Rocío Alvarado Posts

Accessibility guidelines are primarily developed for people with either visual, hearing or physical impairments and disabilities. Here are basic descriptions of some ways people with disabilities use the internet: People with visual impairments might use a screen reader. This is a software that will read out loud the text of the web page. They might also use a text browser and need to make the text bigger. Just think about the elderly that have weaker eyesight. People that have hearing impairments won’t be able to hear music or audio.  Captions or transcripts are the only ways to not alienate them.…

As far as I know, web accessibility in Canada is up to each province to legislate.  There are several attempt to make websites accessible in government and educational institutions. Most if not all government websites in Canada are now accessible. But unfortunately, there are no laws to ensure that accessibility guidelines are respected. A special notice should be given to W3Québec. An organization dedicated to promote web accessibility across Québec. Another organization is Accéssibilité Web that have done substantial studies on the matter and have translated WCAG 2.0 in French. Unlike the US, the Canadian government has yet to make…

The article Why web standards are important in web design by Dustin Brewer is absolutely a must read. It explains quite well the fundamentals of web standards. Brewer does not only relate the topic in terms of what it represents to the designer or developer, but he also looks at the clients perspective. If this doesn’t convince you to adopt web standards, I don’t know what will.

I have been using this tool for some time now. It’s simple and straight forward. It will tell you if your colour combinations are good or not.  Large and bolded text are categorized differently than smaller text. The program also tells you what priority your combination represents. Priority 3 (AAA) is the lowest level, so for all intents and purposes, this is the minimum requirements. Although the page is a little clutered for my liking, I bare it. After all it’s free! Check it out at: http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorcontrast.asp

Content management systems (CMS) have become very popular in the last 3 years or so. They usually are pretty easy to install and to upgrade, but not all of them have accessibility in mind. What often happens is that the theme designer has to make it her or his business to create a site as accessible as possible. I came across some CMS that have accessibility integrated into the system in an article written by the National Center on Disability and Access to Education named NCDAE Tips and Tools: Content Management Systems & Accessibility. They explain the major challenges that…

Web accessibility is part of web standards. It focuses on making any online content accessible to people with disabilities. These people use a variety of assistive technologies to navigate through the Internet. For example, people with visual impairments often use a screen reader to read outloud the text on the page. People with reduced motor skills use adapted keyboards or mouses that help them click on links amongst other things. All these technologies are pretty pointless if the code is not correctly implemented.

What are web standards? Simply put, they are a set of guidelines for web development and web designing. It represents the good practices of the profession. When I started creating websites I had no idea their were rules, but now that I know they exist and I know why I need to use them I cannot code without them. There are several sets of guidelines around the world, but the most widely known is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web standards. Found at www.w3.org. This site is a little overwhelming for someone just starting to look into web standards,…