Accessible Content Magazine

Accessible Content Magazine

This is a very useful resource I just discovered this past week. It's a magazine dedicated to technology and accessibility. The best thing about it is the subscription is FREE. The magazine is fairly new, but has already covered a variety of interesting topics. There's articles on new technology, news in the field, and tips and walkthroughs to creating better accessible electronic content. Some topics already covered have been Flash's accessibility, PDF's, and properly created forms.

The magazine is FREE, and available both on and offline. When subscribing, you can choose to either get a CD, view the online version, or both. The magazine is released quarterly. I've only just discovered this site, but I've already found a lot of useful information here. It's definitely a site worth checking out.

Resources: Accessible Web Design

Want to determine whether your web site (or a web site you are visiting!) follows general accessibility guidelines? While it is crucial to test a site with actual users to ensure that your content is universally accessible, there are a number of standardized guidelines that you can follow to make a web site more accessible to everyone who uses the Web, and there are a number of tools that can help.

To learn more about accessible/universal web design, check out the Web Accessibility Initiative. They have also developed a Preliminary Accessibility Guide, a short checklist that will tell you if your existing site is relatively accessible to all Web users.

The Accessibility Wizard is a tool for web developers, which breaks down key ideas from the Web Accessibility Initiative into concrete tasks to be completed during the design process. Following the suggestions here will ensure the production of a site that meets WAI guidelines. (Requires Flash.)

The Web Accessibility Toolbar is an Internet Explorer plug-in that will allow you to validate the code of any page you visit, as well as assess it from other perspectives. Read Using the AIS Web Accessibility Toolbar.

The following online tools will measure an existing web site against accessibility standards and generate a very general audit or report. Some will assess one page at a time, others will assess multiple pages.

• The ART Guide
  
• Cynthia Says
  
• Hermish also allows you to cut-and-paste source code for evaluation.
  
• Hera generates a visual error report.
  
• Ocawa
  
• WebXACT is an online evaluation tool from the distributors of Bobby.

There are also a number of tools that will assess your web site from the viewpoint of particular user groups.

A number of both desktop and server applications will assess a web site's accessibility. One particularly useful program is LIFT Machine. LIFT Machine, designed by UsableNet, is a server system that will assess an organization's web site for quality and accessibility. A LIFT plug-in is available for Dreamweaver, and tools are also available for mobile devices. LIFT also provides dynamic text transcoding for the visually impaired. Choose the right LIFT product.

Once you have assessed your web site, there are a number of repair tools on the market that can assist you in your efforts to make your web site more accessible. Online free tools, or freeware, that will assist with this process include A-Prompt, freeware that will validate and suggest corrections to your code, and Site Valet, which will provide you with a normalized mark-up of a given page.