Jared Smith has raised a good point over at WebAIM in his recent post - JAWS license not developer friendly. Basically the licensing agreement for the trial version of the software (one of the most popular screen readers) specifically prohibits using it for testing purposes. I would have thought that the fewer barriers that web developers have in understanding assistive technologies the better. Ultimately it would be to the benefit of JAWS users, and that would also reduce support issues for Freedom Scientific.

A quick post before the Christmas break.

I recently came across Pearl Crescent Page Saver and I can see that it will be another useful tool to be used in 2008 when I’m working on template designs. Rather than just producing an image of what is visible on the screen, as happens with normal screenshot programs, it will include the whole of the web page. There’s also an option to run it from the command line, so it would be possible from a single command to create a batch file (or similar shell script)  to capture a range of templates that I’m working on.

I’ve found that it has been very useful for documenting the evolution of templates & I can see that it will be handy for comparing different versions (e.g. how a template looks as plain HTML/CSS pages and when it is integrated into a system, or to ensure …

I have to confess that Yahoo is not one of my usual haunts so I missed this excellent article the first time around - Graded Browser Support. It’s a very clear articulation & formalisation of something that many of us have been thinking about & trying to implement.

Essentially the idea is that you have (at least) 3 grades of web browser:

an identified list of browsers (+ operating system) that will take full advantage of the capabilities of modern browsers and will be tested thoroughly (grade A)
an identified list of browsers that will be able to access core functionality & content, but will only have a representative sample tested (grade C)
the rest that will either take conform to current web standards like the grade A browsers or be able to function at the minimum level of the grade C, however there is no testing and no support (grade X)

Which browser …

Last month we had yet another accessibility audit of high profile sites that made depressing reading and I doubt very much whether the situation will change greatly this year. This would also include many of the UK public sector sites even though they’re supposed to conform to the WCAG Double-A standard. From experience I would say that even if this were the case at launch there seems to be a slow, inevitable slide into inaccessibility. So it set me wondering over the Christmas break how we might be able to stop the rot.

Starting as you mean to go on

A good starting point is the recent BSI guide - PAS 78: A guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites - freely available from the Disability Rights Commission.

Usually the emphasis is those involved in production - the developers and the graphic

…

We’ve just completed a job for a section of the Department for Education and Science that uses the Directgov brand. As part of that work we were asked to include some code so that the site would be integrated with the overall web statistics analysis package.

In amongst the criteria for Directgov are the requirements that the web pages must be Double-A accessible and be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. The code that the third party supplier (speed-trap) handed over would have failed on both of these counts - and therefore the same would be the case for all of the pages where it was included. We had a similar experience earlier on in the year with WebTrends.

In this instance only minor amendments were required to solve the problems, but these are the …

A key part of our quality control is to check a site and/or templates with different versions of a range of browsers. However it’s virtually impossible to run different versions of Internet Explorer (IE) on a single copy of Windows and to know that what you’re seeing is the behaviour in more normal circumstances. Windows and IE are very tightly integrated, so there isn’t even an ‘uninstall’ option available if you wanted to remove it from your computer.

One way around this is to have virtual copies of Windows running on your computer, each with their own single, different version of IE. Microsoft have such a product and have now made Virtual PC 2004 free to download (Virtual PC 2007 version has gone into beta testing, so that’ll be the version that you’d have to pay for in the future). To run it you’ll need a reasonable chunk of memory …