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Accessibility Throughout the Life-CycleSession OTH-2055
CSUN Conference – Los Angeles, California, 21-March-2009Olive Au - IBM Customer Facing SolutionsBill Curtis-Davidson - IBM Human Ability & Accessibility Center
Reasons for Integrating Accessibility into the Full Development Life Cycle Decisions made in each development phase
will affect the accessibility of the application
Level of effort (and associated cost) to address accessibility increases if issues not addressed until late in the life cycle
Regardless of development method used, guidance presented herein can be applied by teams (we are not advocating any specific software process methodology)
Base Framework Example: Creating Accessible WebSphere® Portals Many vendors such as IBM offer product
accessibility statements for many products upon request (http://www.ibm.com/able/). These should be looked at as basic statements of accessibility of the framework.
IBM WebSphere® Portal is used for IBM’s own award-winning “w3” intranet, to implement enhanced accessibility features:– Hidden “Landmarks” are used in core view
layouts (e.g., masthead, global navigation, start of main content area, footers) using HTML heading elements that are hidden from most users using CSS classes.
– Portlet page indexes that are dynamically rendered (and hidden using CSS classes) to offer blind users a quick way to understand complex pages and navigate.
– “Skip to Main Content” links that allow users to jump over the masthead and repetitive navigation elements.
– How is the accessibility strategy supported in use cases and other technology, functional and non-functional requirements?
– How do the selected accessibility standards impact technical aspects of design?
– How will technical team members be trained and share knowledge related to accessibility?
Accessible Design & Usability
– How is the accessibility strategy supported in interaction design work products (e.g. wireframes, templates, visual style, tables, forms, sorting etc.)?
– Have the special needs of people with disabilities been taken into account in specific work products (e.g. personas)?
Team Collaboration Example: Accessibility Information Sharing Accessibility information discovered during
pre-design of chosen technologies should be shared among user experience designers and developers
This information should include:
– Accessibility constraints and/or accessibility attributes of a technology’s API
– List of widgets/components that are accessible and can be used by the team and list of widgets/components that are inaccessible and should be avoided
In sharing this information, developers and user experience designers can be more able to produce an accessible solution
User Interaction Design Example: Content & Consistency Many sites have images that require ALT text.
Surprisingly, the responsibility of defining ALT text to developers whose strength may not be communication!
In addition, the same images may appear on multiple pages where each page is developed by a different developer.
– Accessibility specialist working with an IA can define a list of images and the ALT text that should be associated with a particular image. This will solve both problems: proper wording AND consistency!
Testing Phase: Key Considerations How thorough will the testing be? What types of tests will be performed? What methods will be used to document the
tests so they can be repeated exactly the same way by another developer assigned to fix the defect?
What methods will be used to document and communicate accessibility defects:– To the developers such that defects are effectively
tracked to resolution?
– Communicating general information about defects at a higher level to garner management support for additional resources to fix the defects, or to generalize issues being found for the whole team.
Testing
Goal: Assure the quality of implementation of the accessibility strategy.
Conclusion Project team members have the same overall goal, which is to
develop an application:
– However, each team within the project has a different goal.
Developers need training to understand accessibility standards, development techniques and testing methods.
Application architects, interaction designers and project managers also need training in order to know:
– What questions to ask and how to plan for accessibility activities.
– How to engage in a rational succession of accessibility activities that will hopefully result in development of an accessible solution.
When teams implement the accessibility practices described herein, there can be better communication that can lead to more efficient development of a truly accessible application.
References From the Full Paper Government of Alberta, Canada; Alberta Website Accessibility, 2008. Apple, Inc. Introduction to Accessibility Programming Guidelines for Cocoa, 2008. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), “My Web My Way” Site, 2008. Dojo Foundation, The Dojo Toolkit: Dojo Accessibility Strategy, 2008. GNOME Project, GNOME Accessibility Toolkit (ATK), 2008. IBM Corporation, IBM Human Ability & Accessibility Center Web site, 2008. IBM Corporation, “Dojo: an accessible JavaScript toolkit,” 2007. IBM Corporation, “Usable Access: Conducting User Evaluations with People with
Disabilities,” 2005. IBM Corporation, Developing accessible portals and portlets with IBM WebSphere
Portal, 2006. Keates, Simeon. Designing for Accessibility: A Business Guide to Countering Design
Exclusion. Routledge, 2006. Linux Foundation, iAccessible2 API, 2008. Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) v2.0, 2008. Quantcast, Quantcast Audience Profile: GlobeAndMail.com, 2008. Sun Microsystems, Inc. Java SE Desktop Accessibility, 2008. United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), IRS Web site: Accessibility, 2008. United States Access Board, US Section 508 Website, 2008. WebAIM, Articles on Training Others, 2008. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, 2008. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)
Bill Curtis-Davidson, IBM Human Ability & Accessibility Center ([email protected])
IBM’s View of AccessibilityTo enable human capability through innovative technology and solutions so that all people can maximize their capacity to contribute, regardless of age or ability….