Microsoft Accessibility : Web Accessibility

More awareness and recognition of assistive technology

AnnuskaP — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:58:00 GMT

WebAnywhere did indeed win a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration! Congratulations! You can read about the awards at: http://matc.mellon.org/press-release.

Imagine Cup Accessibility winner, WebAnywhere, up for today's Mellow Award

AnnuskaP — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:04:00 GMT

Jeff Bigham and Professor Richard Ladner, from University of Washington, are in D.C. today for the 2008 Mellon Awards Ceremony. Their project, WebAnywhere, is nominated for an award, which celebrates technology collaboration in higher education, especially benefitting non-profits. WebAnywhere is a wonderful example of how we can apply technology to solve accessibility problems - in this case, surfing the web and needing the information read aloud to you.

WebAnywhere won the Accessibility Award in Microsoft's 2008 Imagine Cup. So, yes, I'm biased, but I think it has a great chance at today's Mellon Award. The award ceremony is in about an hour. I'll post again, once the winners are officially announced.

Prototype of accessible media player for the web

AnnuskaP — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:52:00 GMT

At the TechEd EMEA conference in Barcelona a few weeks ago, during a talk on making web experiences accessible, we gave our first public airing of a video player written in Silverlight which is capable of meeting all of the WCAG 2.0 Time based media Guidelines up to AAA (assuming a suitable media source). The code has been released for use in your own projects under the Microsoft public license and is available at www.codeplex.com/amp.

The media play shows how a video can be supplemented with captions and sign language (for people who are deaf) and audio descriptions (for people who are blind). Other users may like these features well (think cognitive and loud environments), and we hope to build upon them with a community of developers.

Participate in survey about security features on a web site

AnnuskaP — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:13:00 GMT

The University of Washington is conducted a study about a security feature on web sites. This feature, called "CAPTCHA" is often used when you are logging onto a web site for the first time and creating a user name and password.

The research team is hoping to get responses from a wide-range of people, both those using assistive technology and those that don't. I encourage YOU to participate in this short online survey at http://webinsight.cs.washington.edu/webeval/captchas2/.

Making AJAX Accessible in ASP.Net Using UpdatePanel

Cynthia C — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:26:00 GMT

Bertrand Le Roy, a Program Manager on the ASP.Net team, has written a very useful article on DotNetSlackers.com about how to make UpdatePanel, used for AJAX updates in ASP.Net, accessible to screen-readers.

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project

Cynthia C — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:07:00 GMT

A group of people involved in the field of Web Accessibility has set up a project to honor John Slatin, the former co-chair of the WCAG 2.0 Working Group, and help advance his work in Web Accessibility. From The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project Web site:

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project matches accessibility experts with companies that would like a brief review of their site for accessibility. In return, the site owner is asked to contribute a minimum of $500 to The John Slatin Fund. The John Slatin Fund was established to help John’s beloved Anna offset the medical expenses incurred during John’s long illness.

I'll be volunteering, as will many well-known experts in Web Accessibility. Quite a few of these people don't generally do consulting work, so this is really an unusual opportunity to have an evaulation done by an expert at a very reasonable cost. It's also a fitting legacy to John.

UI Automation Support for Silverlight 2.0 Announced at MIX

Cynthia C — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:50:00 GMT

We've just announced support for UI Automation in Silverlight 2.0. There's a lot of Accessibility stuff happening at MIX. I can't wait for CSUN.

Want Accessibility Features? Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 has them.

Cynthia C — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:20:00 GMT

I've been waiting for this one. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is out, and it has features that will make it much easier for Web developers to make their pages accessible.

The one that's getting the most buzz is the new support for the WAI-ARIA spec from the W3C. Internet Explorer 8 uses ARIA role, state, and property information to communicate with assistive technologies such as screen readers. This means you can use ARIA to mark up your rich Web applications with roles, states, and properties instead of building separate simplified Web pages for accessibility. For complex DHTML applications, ARIA allows you to do some things that are difficult or impossible without it, such as alerting users in a non-obtrusive way when parts of the page change. ARIA also allows you to decorate your HTML markup with attributes to assign MSAA roles that aren't available natively in HTML, such as Menu and Menu Item.

I'm actually just as excited about the DHTML Extensions for Accessibility. Internet Explorer 8 is exposing WinEvents when the Document Object Model changes. This is a huge step towards making AJAX and other DHTML applications accessible. Assistive technologies can watch for these events, and expose the updated content in the DOM to users. Once AT vendors are using these events, it means that AJAX updates are no longer invisible to AT users and Web developers are no longer required to do hacks to expose them.

We've also added mappings from more HTML elements to MSAA roles. Internet Explorer has done a read-only mapping from HTML to MSAA for some elements for a very long time. However, it's always been for a subset of tags. In this release, we've added more tags, including structural tags for lists and tables.

You can download Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 to try these out. There's a bug with screen-reader support in the default install, and a workaround documented in the release notes, under Compatibility Information. Also be sure to read the uninstall instructions before you start the install. What can I say? Bugs happen. It's Beta 1.

All in all, Internet Explorer 8.0 is going to be a big win for Accessibility, and make life a lot easier for the Web developers who want to make accessible sites and applications. You can find more details on all of these new features in our MSDN article, What's New for Accessibility in Internet Explorer 8. To learn more about WAI-ARIA in IE 8, read the Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers Whitepaper, and to learn more about WAI-ARIA in general, take a look at the W3C PF Working Group page.