http://theaccesspond.com Making Accessibility A Reality! Thu, 25 Mar 2010 22:13:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This week I am attending the International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference in San Diego. Today I sat in on the the "Assistive Technology Access to Flash and PDF" session presented by Matt May from Adobe Systems. There it was announced that the next release of Acrobat, Acrobat Reader, Flash ... http://theaccesspond.com/2010/03/25/adobe-expanding-the-accessibility-of-acrobat-and-flash/ If you have to work with Section 508 you have probably wondered when we would get a peek at the refresh of the standards. It’s been long overdue. The Access Board has just released the draft of the refresh for the Section 508 standards. You can view them at this link: ... http://theaccesspond.com/2010/03/17/section-508-refresh-draft-ready-for-preview/ I recently came across a site that gave guidance about formatting a Microsoft Word 2003 document for accessibility. Yes, I know that Office 2007 is the most recent version but there are still a lot of Office 2003 users in the World and most of the advice can be transferred ... http://theaccesspond.com/2009/09/10/looking-for-free-accessibility-advice-caveat-emptor/ While this may not be of much use to our development followers I am very intrigued by this push for new standards in a way that can obviously benefit many.  It really isn't a secret that many of us no longer rely on going into a bank and utilizing the ... http://theaccesspond.com/2009/09/08/house-bill-6305-atm-visually-impaired-friendly-act/ The CKEditor is the newest release of the popular open source web page text editor formally known as the FCKEditor. Unfortunately the previous name was often misrepresented as the [bad word] editor. So the name has been updated and hopefully this will avoid any unpleasant or offensive connections in the ... http://theaccesspond.com/2009/09/04/is-the-new-ckeditor-accessible/ I'm going to take a slightly different twist with some posts here as I concede that the many can accomplish far more than a few.  I find and read so many great posts that I didn't think it was fair to limit the knowledge we pass to you simply because ... http://theaccesspond.com/2009/09/04/accessibility-in-the-news-adobe-flash-accessibility/ Earlier today, my friend Lainey Feingold put up a great blog post about a comprehensive web accessibility settlement agreement involving the New York State Attorney General’s Office.  The settlement agreement involves HSBC Card Services.  The settlement agreement requires, among other things, that HSBC make its website conform to WCAG 2.0, level AA. This ... http://theaccesspond.com/2009/09/02/new-york-requires-wcag-20-3-legal-take-away-messages/ I stumbled across a very important post in the accessibility world yesterday.  As Attorney General Cuomo secured a nationwide agreement with HSBC which basically came under fire as their services weren't fully accessible to those with disabilities.  A blind customer in this case was attempting to dispute a credit card ... http://theaccesspond.com/2009/09/02/hsbc-accessibility/ I've run across a few issues and concerns lately that talk about JAWS reading the <Title> attributes in IE but not in Firefox.  I had to spend a little time researching this one but here is the gist of it... The fact that IE works is actually an old IE bug ... http://theaccesspond.com/2009/09/02/jaws-attributes-iefirefox/ Many times great effort and resource is put into making sure that a site is compliant with Section 508 or the WCAG requirements. All the ALT text is in place, input fields have labels, headings and page titles are used, etc. Everything is set and ready to go…at least from ... http://theaccesspond.com/2009/08/11/compliancy-vs-usability/