The Paciello Group Blog Your Accessibility Partner

I thought I’d clear up any potential confusion over the recent rumor that the revised version of the Section 508 and Section 255 guidelines would be published for public comment in March.

Last night I confirmed with the US Access Board that the version of the guidelines to be released in March are an “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM)”, with a 90-day period for public comment.

It is important to note that this Advance Notice is a step BEFORE a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). The Advance Notice is being provided in the interest of getting material out to the public in a timely manner. This Advance Notice allows draft text to be released. After public comments are received and reviewed, a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking will then be released, after preparation of a regulatory assessment, as well as a full Preamble. The date of the NPRM is not known at this time.

An official notice will appear in the US Federal Register when draft text is available.

Note that the US Access Board will be holding a special session at this year’s CSUN conference in San Diego. Members of the public will be invited to speak during the event. Everyone is encouraged to attend.

You can find CSUN on Facebook.

The recent EU ruling requires Microsoft to provide Windows operating system users with a choice of browsers to install rather than having Microsoft Internet Explorer pre-installed. This is a laudable initiative that provides a more level playing field for browser vendors and more choice for consumers. Unfortunately what it does not do is provide informed choice. Read the rest of this entry »

CSS sprites are a useful method to display graphics while preserving bandwith and improving page rendering times.  One of the problems  with CSS sprites when it comes to their accessibility is that some operating system display themes such as Windows High Contrast mode have the effect of hiding CSS background images. So if an alternative version of the image is to be displayed when a user changes the default theme to suit their requirements, the developer has needed to provide an alternative with  images inserted inline rather than as CSS background images. In many cases the developer does not do this, as it is a lot of extra work and undermines the performance benefits of CSS sprites.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently Roger Johansson wrote a post about Safari, WebKit and alt text for missing images. In which he talks about how Webkit based browsers do not always display alt attribute content in place of an image when the image is not available or images are disabled. I have gone a little further into this issue by testing what is displayed with differing combinations of the alt and title attributes on images in IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. Read the rest of this entry »

IDG/ComputerWorld’s Tom Yager wrote an interesting review of Safari 4. Among several interesting points concerning WebKit and performance, Yager wrote,

“A fast and pretty browser won’t cut it for me. A browser — and, indeed, any application that incorporates the linkable framework of that browser — must place an equal emphasis on standards promotion and adoption, as well as accessibility. OS X’s integrated Voice Assist and Universal Access preferences stand apart as mechanisms for inclusion for the visual and motor impaired. New to Safari 4 is support for ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), which takes screen reading and modalities for atypical navigation to the next level, to Web 2.0/AJAX Web apps and sites.”

Do yourself a favor and read the rest of the article at:Test Center: Safari 4 preview

At TPG, we’ll do a review of Safari 4 for ARIA support and WCAG2 compliance and post it here.