Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone

by Wendy Chisholm, Matt May

Overview

Universal Design for Web Applications teaches you how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities 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.

You'll discover how to use standards-based web technologies -- such as XHTML, CSS, and Ajax, along with video and Flash -- to develop applications for a wide range of users and a variety of devices, including the mobile Web. You'll also learn specifics about this target audience, especially the key over-50 age group, whose use of the Web is rapidly growing.

With this book, you will:

• Learn the importance of metadata and how it affects images, headings, and other design elements
• Build forms that accommodate cell phones, screen readers, word prediction, and more
• Create designs using color and text that are effective in a variety of situations
• Construct tables that present information without spatial cues
• Design Ajax-driven social networking applications that people with disabilities can access
• Provide audio with transcriptions and video that includes captions and audio descriptions
• Discover assistive technology support for Rich Internet Application technologies such as Flash, Flex, and Silverlight

Universal Design for Web Applications provides you with a roadmap to help you design easy-to-maintain web applications that benefit a larger audience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596554323
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/14/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	198
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

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 xi

1 Introducing Universal Design 1

Accessible Design: A Story 3

Putting Universal Design to Work 6

2 Selling It 9

There Is No "Them" 10

Audience Characteristics 11

Configurability 13

Growth Opportunity 13

Legal Liability 15

The Standards 17

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) 17

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 17

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 18

User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 18

The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA) 18

Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) 19

Professionalism 19

Early and Often 21

Summary 21

3 Metadata 23

What Is Metadata? 23

Images 24

Keys to Writing Good Text Alternatives 25

Pictures of Recognizable Objects 26

Document-Level Metadata 29

Role and State 32

Relationships 33

Link Text 33

Summary 34

4 Structure and Design 35

First Principles 35

GET and POST 36

Semantics 36

Headings 38

Links 39

Tables 40

Lists 40

Color 41

Color Differentiation 41

Color Contrast 42

CSS Highlights 42

Liquid Layout 42

Text Size 43

Positioning 44

Images 44

Text Versus Images of Text 44

Flicker and Patterns 47

Designing for Email 48

Summary 49

5 Forms 51

Labels 52

fieldset and legend 52

The accesskey Attribute 54

Tab Order 60

Error Handling 60

Client Side 61

Server Side 63

Captcha 63

The Future of Forms 65

Summary 65

6 Tabular Data 67

Data Table Basics 67

Headings and Data 68

Caption 68

Complex Data Tables 69

Summary 70

Specifying Relationships Between Data and Headings 71

Readability, Layout, and Design 73

Color 73

Footnotes and Keys 74

CSS74

pre 75

Summary 75

7 Video and Audio 77

Web Video: The Early Years 77

Video and Universal Design 79

Optimizing Web Video 80

Accessibility in Video 81

Captioning Your Video 83

Hiring a Captioner 85

Audio Description 86

Accessible Mobile Video 87

Transcripts and Text Alternatives 88

Summary 88

8 Scripting 91

Building on a Solid Foundation 92

Disappearing (and Reappearing) Acts 93

Summary 105

9 Ajax and Wai-Aria 107

Taking Stock of Existing Code 107

Code That Works Well Universally 108

Code That Can Be Made to Work Universally 108

Code That Needs a Workaround 108

Support in Browsers 108

Support in Assistive Technology 109

Direct Accessibility-Wai-Aria 110

Summary 123

10 Rich Internet Applications 125

Features of RIAs 126

Assistive Technology Support for RIAs 127

Flex Accessibility 128

Creating the Look: Accessible Custom Components 130

Creating the Feel: Accessible Custom Components 133

Backend Considerations 134

User-Generated Content 135

Testing Your Code 136

Microsoft Testing Tools 136

ACTF 137

Photoshop CS4 and Illustrator CS4 138

Summary 138

11 The Process 139

Universal by Design 139

Tools and Testing 140

Development Tools 141

Evaluation Tools and Resources 144

20 Questions 150

Team Structures and Strategies 158

Appendix Cross-Reference for Universal Design for Web Applications 163

Index 171