Webdragon

In the early days of WCAG 1.0, access keys within web pages were seen as a staple of accessibility best practices: assigning a letter or number which could be pressed alongside an accelerator key (such as Alt) to enable users to instantly activate a link or form field. In reality, they are a poor accessibility practice that gets in the way of users.

Starting in June 2010, Webdragon is now working with NV Access. NV Access are the developers of international break-through open-source assistive technology, NVDA. NVDA is a world-leading screen-reading software package, available free for users and developers alike. Like Webdragon, NV Access is committed to making information accessible to a broad range of people.

Since its beginnings in 2008, Google's Chrome web browser has seen astonishing increases in popularity, and soon will be available right within Internet Explorer via Google Chrome Frame. Unfortunately for people who use assistive technologies, Google Chrome is completely inaccessible.

The latest version of WebdragonCMS features automated definition insertion, making it easy to set out the acronyms and abbreviations used throughout a website. This new feature will soon be available free to all current users of WebdragonCMS.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is responsible for announcing product recalls, and traditionally has used newspaper advertising to alert consumers to new announcements. But the times they are a-changing, and now even Government entities like the ACCC are realising that to get people's attention, they need to use new media in the same way corporations are.

One of the great break-throughs in the past few years has been online video, brought about by sites such as YouTube. One of the great disappointments has been the lack of accessibility in web video, because it adds an extra layer of production and implementation. Recently that has been changing.

Today marks the launch of the iPad in Australia. As an Apple touch-screen device, it uses very similar software to the iPhone, which has been widely praised both for its ease-of-use with the general population, and its accessibility features for people with disabilities. But is it usable enough and accessible enough?

Next week is Scope Victoria's "See the Person" week, from 17 May to 21 May. Every school in Victoria is invited to participate in a week of awareness, encouraging students and the wider community to see the person, not the disability.

One of the challenges of online video is making it accessible to everyone, from a whole range of perspectives: having the video in a format that a majority of users' web browsers can display; users having an internet connection that's capable of downloading video fast enough; and making the video usable by people who cannot hear the content.