Showing posts with label section 508. Show all posts
Showing posts with label section 508. Show all posts

Monday, April 15, 2013

Color contrast checking tool

Recently people from Washington suggested me a very good tool for color contrast. I installed it and play around. I think, it's easy and quite interesting. I hope, for those, who need, will use for the development.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Unicode symbol map for PDFs

I'm checking new PDFs  from SRTR ADR for section 508 accessibility. My first check shows me that document has some problems with Unicode mapping. My editors don't know what to do. So, I searched Internet for the answers. Actually, I found very good site which is very helpful solving my problem.  I copied some mathematical symbols into my pdf files and it solves the problem with accessibility.  I'm not a first one, who has problem with mapping UNICODE symbols, so I offer you a real help. I hope, it will work for you.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Color contrast

Working on section 508, I've learned a lot about color contrast. First of all, there is a wonderful online tool for finding  a right colors for your template. I used old color and found out what I should do with them to improve a color contrast. To improve a color contrast, I use another good online tool. I think, any developer should know about color contrast  idea and use for site development. I hope, I found a right colors for my SRTR gov-site.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Section 508 and Skip navigation

Today I dedicated my time to another "Section 508"-feature such Skip Navigation. It's quite important for Gov-sponsered sites. This feature could be us by Internet users, who are blond and don't use a mouse.
Here's a complete code for "skip navigation" feature.

HTML code after <body>-tag:
<div id="skipmenu">
        <a href="#skip" class="skippy">Skip To Main Content</a>
        <a name="top"></a>
    </div>

HTML code after "main" content begins:
<div><a name="#skip" tabindex="-1" id="skip">&nbsp;</a></div>

CSS code which goes with HTML:
div#skipmenu{
position:relative;
}
div#skipmenu a.skippy{
position:absolute;
top: -1000px;
left:-1000px;
height: 1px;
width: 1px;
overflow:hidden;
}

div#skipmenu a.skippy:active, div#skipmenu a.skippy:focus, div#skipmenu a.skippy:hover{
position: absolute;
top:auto;
left:auto;
width:100%;
height: 1em;
width: auto;
font-size:1em;
font-weight:bold;
width:100%;
padding-bottom:15px;
color: black;
z-index:100;
text-align:right;
margin-bottom:25px;
}

In addition, I found quite interesting site about SKIPPING. I think, it's going to be interesting for many of us.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

DropDown Menu and section 508

I'm still working on future srtr.gov-site fixing all problems related to section-508 compliance. One of the problem is to implement tabbed-accessible (for non-mouse users) and JAWS-readable menu.  Researching the ideas how to do this, I found several sites with code which claim their menus are section 508-complaint. I tried all of them, and did not find them complaint. I found only one site, which led me to implementation of my menu.  Before starting  to do something I have read several articles on sites:
1. Accessible Dropdown Menus by Terrill Thompson
2. Accessible Drop-Down Menus by Martin Kliehm

Friday, April 6, 2012

Free tools for section 508

Free tools for those, who design gov websites.
Constructing a new www.srtr.gov site, I found some very useful tools to satisfy all requirements of sections 508. After you wrote a code, please use these tools to check if your code satisfies section 508.
Here they're:
1. Fangs - the screen reader emulator
2. Exclusively helpful site with a lot of free tools Illinois Center for Information Technology and Web Accessibility
3. Powermapper section 508 Accessibility testing Tool
4. Tools on WebAim site

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Accesskey and section 508

How different browsers handle the above accessKey letters for button and anchor elements


BrowserOperating SystemKey CombinationButton BehaviorAnchor Behavior
Chrome 7.0.517.41LinuxAlt + letterClicks the button (3)Clicks the anchor (3)
Chrome 7.0.517.41Mac OS XControl + Option + letterClicks the button (3)Clicks the anchor (3)
Chrome 7.0.517.41WindowsAlt + letterClicks the button (3)Clicks the anchor (3)
Firefox 1.5WindowsAlt + letterClicks the button (1)Unknown
Firefox 2LinuxAlt + Shift + letterClicks the button (1)Clicks the anchor
Firefox 2Mac OS XControl + letterClicks the button (1)Clicks the anchor
Firefox 2WindowsAlt + Shift + letterClicks the button (1)Unknown
Firefox 3LinuxAlt + Shift + letterClicks the button (1)Clicks the anchor
Firefox 3Mac OS XControl + letterClicks the button (1)Clicks the anchor
Firefox 3WindowsAlt + Shift + letterClicks the button (1)Clicks the anchor
Internet Explorer 6WindowsAlt + letterSets focus on the button (2)Unknown
Internet Explorer 7WindowsAlt + letterSets focus on the button (2)Sets focus on the anchor (2)
Internet Explorer 8WindowsAlt + letterClicks the button (3)Sets focus on the anchor (2)
Internet Explorer 9 (beta)WindowsAlt + letterClicks the button (3)Sets focus on the anchor (2)
Safari 3.1.2Mac OS XControl + Option + letterClicks the button (3)Clicks the anchor (3)
Safari 3.1.2WindowsAlt + letterClicks the button (3)Clicks the anchor (3)
Safari 5.0.2Mac OS XControl + Option + letterClicks the button (3)Clicks the anchor (3)
Safari 5.0.2WindowsAlt + letterClicks the button (3)Clicks the anchor (3)


•Red = Different behavior for buttons and anchors
•Comment 1 = To just set focus on the button/anchor, change your about:config setting for the “accessibility.accesskeycausesactivation” user preference.
•Comment 2 = Press Enter to click the button/anchor
•Comment 3 = There appears to be no built-in mechanism to just set focus on the button/anchor. The component handling the click event would be responsible for setting focus while handling the click.

The data comes from http://formattc.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/browsers-and-the-html-accesskey/ this table was really helpful to build my own system of accesskeys.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

SRTR.org and section 508

I started a new project for www.srtr.org moving toward new HTML5 and section 508 website. First of all, I'm going through 508-standards documents and some PowerPoint presentations presented by hrsa.gov. Went to Internet trying to find some interesting sites which talk about benefits of section 508. Found some of them. Here they are:

http://www.ada.gov/websites2.htm

http://www.usweb.com/internet-marketing-firm/XCO/benefits_of_section_508_compliance.htm

My first step is reading of all papers and talking to editors and writers

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Again Section 508

Today I concentrate on section 508. There are a lot of new and interesting ideas to work on. I'm surprised, how difficult is to satisfy gov requirements. From another side, it's quite good that government takes care of people with vision problems. It's great that more and more people can access Internet and be part of Web community. American government creates a very detailed document to follow. Now I do have more understanding of section 508.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Section 508 and alt-text

Today I spent fair amount of time researching screen readers programs to satisfy rules of section 508.
Actually I was intrigued by the idea to find free screen-reader program. I found several programs, but all of them don't read alt-text. The best FREE choice is NVDA (http://www.nvda-project.org/). The program reads out all links which is quite comfortable. I continued my search and found that only some of the screen reader programs CAN read alt-text. One of them is JAWS
(http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp). JAWS is quite popular in software community.

List of screen reader programs

Actually I found another interesting site. It's a site of The HiSoftware CynthiaSays portal
(joint Education and Outreach project of HiSoftware, ICDRI, and the Internet Society Disability and Special Needs Chapter). Using the site you can check if your site is section 508 complaint. It generates quite good and detailed report. I really like the fact, that we can test compatibility before submitting the site. Previously I used the similar site for HTML-quality code. With HTML5 implementation, I'm not sure, that the html-validator will work good as it used to be.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Section 508 and ASP.NET

This is my second post about section 508. This time it's related to asp-server control Menu.
There are 2 attributes such as DynamicPopOutImageUrl and StaticPopOutImageUrl which is often used for building a Menu. Both of these attributes MUST be accompanied by another 2 attributes such as DynamicPopOutImageTextFormatString and StaticPopOutImageTextFormatString respectevely for proper implementation rules of section 508. Both of these attributes generate text for image alt attribute. It's quite important moment because menu plays an significant role on a web-page.

Actually I did not find much information about it on Internet. Therefore I decided to post a couple words about it.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Section 508

Many people has no clue about "section 508". I would like to spend some time and blog about this topic. For developers who used to develop a lot of front-end screen "section 508" becomes one of the important issues. First of all, there are number of sites dedicated to such important topic. Here are two of them:
section508.gov
HHS about section 508

Recently I did one special project dedicated to section 508. I worked on SRTR.ORG
I would like to share some guidelines from section 508 acceptance list.

- Checked for Description and Title Metadata, inserted Copyright Status
- Checked all URL’s contain the correct hyperlink, displayed the fully qualified URL and all URL's linked to the correct Web destinations
- Inserted in all images, grouped images and non-text elements that convey information ALTERNATIVE text descriptions
- Checked if all complex images have descriptive text immediately after the image
- Checked if all data tables in the document have a logical reading order from left to right, top to bottom
- Checked all documents file name not contain spaces or special characters. It's quite important for cyber security.
- Checked if document is free of scanned signatures because scanned signatures within documents are a considered a theft-of-identity risk

Full section 508 acceptance list could be find on Webaim