Accessibility testing methodology and introduction to automated testing tools

The complete presentation will be made available soon in PPT format. However the presentation will consist of:

  • Accessibility Testing Approach
    • At design stage
    • At Development Stage
    • At QA stage
    • At beta testing stage
  • Automated Testing Tools
  • Color Contrast
  • WAVE
  • PayPal’s AATT
  • Accessibility Assessment reporting
  • Accessibility validation

Yahoo! messenger & accessibility

Initially Yahoo! Messenger was available just as a client and it was almost difficult for some section of people to use it without the help of third party scripts. Over the year, Yahoo! Messenger has put in significant efforts to make Yahoo! Messenger Accessible and not only that, now Yahoo! Messenger is available on many forms, via Yahoo! Mail, iPhone App, Clent, SMS. Also, there is an option to chat with Facebook friends! This session would be more like a demo of Yahoo! Messenger – how it can be used with assistive technologies on different platforms. This would also clearly demonstrate the power of ARIA – W3C’s recommendation!

Objectives of presentation and benefits for the audience: To show the participants different accessibility features of Yahoo! Messenger and different ways to use it.

The Power of ARIA

Submitted for Techshare India 2012

Today users would like to see the web as a desktop application with rich and interaction and not just as content document. Hence, today most of the web is being developed using AJAX; however, not many of them are accessible to those assistive technology user. This paper will talk about the power of ARIA – a W3C recommendation and a solution to ARIA. The talk will illustrate how Yahoo! Makes best use of ARIA to make our products accessible to all. Rather than lecture, the talk will be more in the demo format with technical explanation.

Role of engineering best practices to create an inclusive web

Submitted for CSUN 2011

We often notice that engineers and engineering managers assume that creating an accessible website or to comply with Web Accessibility standards is an additional effort, time consuming or involve additional costing; which is not so true.

Most of the accessibility guidelines are nothing but the best practices of authoring tools such as HTML, Flash, Flex, AJAX, CSS, JavaScript etc. It is just that engineers need to implement correct techniques. For instance, most of the engineers creating beautiful headings by just adding different styles like different font color, increasing the font size, applying bold etc. but do not apply hx tags thus it become an inaccessible heading no matter what fancy style it has.

A few more instances – lack of alternate text attributes (alt) to non-text elements such as images. Without alt attribute to an image, even code will not get validated. Another major issue is most engineers do not apply “for” and “id” attributes to form input elements thus for a screen readers, text browsers and for search engineers, those elements will become “unlabelled” input elements.

It is also misconception that most engineers feel that to develop an accessible application, one should refrain from using fancy technologies; which is again absolutely not true. One can develop web applications using any technologies they would want to, but what is essential is to apply correct and standard techniques so that product is accessible to all.

This paper talks about the common mistakes and misconceptions towards creating inclusive web.

Need for web accessibility in developing countries – yahoo! initiatives

Submitted for Techshare India 2010

Today, Internet plays an innovative role in every aspect of human life. People user Internet for almost everything such as communication, find a job or a life partner, shopping, education, entertainment, research etc.

In country like India or any developing country for that matter, Internet is being used widely both in business and personal life. And so is applicable for people with disabilities too. In fact, Internet helps a lot to people with disabilities to address their daily needs since they do not need to step out of their home. However, the problem is that most of the websites today that offer different services like education, shopping, careers, matrimony, entertainment, news or social networking are not accessible to assistive technologies it’s just that they are designed keeping the standards and different users in mind.

The paper talks about why accessibility is so important and to show the developers that it’s not difficult to address. In addition, paper will share some practices followed at Yahoo! To make it’s global properties accessible to everyone.

Objectives of presentation and benefits for the audience (bullet points):
Objective: To remove the mindset of thinking that accessibility is difficult, scary etc.

Benefit for the audience:

  • Increase the customer base
  • Develop global products
  • Realize the need and importance of accessibility
  • Realize how easy is to address accessibility