Web Accessibility
January 28th, 2010 by Erick Beck
Yesterday at the IT Forum we had a good discussion about web accessibility. One of the things that was noted in the automated scans of campus web pages was that the primary areas of non-compliance were lack of “alt” attributes on images, lack of “skip nav” links, and lack of label tags on associated form fields.
It is easy to look at those things and think they are just minor details that don’t matter that much. But let’s look at how important they really are. Last year we presented an Accessibility Showcase to campus, and one of the presentations was a description of screen readers and then a live demonstration given by a blind student. Watch or download the video and see how hard it is to navigate some of our own sites here on campus.
Would have liked to have watched the video, but it wouldn’t open, even in IE.
If the player window doesn’t come right up check the yellow popup box at the top of the page – I had to install a windows media add-on in order to view it in IE.
Alternatively, there is a download link that you could download the video and watch it from your local machine.