I got some time today to listen to this Podcast today on the way to and from one of our other buildings today uptown. I was attending SAS training which is a pretty cool data mining / report generation tool.
This episode was an interview with T.V. Raman and his seeing eye dog Hubbell on accessibility in a developer's world. Quick recap:
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Why care about accessibility? (As a developer)
- You DON'T know your user
- try to build for the widest range of abilities
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Think about how people with different abilities will use the app
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FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Konquerer. Browser specifics are a problem
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Generic browsers out of the box do not help vision, does not enhance views, or help the motion impaired
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you have to add on to the browser
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There is too much "slop", you need to take a step back and not assume what your user will use
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CSS is good for getting developer / user balance
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There are very good FireFox accessibility addons
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Google results page is an html mess so it can work in all browsers
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The standard GMail interface is an accessibility nightmare but this is remedied by using the mobile version
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A year from now Ajax accessibility will get much better with FireFox 3
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Bottom Lines:
- What is it that you are using for accessibility? Is it the base platform? Does it come with tools
- What is the focus?
- What platform are you on?
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Google books scan and OCR to voice is decent
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The mobile calendar is also good.