January 12, 2008 - Comments Off on 456 Berea Street: Two on Accessibility
456 Berea Street: Two on Accessibility
Post-holidays, I'm finally getting a chance to catch up with my favorite blogs. Over the next couple of days, I plan to summarize and include links to some of my favorite posts.
Roger Johansson, of 456 Berea St., wrote two interesting posts about accessibility in December of 2007. The first is primarily an exhortation to practice accessibility, while the second examines some bad practices that masquerade as accessible.
On 14 December, in "Accessibility is part of your job, Johansson included this quote (which he agrees with and so do we!) from James Edwards's "Why Accessibility? Because It's Our Job!:"
If we call ourselves professionals, we owe it to our clients, their clients, and ourselves, to do our job properly. A chef must care about health, a builder must care about safety, and we must care about accessibility.
Caring about accessibility, however, means more than mindlessly applying a few HTML attributes to a web page. In "Overdoing accessibility" (17 December), Johansson writes about the mis- and overuse of the accesskey
, tabindex
, title
, and alt
attributes. In one egregious example, he mentions a webpage containing 185 spacer GIFs with an alt
attribute of "Typographical space"!
Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism, The Thinking Mechanism
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