Comments on: Calling all Assistive Technology vendors

By: feather

feather — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 20:09:09 +0000

It would be quite nice if they (the assistive technologies) could utilise the accessibility features that are coded in, as defined by the w3c. I was shocked the other day on testing in jaws 6 just how many semantic tags were ignored.

Hi nickh – I’m curious – what are the specific semantic tags that were ignored in Jaws 6? While Freedom Scientific is currently working on newer releases of Jaws, it might be helpful to know if there was something specific that was unsupported in older versions.

Thanks! Derek.

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By: nickh

nickh — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 19:43:15 +0000

Title attributes, unless you know how to turn them on, are ignored by default. It makes it more difficult to argue for fuller semantic mark-up if even the systems we are trying to support don’t recognise our efforts.

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By: isaac

isaac — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 15:06:04 +0000

I hope the collaboration will include plans to make Ajax applications accessible. Basically there should be a consistent way to let the user know something has been updated, and what has changed.

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By: Britney Simpsons Blog » Calling all Assistive Technology vendors

Britney Simpsons Blog » Calling all Assistive Technology vendors — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:22:49 +0000

[...] Calling all Assistive Technology vendors [...]

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By: Accessibility: standards versus testing — lucid plot

Accessibility: standards versus testing — lucid plot — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 21:23:50 +0000

[...] The recent launch of WaSP’s Assistive Technology Initiative is a positive step, but it needs to be accompanied by pressure. A good way to exert this pressure would be to continue the use of innovative techniques like image replacement and Ajax, making sure that we follow standards, but not insisting on 100% interoperability with assistive technology, if we can show that a lack of standards-compliance is the cause. The WCAG 2 debacle demonstrates that vendors don’t always act in the interests of the web and its users. If we want to stand up for accessibility, we need to show that we can still sting. [...]

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By: Jan Brašna

Jan Brašna — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 21:41:51 +0000

It is great to see a movement like this. Finally. After various talks at this year’s @media in London I found out that I was right with the idea that AT is pretty way behind today’s needs. Good luck with the effort!

BTW as Tomas Caspers told me Solaris has a similar potential as OS X here – a great screen reader built in the system. I’m currently working from my ILG position on providing better communication between Sun and WaSP ATF with the hope we can eventually have better results.

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By: Accessify: latest news / Web Standards Project Accessibility Task Force: Calling all Assistive Technology vendors

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:41:35 +0000

[...] Web Standards Project Accessibility Task Force: Calling all Assistive Technology vendors WaSP ATF issues an invitation to AT vendors: When the Accessibility Task Force (ATF) was formed, we received feedback from designers and developers about their desire for better standards support in assistive technology. Today, we announce the launch of the ATF’s Assistive Technology Initiative. We are issuing an open offer to assistive technology vendors to work with WaSP (and other groups where appropriate) to help ensure that assistive technology can benefit from a web standards-based approach to web development, design and programming. By working together: [...]

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By: hmkoltz

hmkoltz — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 13:44:37 +0000

Nice work on the launch, ATF. Looking forward to the progress and improvements.

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By: hmkoltz

hmkoltz — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 13:39:56 +0000

Dont forget to include Apple in your testing.

It would be nice to see an updated report targeting a variety of users for the three operating systems: Apple, Linux, and Windows.

Linux, for many years, has had available extra support for speech technologies, via Emacspeak with full support for Aural stylesheets. More recently available is Emapspeak, a Google Map screen reading application which uses Google's embedded XML metadata to deliver the map content. These technologies are open source and could be useful for more than one accessibility user group. Microsoft offers some accessibility features and there are many other accessibility options available to use with the Microsoft Windows operating system. Apple offers some improved accessibility features, and seems more may be coming.

A few related links:

How does accessibility differ across operating systems? -- article from National Center on Accessible Information Technology in Education, University of Washington.
Operating Systems with built-in Accessibility Features -- an older compassion via Trace Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Accessibility at Microsoft
Apple Accessibility
Is Linux Accessible -- article from National Center on Accessible Information Technology in Education, University of Washington.
LarsWiki: Linux Accessibility Resource Site

By: David Joseph

David Joseph — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 20:41:22 +0000

Excellent, I’m so glad this is happening for all we all (justifiably or not) complain about IE, Screen readers (and other assistive technology) fall so short of any standards or standardisation its really difficult to judge how to help them (when trying to do something complex or potentially usefull to most such as dare I say it Ajax) it means that its just not possible to do certain things (if you care to cater for everyone) at times. This can (I hope) help tremendously

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