Today kicked off the Web Directions North conference in Vancouver, being the pre-conference (optional) workshop day. Kenneth Berger (Dreamweaver PM) and I attended Derek Featherstone's 'Accessibility 2.0' session, a full-day exploration into the state of developing accessible websites, and supporting assistive technologies. And boy, did I get a schooling. Derek really knows his stuff, despite the occasional flakiness of JAWS and some tough questions from the peanut gallery he lead us quite capably from the basics of accessible web design well into the complexities of building rich Ajax-based web apps that support assistive technologies.
I've struggled in the past with both justifying the extra development required to truly build accessible web apps to (former) clients, and one of the rather difficult bits of overhead involved with this is getting hold of assistive technology like the aforementioned JAWS to test sites with. Derek recommends - and I can't disagree it's a great approach - that as opposed to becoming an expert with assistive technology that it's more effective to contract help from real users to test your sites and applications. Another great pointer from Derek was the Firefox extension Fangs - which although is not a screenreader per se (nor a replacement for one), allows you to review a text-based representation of how a screenreader may interpret your page and looks to be very handy indeed for baseline checks of sites in development to flag and correct accessibility issues. Check it out, if you haven't already.
Hijax was covered liberally in regards to accessibility - which I won't go into in depth but if you're not familiar with the concept, is the Jeremy Keith-coined phrase used to describe best practices in developing progressively-enhanced and gracefully-degrading Javascript applications. I'm looking forward to Jeremy's session tomorrow (with Derek) to go deeper into the subject, as well as getting some time to chat with him on the subject for a possible podcast. It sounds like he may have as many questions for myself as I do for him, which should make for a lively conversation. I also plan to get more details about his upcoming book, Bulletproof Ajax - which is releasing next week, and looks to cover Hijaxian methodologies quite definitively (and I've got on preorder at Amazon as we speak).
Anyway- we're off to a great start at what looks to be a fantastic conference - Adobe will be sponsoring the evening welcome reception tomorrow after a full day of breakout sessions (in two tracks), but for now I've got pages and pages worth of notes from today's session and my hallway conversations to wade through and clean up. Great day- and I'm sure I'll have more to talk about tomorrow, too. ;-)
"one of the rather difficult bits of overhead involved with this is getting hold of assistive technology like the aforementioned JAWS to test sites with"
FYI, a fully functioning demo of JAWS is available for free download from the manufacturer (http://www.freedomscientific.com/). It gives 40 minutes of functionality at a pop. I found this is more than I need to test an average website. Need more time, reboot your machine and get another 40 minutes. There is no limit to the number of times you can reboot and start again. WindowEyes (http://www.gwmicro.com), its main competition, has a similar demo available.
Thanks, Donna- that's helpful to know!
Alas, my own barrier is more due to the fact that I'm exclusively a Macintosh-based designer - with a dedicated QA/testing group that catches x-platform issues for me, and the two key screenreaders (JAWS and WindowEyes) are Windows-specific. However with Parallels and the like now available to run Windows apps on a Mac, this should become much less of an issue going forward.