Continuing their series on accessibility technologies in action, Yahoo’s User Interface Blog has a video demonstrating ZoomText.  Most of the issues involve the visual aspects of a web page (as opposed to a screen reader where the code used to create the page is more important) - for instance consistency in layout (as the user might only see part of the page at a time, so needs to know which direction to scroll in).

I liked the fact that it hasn’t been through their marketing department - the user demonstrating the magnifier obviously has Google as her default home page.

Our recommendation for clients is that they should aim for small incremental updates on their website, maybe every three months - it avoids creating major upheavals that have to work as soon as the changes are implemented. This strategy isn’t going to work when you are developing standards as there needs to be more stability for others to be able to apply them. The World Wide Web Constortium (W3C) appears to have gone to the other extreme though as it is now 8 years since the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) became a recommendation - sometimes you might see references to the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) or the accessibility levels specified (AA, Double-A, etc.).

That’s no change since 1999! At that stage we were just discovering the joys of Internet Explorer 5.0 and the Netscape browser was stuck on version 4 (as the Mozilla project that produced …