Universal Access (Accessibility)

Terms:

• Accessibility: being able to access something (implies disability)
• Universal Access: making sure everyone can use something (inclusive of all)
• Inclusive design: designing to covere the needs for everyone, keeping in mind any special situational, temporary, or permament accomodations
  • Microsoft has an amazing document (PDF) on this exact topic.

Cockpit-related accessibility documents

• Installing NVDA on Linux
• ChromeVox HowTo

Resources

• MDN Accessibility overview
• WebAIM
• The A11Y Project: A community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier.
• Section 508
  • HTML checklist:
    • HHS section 508 checklist
    • WebAIM section 508 checklist
    • Section508.gov Accessibility improvement
  • Development Methodology for Section 508 Compliance (pdf)
• Testing accessibility with real people
• Simply Accessible articles
• Screen reader reliability tests @ PowerMapper

Specific

HTML-related

• Tabindex
  • summary: use 0 or -1, but nothing higher
• Skip link
• ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)
  • ARIA @ MDN
  • WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1
    • Editor's Draft (more recent WIP version of the above)
    • First rule of ARIA club is to not use ARIA, unless there's no other way (that is: if there's a semantic element that provides the feature, use that instead — it's much prefered and simpler than marking up everything with ARIA)
  • Landmarks
  • Articles
    • Landmarks: HTML5 vs. ARIA
    • AIRA tabs (danger!)
    • Don’t Use ARIA Menu Roles for Site Nav
      • "A properly-coded web page navigation menu needs no ARIA. Once you add ARIA, however, you have put yourself on the hook to handle some complex interactions."
      • "Somehow many developers have come to the conclusion that a web page is inaccessible unless it uses ARIA. This is a combination of patterns that do not use semantic HTML, a misunderstanding of ARIA, and not having practical experience with assistive technology."
      • "Tutorials often get it wrong, such as the always useless W3 Schools in its Bootstrap documentation. Not that Bootstrap is off the hook, given that its 2.x documentation recommended menu roles and I still see that code copy-pasted into projects today."

Testing framework

• aXe: https://www.axe-core.org/
• Accessibility Developer Tools: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/accessibility-developer-tools

Browser add-ons

• aXe Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/axe-devtools/
• WAVE (WebAIM): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wave-accessibility-tool/
• Tota11y: Accessibility toolkit: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tota11y-accessibility-toolkit/
  • Based on Tota11y by Khan Academy: https://khan.github.io/tota11y/

Desktop screen reader

• Orca is included in GNOME
  • speech-dispatcher-flite adds a better voice for Orca (which is used once it's selected)
  • orca -s lets you configure Orca, including the voice used

Web screen reader

• Epiphany (GNOME-Web) can use Orca
• Chrome has a plugin called ChromeVox