Universal Design for Web Applications

by Chisholm, Wendy

• ISBN13: 9780596518738
• ISBN10: 0596518730
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-11-01
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

Universal Design for Web Applications teaches you how to build websites that are more accessible, and explains why doing so is good business. It takes more work up front, but the potential payoff is huge-especially when mobile users need to access your sites.

Author Biography

Wendy Chisholm is a consultant, developer, author, and speaker on the topic of universal design. As co-editor of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) and then staff at the World Wide Web Consortium, she has worked with people around the globe to make the web accessible. Currently residing in Seattle, WA, Wendy consults with market leaders such as Microsoft, Adobe and Google, integrating universal design concepts into their tools and technologies. She continues to further the research and development of universal design as a part-time staff at the University of Washington.

Matt May is a developer, technologist, and accessibility advocate who is responsible for working internally and externally with Adobe product teams and customers to address accessibility in Adobe products, ensure interoperability with assistive technologies, and make customers aware of the many accessibility features that already exist in Adobe products. Prior to joining Adobe, Matt worked for W3C/WAI on many of the core standards in web accessibility, led the Web Standards Project's Accessibility Task Force, helped to architect one of the first online grocery sites, http://HomeGrocer.com, and co-founded Blue Flavor, a respected web and mobile design consultancy.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Introducing Universal Design	p. 1
Accessible Design: A Story	p. 3
Putting Universal Design to Work	p. 6
Selling It	p. 9
There Is No "Them"	p. 10
Audience Characteristics	p. 11
Configurability	p. 13
Growth Opportunity	p. 13
Legal Liability	p. 15
The Standards	p. 17
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)	p. 17
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)	p. 17
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)	p. 18
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG)	p. 18
The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA)	p. 18
Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP)	p. 19
Professionalism	p. 19
Early and Often	p. 21
Summary	p. 21
Metadata	p. 23
What Is Metadata?	p. 23
Images	p. 24
Keys to Writing Good Text Alternatives	p. 25
Pictures of Recognizable Objects	p. 26
Document-Level Metadata	p. 29
Role and State	p. 32
Relationships	p. 33
Link Text	p. 33
Summary	p. 34
Structure and Design	p. 35
First Principles	p. 35
GET and POST	p. 36
Semantics	p. 36
Headings	p. 38
Links	p. 39
Tables	p. 40
Lists	p. 40
Color	p. 41
Color Differentiation	p. 41
Color Contrast	p. 42
CSS Highlights	p. 42
Liquid Layout	p. 42
Text Size	p. 43
Positioning	p. 44
Images	p. 44
Text Versus Images of Text	p. 44
Flicker and Patterns	p. 47
Designing for Email	p. 48
Summary	p. 49
Forms	p. 51
Labels	p. 52
fieldset and legend	p. 52
The accesskey Attribute	p. 54
Tab Order	p. 60
Error Handling	p. 60
Client Side	p. 61
Server Side	p. 63
Captcha	p. 63
The Future of Forms	p. 65
Summary	p. 65
Tabular Data	p. 67
Data Table Basics	p. 67
Headings and Data	p. 68
Caption	p. 68
Complex Data Tables	p. 69
Summary	p. 70
Specifying Relationships Between Data and Headings	p. 71
Readability, Layout, and Design	p. 73
Color	p. 73
Footnotes and Keys	p. 74
CSS	p. 74
pre	p. 75
Summary	p. 75
Video and Audio	p. 77
Web Video: The Early Years	p. 77
Video and Universal Design	p. 79
Optimizing Web Video	p. 80
Accessibility in Video	p. 81
Captioning Your Video	p. 83
Hiring a Captioner	p. 85
Audio Description	p. 86
Accessible Mobile Video	p. 87
Transcripts and Text Alternatives	p. 88
Summary	p. 88
Scripting	p. 91
Building on a Solid Foundation	p. 92
Disappearing (and Reappearing) Acts	p. 93
Summary	p. 105
Ajax and Wai-Aria	p. 107
Taking Stock of Existing Code	p. 107
Code That Works Well Universally	p. 108
Code That Can Be Made to Work Universally	p. 108
Code That Needs a Workaround	p. 108
Support in Browsers	p. 108
Support in Assistive Technology	p. 109
Direct Accessibility-Wai-Aria	p. 110
Summary	p. 123
Rich Internet Applications	p. 125
Features of RIAs	p. 126
Assistive Technology Support for RIAs	p. 127
Flex Accessibility	p. 128
Creating the Look: Accessible Custom Components	p. 130
Creating the Feel: Accessible Custom Components	p. 133
Backend Considerations	p. 134
User-Generated Content	p. 135
Testing Your Code	p. 136
Microsoft Testing Tools	p. 136
ACTF	p. 137
Photoshop CS4 and Illustrator CS4	p. 138
Summary	p. 138
The Process	p. 139
Universal by Design	p. 139
Tools and Testing	p. 140
Development Tools	p. 141
Evaluation Tools and Resources	p. 144
20 Questions	p. 150
Team Structures and Strategies	p. 158
Cross-Reference for Universal Design for Web Applications	p. 163
Index	p. 171
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