Newsletter Archives - July 2004
Note
This newsletter is maintained here for archival purposes. The content presented here may be outdated, may contain out-of-date links, and may not represent current best practices or represent the opinion and recommendations of WebAIM. For up-to-date information, please refer to the WebAIM web site.
WebAIM is a project of the Center for Persons with Disabilities (CPD) on the campus of Utah State University. The CPD will soon have a site evaluation team from the Administration on Developmental Disabilities (ADD). This federal compliance team will review the extent to which the projects at the CPD help improve the lives of individuals with disabilities and their family members. As such, WebAIM has been asked to supply data and information to show the impact of the WebAIM project on those with disabilities. We will be in the position to provide the federal site team with a variety of our resources along with evaluation data we have gathered on those resources (e.g., your satisfaction with our online or site-based trainings). However, we need to collect information on our overall impact since WebAIM’s focus is to help those of you who create the pages that are accessed by individuals with disabilities. Essentially, you have the impact, not WebAIM. Thus we are asking your help to establish that the WebAIM project has been helpful in your work to create accessible Web content, and thus make a difference in the lives of individuals with disabilities.
So, if you have used WebAIM's online resources, newsletter, discussion group, online training, CD-ROM training, site-based training, WAVE tool, consultation services, or other WebAIM elements AND if you have stories, comments, or can discuss how our efforts have helped you and/or the disability community please take a moment and send your thoughts to
If you know of any consumer with a disability that would be willing to share the importance of accessible Web content or has benefitted because of a WebAIM event, resource, or tool, these stories would be particularly helpful to document our impact.
We appreciate your help and thank you in advance for your support.
The WebAIM Team
Featured Article
Creating Accessible JavaScript
by Jared Smith (WebAIM)
JavaScript allows developers to add interaction and processing functionality to otherwise static Web pages. Though commonly used, JavaScript introduces some unique and challenging accessibility issues. This article presents an overview of JavaScript accessibility as well as advanced techniques and examples of how JavaScript can be used and made natively accessible. Read the full article: Creating Accessible JavaScript
On Target Tip
How many of us have the technical skills to develop accessible Web courses? Many teachers, faculty, staff, or trainers in education, business, or government don't have the necessary time or the necessary skills to put their course or training online in an accessible format. CourseGenie from Connected learning in the UK allows the conversion of a Microsoft Word document to various types of HTML. CourseGenie takes allows the user to assign text in the Word document as a specified part of an HTML document. In order for the HTML to be accessible the Word document must be created accessibility to output accessible HTML. If you're not sure how to create an accessible word document you can view WebAIM's Word tutorial for more information
The courseGenieWeb site states, "With courseGenie you can write a complete course as one Word document and automatically generate an online course including navigation, popups, hyperlinks, selftest questions, audio and video, with export to plain HTML, WebCT Content Module or IMS formats." A free 30-day trial is available from the Web site so you can see for yourself if courseGenie works for you.
On Target Resources
A fun and informal article containing comments and thoughts from a variety of experts on the use of color to distinguish between visited and unvisited links. Some great ideas and thoughts on various methods for conveying links to the users.
Flash Accessibility White paper
Bob Regan has put together a white paper titled "Best Practices for Accessible Flash Design". He has promised to post, over the next few weeks, some examples detailing what works and does not work in Flash. For those of us that dabble in Flash development this is a nice overview and resource on accessible Flash media.