Best Practices for Web Accessibility

What makes accessibility hard?

• Knowledge
• Skill
• Authoring Tools

Where did we start?

• Training: Webmasters group, courses and workshops
• Targeting high profile websites: Office of Admissions and Records
• IBHE web accessibility reporting requirements

What do web developers want?

• Knowledge: Best practices
• Validation: Did I do it right

Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act

• Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act (IITAA)
• IITAA Web accessibility requirements
• iCITA HTML Best Practices
• IBHE Web Accessibility Best Practices Working Group

Best Practices Organization

• Navigation
  • Titling
  • Sub Headings
  • Sub Headings
  • Forms
• Text Equivalents
• Scripting
• Styling

Functional Accessibility Evaluator 1.0

• FAE Beta 1.0 link
• FAE Beta Google Group
• Firefox Accessibility Extension

Steps to Accessible Design

• Use web standards and semantic markup
• Check with best practices during design time
• If you don't seem to find what you need contact best practices group

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)

• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) Version 1.0
• W3C ARIA Roadmap
• W3C WAI-ARIA Primer
• W3C WAI-ARIA Best Practices
• iCITA ARIA Examples

Collaborations

• Campus Collorations related to Accessibility
• Blackboard
• EBSCO Bibliographic Databases
• eXlibris Electronic Content
• Mirapoint

Upcoming Feaures

• DHTML analysis of onload scripting
• Additional rules and checks
• Compliance reports
• Scheduled analysis of web sites
• Firebug accesibility extension (Mozilla Foundation)

Questions?