The Paciello Group Blog Your Accessibility Partner

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.

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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.

TPG’s Charlie Pike in conjunction with Adobe is presenting a free online seminar. This seminar will concentrate on Accessible Content Workflow with Adobe InDesign CS4 and Adobe Acrobat 9.

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Testing of the latest builds of the major Windows browsers indicates Google Chrome’s ARIA role support improving, 18 of  47 roles are now correctly mapped to MSAA roles. There has been no change in Opera or IE support and only minimal improvement in Safari/Webkit support. There has been a minor regression in Firefox support in the latest Minefield build. The reported regression in Firefox was due to a reporting tool error. All ARIA roles are correctly mapped in Firefox.

Current levels of ARIA support in Chrome/Opera/Safari and their lack of support for assistive technology (on Windows) in general, means the only browsers currently usable by assistive technology users and the only browsers that can currently claim practical ARIA support are Firefox 3+ and Internet Explorer 8.

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