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20021116 Saturday November 16, 2002

My Journey into Accessibility Bobby WorldWide Approved 508 I got a wild itch tonight and decided to make this site Section 508 Approved. All I really needed to do what do a little code alteration within the forms (search and theme switcher) in the menu. I had to add <label> tags around the search box and the theme drop down. I then used the labels.js javascript file from this demo to put the search's label inside the <input> tag. The labels.js script doesn's seem to work on IE5/Mac. Also, since I didn't really want to see the "Theme" label for the drop-down, I added style="display:none" - and that worked in all browsers except Chimera. Maybe I could just have a blank label, but what good is that? The validators also didn't like the onchange event for the theme drop-down and so I opted to add a go button as a workaround.

As for validators, I found that Bobby works pretty well, but only allows a certain number of requests per hour. What kind of validation site is that?! That's not very accessible in my book. You can try to validate this site using Bobby, and you might see this inaccessible error yourself. Rick Salsa pointed out a much better validator last week on the roller-dev mailing list. You can validate this site using it if you'd like.

I went ahead and created a new icon similar to Antipixel's icons. Boy, can the 508 badges get any uglier?! Now I have to find a good place to put it on this site, maybe down in the bottom right by the java.blog icon. Section 508 Approved Posted in The Web at Nov 16 2002, 08:11:03 PM MST 1 Comment

Comments:

Matt, The whole notion of accessibility and making a web app “accessible” is often really a vague target. I believe that Bobby rates the level of compliancy of a target page. So, what does it mean to be Bobby compliant? I’ve had a recent experience with building web applications to comply with the (www.sos.state.co.us) State of Colorado’s requirements. One of the listed requirements is that you cannot use javascript for page navigation. We totally eliminated the use of javascript except for dynamically toggling an image. It actually turned out pretty good after we realized the constraints.

Posted by Gary VanMatre on November 18, 2002 at 05:51 AM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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