7 Real-Life Situations where Web Accessibility is a Must

Web accessibility is very often neglected by individuals and companies while creating their web sites. The reason for that mostly is not enough information about the accessibility and its benefits.What people think about accessibility is to provide some description of the images they use and stop using JavaScript and Flash. There is a lot of misunderstanding about web accessibility and its goals. Therefore, I will list 7 scenarios from daily life when people need accessible web sites:

1. Users can not see. The text content of the site can be accessed using an assistive technology (screen reader, braille output device but the it can not reproduce an image or a video. The assistive technology can not identify structural elements from pure content. The tables used for layout confuse the screen reader, as it tries to read the content of the table in a manner appropriate for tabular information.
2. Users can not hear. They can not access audio content, nor can they follow the narrative in a video clip.
3. User can not move. They can not use the mouse nor the keyboard as an user without disabilities can.
4. Users can not understand a complex text. They see very long page or too complex sentences. Until they reach the conclusions, they have forgotten the real problem.
5. Users have a slow Internet connections and the images either take too long to download or are not downloaded at all.
6. Users are not native speakers and have difficulties understanding the foreign language.
7. The situation prevents for the user from using their hands, eyes or hears to access a web page. Driving or working in a loud environment are examples.

For more information about the importance of Web Accessibility I recommend the web site of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.

GeoBlog

Parallel to this blog I am maintaining another blog - Life In Maps. There are not so many articles as here, however it is quite new and it will grow.

The blog contains maps of the places where I have been. This includes:

• places where I have lived;
• places which I have visited;
• locations of events which I have attended.

For each location there is a map with a marker for the location. If the marker is pressed, a short video will be started if such is available. I have created the video clip with the help of animoto. The clip contains an album from my flickr photos, if there is an album for the location or the event in the map. My aim is to have a diary of the all the places which I have visited. There is a short description of the map as well. My intention is to make the descriptions longer.

Currently I have posted maps of my home in Bonn, of my working place - Fraunhofer FIT and of my trip to Amsterdam with my parents where we visited Madame Tussaud's.

The motivation behind the LifeInMaps blog was to check out how I can create a mashup using Google Maps and flickr. I was reading a lot about the mashups, I was fascinated with them but I had not tried them yet. At the same time I wanted more sophisticated geo-interface to my photos than what is offered by the Flickr Map functionality. So I created this geo-blog as a mashup experiment where I can try out and combine different services which are available in Internet. I know it can be improved a lot and I'll be grateful for every comment there.

Yahoo! Pipes in action

Yesterday and today I spent some time to set up Yahoo! pipes.
The result are two public pipes which merge the content of several RSS feeds and each emits a new feed.

The Companies pipe will be more interesting for broader audience. It gets information from the blogs of really trend-setting web companies. Currently I have included Google, Yahoo! UI Theater, IBM alpha works, Netvibes and RememberTheMilk. The entries are modified in order easily to recognize where they have come from. I have included labels with their source. They are sorted chronologically as well.

I had to work a lot on creating readable entries because some of the feeds are in format which is not processed well by Yahoo! Pipes. One example is how Yahoo! Pipes processes a set of elements with the same name. I had to try a lot of stuff until I realized that I can access an element with index 0 using the following notation: item.element.0. I am glad that I could manage it because the documentation contains only the basics.

The other pipe is focused on accessibility. The web sites whose feeds are aggregated are as follows: W3C WAI - the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C, WebAIM and Juicy Studio. W3C WAI prepares guidelines for web accessibility and reviews web standards with respect to accessibility. WebAIM is a commercial organization and Juicy Studio is an independent UK web site. Any news about accessibility probably will be covered there.

These are my first tries for pipes. I plan to create more with different thematics. An example could be a pipe for the upcoming scientific conferences. The two pipes will evolve as well, new sources will be added there.

I have included both of my pipes in my Netvibes start page. I am waiting impatiently for the Netvibes Ginger release so that I can share my pipes and other widgets with friends.

Facebook

It is really cool!
It is so much fun!
It is the trendiest, and the friendliest, and the expensivest ;) social network in Internet. You guessed. Yes, it is Facebook!

And me, the guy who knows about it, who reads about it, who is going to make unimaginable amount of money from writing widgets from it, did not use it. Just did not use it. Today that problem is gone. Today I am the most active person in Facebook, adding new friends, importing applications and spending all my free time there. My friends will delete me from their lists because of my constant spam ;).

OK, now seriously. Here are my positive impressions from Facebook:

• the design is simple and usable;
• it was really easy to create a profile, connect with the people from my address books and insert applications for my other web sites;
• very nice iPhone widget, which can be inserted in web sites like Netvibes;
  
• it is nice seeing what your friends are doing;
• it is fun to explore the facebook applications
• and much more... ;)

There are some remarks as well:

• better integration with blog and photo hosting providers
• joining more than one place network
• better group overview
• better high school, colleges and workplaces database
• advanced people search
• more will come while I'll use the application

These are my first impressions from Facebook. It is cool and it is promising (for me).

See you next time,
Mitko