups of people from accessing information, is becoming a common requirement for Web applications. The groups that accessible Web apps are targeted to help include people with disabilities, mature users, and other people who may be challenged by the visual and physical elements of operating a program. With the help of modern assistive technologies, these people are able to interact with a software application, but only if the application is developed in full compliance with accessibility standards. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-aj-web20/index.html?ca=dgr-twtrAjax-Accessdth-WD&S_TACT=105AGY83&S_CMP=TWDW Colblindor: Color Blindness viewed through Colorblind Eyes Colblindor is all about color blindness. You can learn a lot of colorblind facts while browsing through the articles. Or just try one of the tools or take a color vision deficiency test. http://www.colblindor.com/ Using Opera 10 With the Mac Screen Reader VoiceOver Support for the Mac native screen reader VoiceOver was added to Opera in version 9.5. This is a quick overview explaining what you can access using VoiceOver with Opera. I'm hoping it will be of use to people with screen readers and developers debugging content alike. http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/show.dml/4291972 Keyboard accessibility in web applications In the first part of the article we add keyboard shortcuts to a painting application. In the second part we implement a way to move the pointer inside the drawing canvas using keyboard shortcuts. In the third part we will look into the cross-browser compatibility layer implementation for handling all the differences between browsers. Part1: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/keyboard-accessible-web-applications-1/ Part2: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/keyboard-accessible-web-applications-2/ Part3: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/keyboard-accessible-web-applications-3/ Providing access to graphs for users who are blind or visually impaired Graphs are frequently used in math and science materials to present and summarize data. In visual form, they are not accessible to users who are visually impaired, although the data being graphed can be expressed in nonvisual ways. Viable alternatives include generation of a tactile graph, delivering the information in text, interaction with an audio graph, or a combination tactile/audio approach. http://ncam.wgbh.org/publications/adm/guideline_f.html Weekend Reading Archives https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/weekend_reading/