AJAX and other web accessibility stuff

Like I said, I’ve been out of the loop for a while and, apparently some folks out there are designing some bad interactivity because, there’s been a tonne of articles over the last seven months on how to make AJAX accessible:

  • International Business Machines gives us an AJAX Accessibility Overview. And here are forty more tutorials and articles on How to Make Your AJAX Applications Accessible.
  • Brothercake gives us keyboard accessible docking boxes. It seems to degrade gracefully with CSS or JavaScript turned off, so this might be a good example.
  • This one is pretty elementary, if you don’t know how to make JavaScript links that gracefully degrade or how to make semantic anchors to document fragments by now, turn in your badge. Speaking of which, I have yet to clean some cruft out of MT’s templates because they still do document fragment anchors the old fashioned way.
  • Speaking of cleaning up bloat and cruft, MT’s default templates, while not nearly as bad as the old days of layout tables, suffer from div-itis. Div-itis is a disease where page markup grows bloated with semantically meaningless divisions whose sole purpose is to let you micromanage content positioning in badly compliant browsers. Anyway, I think you should all read up on better CSS techniques globally reset how white-space is handled.
  • From Juicy Studios is the first of a series of articles on screen reader support for JavaScript events.
  • Flash Satay was first but now there is more information on embedding Flash objects in a standards compliant way that’s friendly for search engines. Please note, just because the Flash object is in the markup correctly doesn’t mean that the Flash object itself is accessible. Please read up on how to do that.
  • AForm is a design tool that helps you design nice looking web forms with good standards compliance, usability and accessibility. Awesome Form is another simple utility that does the same thing.
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