Web Accessibility Acronyms (WCAG, WAI-ARIA, JAWS) - WTF?

Andrea HillResource Interactive

andrea.hill@gmail.comhttp://www.afhill.com/blog/

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Web Accessibility Acronyms

• The purpose of this session is for us to establish a common language so we can discuss accessibility

• Feel free to add, edit or argue!

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Overview

• Regulations and Guidelines• Involved Parties• APIs• Assistive Technologies• How RIA changes everything!

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What does “accessible” mean?

• Usable by everyone, everywhere• Can be picked up by screen readers• Can be navigated without using a mouse• Follows legal guidelines/standards• Can be found on google

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Two Motivating Factors

• Usability - the idea that a person can access your content (hopefully easily)

• Regulatory Compliance - that you adhere to established protocol

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Regulatory Compliance

• Section 508• WCAG• ADA• DDA

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Regulatory Compliance

• Section 508Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998.

• Electronic technology that is created, procured or maintained by Federal agencies must comply with established regulations.

• Also refers to agencies who receive Federal funding (post-secondary educational institutions)

• Institutions have the obligation to secure the “most accessible” solution

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Regulatory Compliance

• Section 508 - VPATVPAT - Voluntary Product Accessibility Statement.

• Essentially a three column table outlining how a product meets or does not meet Section 508 regulations.

• Allows the product to be listed on the BuyAccessible website

• http://www.bna.com/corp/vpat.htm

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Regulatory Compliance

• WCAG1.0 (Wu-CAHG)Web Content Authoring Guidelines

• Section 508 was based on WCAG (released at the same time, 98/99)

• Three levels of compliance: • Priority 1: one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the

document.

• Priority 2: one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document.

• Priority 3: one or more groups may find it difficult to access information in the document.

• There is no official governing body to enforce compliance.

• Jim Thatcher’s comparison: http://jimthatcher.com/sidebyside.htm9

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Regulatory Compliance

• WCAG2.0 (Wu-CAHG)• In Candidate Recommendation status as of 30 April 2008

• Initially met with industry critique as being too difficult to understand and too technology-agnostic.

• Sites should be:

• Perceivable

• Operable

• Understandable

• Robust

• Did incorporate more success measures (color contrast ratio)

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Regulatory Compliance

• ADA• Americans with Disabilities Act on 1990 prohibiting

discrimination on the basis of disability in public andprivate sections

• Target was a landmark case. For many years, web sites were not considered to be included under ADA.

“This doesn't mean that the ADA applies to all Web sites, but on the other hand, if there's a bricks-to-clicks type of business and there is some integration of the experience between the two, I think the court is saying that those sites need to comply with the ADA,"

Court allows class-action lawsuit against Target Web site - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9040780

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Regulatory Compliance

• DDA• Disability Discrimination Act (United Kingdom)

• The main part of the DDA that applied to websites came into force on 1 October 1999.

• “A disabled person who believes they have been discriminated against by a service provider can apply to the County Court for an order that the service provider makes their website accessible and compensation for "injury to feeling" for the discrimination they have faced.”

• There are no known cases of sites being cited for non-compliance

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Involved Parties

• W3C • WAI• United States Access Board• AIA

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Involved Parties

• W3C• World Wide Web Consortium

• “an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.”

• Mission: To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

• enables public participation and promotes public accountability

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Involved Parties

• WAI• Web Accessibility Initiative

• Subset of W3C

• “works with organizations around the world to develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.”

• Currently working on WCAG2.0 as well as WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)

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Involved Parties

• United States Access Board• Also known as the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance

Board

• “The Access Board is an independent Federal agency devoted to accessibility for people with disabilities.”

• Represents the public

• TEITAC• Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory

Committee

• An advisory committee formed by the Access board to “a federal advisory committee provide recommendations for updates of accessibility standards issued under section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and guidelines under section 255 of the Telecommunications Act” 1

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Involved Parties

• AIA• Accessibility Interoperability Alliance

• “Initiated by the accessibility industry, the AIA is a group of leading Information Technology (IT) and Assistive Technology (AT) companies, content providers, and other key engineering organizations, working to create and harmonize standards for accessible technology.”

• The first four AIA projects include:1. User Interface (UI) Automation

2. Mapping WAI-ARIA to UI Automation

3. Interoperability of Accessibility APIs

4. Common Keyboard Shortcuts for AT Products Used with Web Browsers

• Members include: Adobe, GW Micro, HP, Microsoft, Oracle.

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Assistive Technologies

• Screen Readers• Screen Magnifiers• Pointing Devices

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Assistive Technologies

• Screen Readers• JAWS - most popular screen reader software

available. Very customizable. • Fire Vox - a FireFox extension that recognizes

changes to the DOM.• Window-Eyes, HAL

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Introduction to Screen Readers

QuickTime™ and aSorenson Video decompressorare needed to see this picture.

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APIs

• MSAA• IAccessible2• UI Automation

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APIs

• MSAA• Microsoft Active Accessibility

• The means by which Flash communicates with assistive technologies

• Windows only!

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APIs

• IAccessible2• Developed by the Free Standards Group.

• Extends, does not replace, MSAA

• “The standardized interfaces make it far easier for application developers to provide accessible applications to computer users with disabilities, regardless of their OS platform.”

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APIs

• (Microsoft) UI Automation• Exposes user interface controls for test automation and assistive

technology.

• Part of the .NET framework starting at 3.0.

• Successor of MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility)

• Tools are available royalty-free on all operating systems that support Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

• While UI Automation is trumpeted as "royalty-free", IAccessible2 claims to be an "open standard".

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How RIA Changes Everything!

• RIA• WAI-ARIA• AxsJAX• AjaxAID

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What does “RIA” mean?

“The promise of rich clients includes the ability to cleanly separate presentation logic and user interfaces from the application logic hosted on the network. Rich clients should provide a model for easily using remote services provided by back-end components, whether hosted in an application server or accessed as XML Web Services” (J. Allaire, 2002) [1]

•A departure from the traditional “page refresh” to retrieve data 2

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WAI-ARIA

• Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications

• Introduced in September 2006

• Roadmap

• Roles

• States/Properties

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AxsJAX

• By the creator of Fire Vox, Charles Chen (and T.V. Raman)

• User-implemented via bookmarklet, Greasemonkey script or Fire Vox

• Injects accessibility-specific DOM properties into existing Web applications via JavaScript, providing a light-weight yet flexible mechanism for experimenting with various design patterns for enhancing the accessibility of AJAX applications.

• Pre-requisites:

1. A modern Web browser like Firefox 2.0 or later that supports W3C ARIA.

2. Adaptive technologies that respond correctly to the accessibility enhancements introduced by W3C ARIA.

3. In particular, many of the enhancements injected by AxsJAX depend on support for live regions a feature that enables adaptive technologies like screen readers and self-voicing browsers deal correctly with asynchronous updates to portions of a Web page.

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AjaxAid

• Formerly known as FlashAid

• A technique that uses the accessibility properties in Flash to inform javascript whether or not a screen reader is being used

• Only works where MSAA is available

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Cheat Sheet• Regulatory Compliance

– Section 508

• VPAT

– WCAG1.0

– WCAG2.0

– ADA

– DDA

• Parties

– W3C

– WAI

– United States Access Board

– AIA

• Screen Readers

– JAWS

– Fire Vox

– Window Eyes

• APIs

– MSAA

– IAccessible2

– UI Automation

• RIA

– WAI-ARIA

– AxsJAX

– AjaxAID

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