Blog
April 29, 2008
Techshare India 2008 Presentations are now available online!!
Filed under: Techshare India — Priti Rohra @ 11:25 amTechshare India 2008, the first accessibility conference and exhibition held in New Delhi included a range of presentations by speakers across the world. The presentations were on different topics including Web Accessibility, PDF accessibility, Flash Accessibility, Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), Section 508 etc.
Some of the speakers who presented at Techshare India include Brian Hardy and Kenny Johar of Vision Australia, Mandy Thompson and Steve Morgan of The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) UK, Steve Bennett of Dolphin Computer Access, David Baquis of Section 508, Lisa Friendly of Bookshare, Sameer Bhatt of Adobe Systems, omprakash subbarao of Yahoo etc.
The presentations are in different format, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Power Point (PPT), and Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) etc. These presentations are now available online at: http://www.barrierbreak.com/events-conference/techshare_presentations2008.php.
No CommentsApril 9, 2008
United Nation (UN) convention on the rights of people with disabilities will be coming to force on 3rd May 2008…
Filed under: General — Priti Rohra @ 6:59 pmOn 3rd April 2008, Ecuador became the 20th country to ratify the UN convention on the rights of people with disabilities. This has resulted in the treaty coming in to force on 3rd May 2008. Following is the list of 20 countries, who have ratified the convention:
- Bangladesh – 30 November 2007
- Croatia – 15 August 2007
- Cuba – 6 September 2007
- Ecuador – 3 April 2008
- El Salvador – 14 December 2007
- Gabon – 1 October 2007
- Guinea – 8 February 2008
- Hungary – 20 July 2007
- India – 1 October 2007
- Jamaica – 30 March 2007
- Jordan – 31 March 2008
- Mexico – 17 December 2007
- Namibia – 4 December 2007
- Nicaragua – 7 December 2007
- Panama – 7 August 2007
- Peru – 30 January 2008
- San Marino – 22 February 2008
- South Africa – 30 November 2007
- Spain – 3 December 2007
- Tunisia – 2 April 2008
Source: United Nations website (http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=257)
Let’s hope this landmark convention on rights of people with disabilities will help to build an Inclusive society across the globe.
No CommentsApril 4, 2008
Importance of ‘Help’ for Accessibility
Filed under: Flash — Shilpi Kapoor @ 2:18 pmAlthough the topic seems small, ‘Help Screen’ plays an important role in making any application accessible/usable. In our typical developer role we create all the fantastic things in an application, we provide keyboard shortcuts, alternative text for images, descriptions for buttons and images, various ways of handling different things in the course etc… but we forget to pass all of this information to the user. We assume that the user will come to know this when he/she will use the course, which is not fair.
The best way of conveying this information to the user is by providing a ‘Help Screen’.
We must include ALL the information which is beneficial for the users to access the application in a ‘Help Screen’. If we have developed the application catering to various disabilities, we should not hesitate to add an additional help topic for them so that the application becomes practically accessible to them. In case of a screen reader user, we should inform him/her about how to get to the buttons, how to read the alt for a button, if description is provided for a particular object how to access it? What are the different key combinations used by the screen reader to provide the information faster. (e.g.: Insert+Ctrl+G gives the list of all the graphics on the screen). We can’t assume an average screen reader user to know all these shortcuts.
To avoid the confusion, while the user is accessing the help screen, he/she should not have access to rest of the information. For example if a screen reader user is using the help screen and he/she press ‘Insert+F5’ to get the list of controls, he/she should only be presented with the controls on the help screen. This not only applies for help screen but also for other major parts of your flash screen (application). Normally what developers do is, they just make rest of the things disabled by writing simple code. But only disabling is not enough for keeping screen reader away from that information. Screen reader picks up all that stuff even if it’s disabled. We need to think one step ahead and deliver the solution.
We have to give the users what they want and not what we think they need.
And last but not the least; the ‘Help Screen’ has to be completely accessible 
You can have a look at our Hangman game for reference.
peace, veiky
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