This takes it even further in some ways than the ADA. As far as I can tell (and I am no lawyer), the judge is saying that one state's disability laws can apply to all web sites that are available to that state. Keep in mind that Target is not a California based company. According to Hoovers, it is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. However, the case is being heard in San Francisco Federal court and was brought by a UC Berkley student. So this is starting to have major repercussions for any business that wants to do business in California. (And with a population of over 36 million or 12% of the United States Population, thats a lot of people to not want to do business with).

The story has been picked up by the Los Angeles Times .

A reprint of the press release can be found at Yahoo Business.

Again, this is another indicator that accessibility is going to become law for businesses as it is for government. Start thinking about it and preparing your business for it now.

I didn't get to my special treat, which is popup Windows using a Class. I've got the zip file up at: docs/popupwindows.zip for your downloading pleasure. The basic premise is that in an xHTML 1.0 strict environment, the target attribute is obsoleted. So there is no way to simply have a link open in a new window. I actually blogged about this in September, 2006, and have been working on the solution since then. The solution uses JavaScript and CSS together to create both the functionality of the popup window as well as add an image to the page to indicate that the link opens in a new window. It also degrades gracefully without JavaScript and simply opens in the current window.

I've also made my presentation and sample files available for download. Enjoy!

I do! So, once again, I'm participating in CSS Naked Day. Why am I doing this? Well, everone knows that I'm a proponent of Web Standards and Accessibility. I also have some pretty good CSS skills. One thing I've found is that a strong HTML structure supports all these things.

So I'm not afraid to take it all off. I'm proud of my "structure"

For more info http://naked.dustindiaz.com/

For all you interested in how you can use Ajax and how JavaScript and Screen Readers work together, this would be a good session to go to. I plan on being there in person.

Webcast information page

WebCast Presentation Room

First off, I got to be a thorn in the side of Bob Regan and Andrew Kirkpatrick of Adobe as they presented on Flash Accessibility. I really want to believe Flash is accessible, really I do and I go to these presentations in the hope that I see stuff that will make me believe. Inevitably I leave disappointed.

Don't get me wrong, Flash is making leaps and bounds in the accessibility arena. But one thing I was unaware of before, but was told today, is that while Flash still only works in Windows and while it is supported in both Window-Eyes and Jaws (the two leading window screen readers), it only supports Internet Explorer. (Although both of those screen readers work with FireFox as well). That was disappointing. I also asked about testing. There really isn't a good way to test accessibility in Flash without a knowledge of Action Script.

Yes, developers should be testing and knowledgeable about accessibility, but in my experience that isn't alway the case and a large part of the testing process is pinpointing problems in a project's source code and coming up with suggested solutions for the developers. To tell a developer, "Your form isn't accessible" doesn't cut it. I have to be able to tell them why it isn't accessible and where it isn't accessible and how to make it accessible. Harder to do with Flash.

There are no tools out there to help test Flash accessibility either, although IBM is presenting on a rules based validation tool for Eclipse for Rich Clients tomorrow. I plan on going to that. Not sure if it will work for Flash. Possibly Flex since that is xml based. Will be interesting to see. One of the interesting things that I took away is that while Flash only has 12 accessible components, Flex has 26. Of course just like HTML, a flash application will only be as accessible as its developer(s) make it.

I think one of the areas of accessibility that Flash does shine is in the ability to caption video. In many ways, that is the best way to do accessible video.

Apollo should be very accessible by the way, since it is written off of webkit (the same engine that Safari is written under).

I was at two WCAG presentations today, that were more about what the WCAG is doing and providing than how to's. The first one, focused on what the WCAG is doing to help market accessibility to developers. I plan on looking very closely at that information and providing links through here.

The second WCAG presentation was about Testing and the WCAG 2.0. I thought that it was going to be about how to test WCAG guidelines. Instead it was about the beginnings of a test suite for the WCAG 2.0. Its in its very infancy, but the implications of having tests and samples of code to meet guidelines will eventually be invaluable for those of us who work with this on a daily basis.

My third presentation was regarding testing metrics. The presenter, Giorgio Brajnk, actually wrote the software for Lift. He presented a new way of measuring metrics on testing sites. Some of the stuff he had to say was interesting, and I might include it into my testing talk for CFUNITED. I have to go over my notes though and see whether it fits into the theme. Part of the problem is his ideas are theories at the moment and I tend to speak on the hows during my talks.

The fourth presentation, by IBM, spoke of harmonizing standards. The gist being that for a large, international company like IBM, how do you both test and certify that your products/websites meet all the standards for all the different countries. Since my company does a lot of international business, its an interesting concept and one that I am going to flesh out more fully as I help implement an accessibility model for us.

All in all, its been a good day. I plan on attending sessions tomorrow on Flash Accessibility, Dojo: an accessible JavaScript library and a panel discussion on what is going on with Section 508. (For those that don't know, the access board is doing a "refresh" on it, that is looking at what is going on in the world of the web and making changes to it. From my understanding, the US access board has 4 international participants from Canada, Japan, the EU and Australia) as well as a participant from the W3C. Which makes for an interesting mix.

Ron is an old co-worker of mine from back in the 80's. He is a very talented and gifted engineer. He had a stroke 3 years ago which doesn't confine him solely to a wheel chair simply because he works at it. He hops with one leg getting around his house, in and out of his pool, using a wheelchair and a specially equipped van that he can drive everywhere else. But one side of his body is not able to move. I was in awe of him tonight, not for what he has managed to overcome, but by what he has achieved both because of his disability and despite of it.

Ron has become a disability advocate in the Los Angeles area, using his voice to make sure that not only are his issues heard, but others as well. He told me of letters he wrote after a cruise he was on which was sold to them with specific accessible features in mind, wasn't. His letter prompted changes to the ship. He has been vocal about making sure that bathrooms are accessible at the Convention Center when he goes to see games. He isn't doing it for only for himself, but to make sure that others who don't have his willpower or stamina benefit to.

It made me realize tonight, more deeply than I have before, how much accessibility issues (web or otherwise) affect, not only the physical well-being of those who have issues, but their mental and emotional well-being as well. Ron is an intelligent man. He hasn't lost the use of his intelligence, just the use of one hand and one leg. He doesn't want to be treated as a person in a wheel chair, or made to feel different. He doesn't want "separate but equal". He just wants the playing field leveled in a way that isn't obtrusive to the rest of the world, but allows him to still be independent.

Accessibility isn't just about hitting a guideline or an abstract concept. In the end it comes down to people. For me, its about making sure that people who access sites that I have a hand in can have equal, quality access to the information I present. To treating all people with respect for who they are, and their accomplishments. I plan on taking the lessons I've learned tonight and my wakeup call into all the sessions I attend here this week.

The introduction to the book states:

On the following pages we will discuss and see how we can use Javascript, but still maintain accessibility. The technique to completely separate Javascript from the other two layers of web development has become commonly named "unobtrusive Javascript", as "accessible Javascript" does not quite cut it. You can have a perfectly separated Javascript and still be totally inaccessible.

For those of you who didn't know, Home Page Reader in its latest iteration (3.04) was a viable and inexpensive way of screen reader testing. It didn't do as much as Jaws or Window Eyes which are the big two screen readers, but it also was much more inexpensive (just over $100 versus the $799-$1,200 for the other two). It was a reasonable alternative to testing.

With the discontinuation of Home Page Reader, the developer has some options, but they aren't great. The most viable option seems to be that both Jaws and Window Eyes offer demo versions of their software for testing purposes. The bad news is that they are time sensitive (40 minutes for Jaws and 30 minutes for Window Eyes) and require a complete reboot.

A more palatable way of dealing with this seems to be to install these programs within a Virtual Machine, thereby giving yourself an option of rebooting the virtual machine instead of your entire computer. I've spent some time doing this in the last weekend and while it wasn't an easy install, it is a solution, since a Virtual Machine will use your sound system.

The problem is that I always use an xHTML 1.0 Strict DocType and the target attribute of a link is deprecated. If I use the target then my pages don't validate. While I'm (somewhat) okay with the idea that outside items that I put in (like ads) will make my pages not validate, I want the code I have control over to validate. Its a control issue, I freely admit it.

Federal Judge Sustains Discrimination Claims Against Target; Precedent Establishes That Retailers Must Make Their Websites Accessible to the Blind Under the ADA.

This is an article in an occasional series on common mistakes in markup and accessibility. While its fine to always talk about what the guidelines are, sometimes its also good to talk about what not to do or how to do something properly.

For some reason, many people think that adding a <tbody></tbody> series of tags to their tables increases accessibility. While I'm not sure where this misconception came from, I know its out there. I can definitively state that the <tbody></tbody> tags do not increase accessibility in and of themselves. In fact using them by themselves is not a valid usage.

Out of 317 responses (and this was a multiple choice poll, meaning you could choose more than one thing that you wanted), 77 people put down that they wanted Adobe to put an accessibility checker into the IDE. I thought about this after I read it and I have some thoughts I wanted to share.