WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

April 2013 Newsletter

Feature

Low Vision Survey Results

The results of WebAIM's recent survey for users with low vision are now available and provide some interesting insights into the demographics and opinions of this diverse population. Some highlights of the survey results are available on the WebAIM blog.

News

WebAIM Training

WebAIM's next web accessibility training will be held May 21-22 in Logan, Utah.

Resources

Pragmatica11y: A New Approach to Web Accessibility-Learning to Let Go

Denis Boudreau proposes helping developers learn the principles of why web accessibility is so important, instead of merely focusing on satisfying guidelines and success criteria.

aria-controls - lack of support

Gez Lemon explains the importance of support for the aria-controls attribute.

Web Accessibility Lessons from Indiana Jones

Derek Featherstone uses Indiana Jones to teach a valuable lesson about using direct replacements in an interface.

Easy ARIA Tip #6: Making clickables accessible

Marco Zehe describes how to make clickable texts accessible for screen reader and keyboard users.

Quick Tip: Image Sprites and Accessibility

An image sprite is a collection of images that are put into a single image file. This allows the end user to download one large file containing multiple images, rather than downloading multiple image files, thus saving bandwidth and processing time. To present a particular image from within the sprite, the sprite image is defined as a CSS background then positioned to display the appropriate portion.

Because alternative text cannot be provided directly for background images, background sprites are inherently inaccessible. However, a text alternative to an image sprite may be presented in content, but hidden using CSS. For example, a link to a PDF file may present an icon to indicate that it is to a PDF file. If the PDF icon is presented as a sprite background image at the end of the link, the link markup could be <a href="app.pdf">Employment Application<span> - PDF file</span></a>. The text within the span could then be hidden off-screen using CSS. Sighted users would see the CSS background icon while screen reader users hear the "- PDF file" text.

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