Accessibility

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While surfing the DesignMuseum site I noticed an Accessibility link at the bottom. Interesting! Is that the ‘new thing to do’, listing every access key?

3 Comments leave a comment below

  1. “Is that the ‘new thing to do’, listing every access key?”

    as there’s no way to expose them in any other sensible way to keyboard users (though some screen readers *may* have some built-in function to list accesskeys present in a page…but not every keyboard user is necessarily blind), it’s one option that’s as good as any.

    unfortunately, they don’t seem to have done their homework that well…on windows/ie7, alt+a triggers the favourites menu; on windows/firefox2, alt+s is the history menu…

  2. it’s good practice to create a statement to let users know about all of a site’s accessibility features. as patrick said there are often clashes between site defined and user agent (browser) defined access keys. users with mobility/visual challenges may have personal access keys defined on top of the browser defaults too. So best practice is to set default access keys but within the accessibility statement give the user the ability to set their own access keys. juicy studio provides a good php tutorial on the subject: http://juicystudio.com/article/user-defined-accesskeys.php

  3. I went to a conference in Washington, D.C. last year on Section 508. What was most interesting to me was the talks by people from big names like Adobe saying that accessibility is now no longer just something for people with impairments but people who want to simply be more efficient. They also said that it was this second demographic that would push and refine accessibility in the marketplace, not the demographic it was originally created for.