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Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers
juicystudio.com — It's well known that AJAX in its current state is fairly inaccessible to certain types of users (eg. the vision impaired). This article offers some suggestions of how to improve the accessibility of websites using AJAX, specifically for those people using screen readers.
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- jvux, on 10/12/2007, -11/+1this will be useful when i turn 136, when my vision starts going bad
- demerol, on 10/12/2007, -12/+0haha blind people are stupid
- blueangel5383, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2it's call good practices and section 508 in case you've never heard of it
- goeric, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3There are going to be people who will benefit from this, don't bad talk something good.
- nitsuj, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Ajax + DHTML is allowing the web to exist as a platform for applications. That's going to be much, much harder to please everybody as far as accessibility goes. Take a small company like 37signals - authors of BaseCamp etc - do you think they have the resources to make their software accessible? Nope. Just like hundreds of other startups.
As for the comment above about 'good practices': accessibility is a context sensitive and subjective issue. Horses for courses.
If you need your web content to be accessible then maybe you shouldn't bother with Ajax + DHTML at all. - jeffthejiff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Interesting, but doesnt seem to be quite there. When the link is pressed, JAWS 7 (in Firefox) seems to jump to the right area on the page, but i'm still not told that anything has changed, unlike with something like an Alert box which comes up immediately.
Screenreaders need to be adapted as well to suit DHTML/AJAX, as well as the webpage's coding. For the moment though, AJAX (and other funky things like custom rich edit controls etc) are unsuitable for accessibility. - pornel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is really important topic. Most webdevelopers don't give a ***** about accessibility, but the web is the most precious resource for blind people - it's much easier for them to surf than to go to library and OCR books. It's easier to fill-in online form than going to the shop, etc.
And it's not only bind people - some people can't use hands (or just have trouble with mouse) - for them it's important that website is usable with keyboard or special input devices (and sites filled with thousands semi-random onclicks may not). - kenni, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.drivers-ed.net
http://www.playing-with-fire.net
http://www.helicopter-game.net - kenni, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.drivers-ed.net
http://www.playing-with-fire.net
http://www.helicopter-game.net - lasdigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I use JAWS, and tried the examples with the virtual buffer on and off. I've pretty much come up with the results you've stated.
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