Universal design for Web applications : for web applications

Universal Design for Web Applications teaches you how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities and explains why doing so is good business. It takes more work up front, but the potential payoff is huge -- especially when mobile users need to access your sites.



You'll discover how to use standards-based web technologies -- such as XHTML, CSS, and Ajax, along with video and Flash -- to develop applications for a wide range of users and a variety of devices, including the mobile Web. You'll also learn specifics about this target audience, especially the key over-50 age group, whose use of the Web is rapidly growing.



With this book, you will:

Learn the importance of metadata and how it affects images, headings, and other design elements Build forms that accommodate cell phones, screen readers, word prediction, and more Create designs using color and text that are effective in a variety of situations Construct tables that present information without spatial cues Design Ajax-driven social networking applications that people with disabilities can access Provide audio with transcriptions and video that includes captions and audio descriptions Discover assistive technology support for Rich Internet Application technologies such as Flash, Flex, and Silverlight

Universal Design for Web Applications provides you with a roadmap to help you design easy-to-maintain web applications that benefit a larger audience.

• Preface p. xi
• 1 Introducing Universal Design p. 1
• Accessible Design: A Story p. 3
• Putting Universal Design to Work p. 6
• 2 Selling It p. 9
• There Is No "Them" p. 10
• Audience Characteristics p. 11
• Configurability p. 13
• Growth Opportunity p. 13
• Legal Liability p. 15
• The Standards p. 17
• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) p. 17
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) p. 17
• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) p. 18
• User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) p. 18
• The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA) p. 18
• Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) p. 19
• Professionalism p. 19
• Early and Often p. 21
• Summary p. 21
• 3 Metadata p. 23
• What Is Metadata? p. 23
• Images p. 24
• Keys to Writing Good Text Alternatives p. 25
• Pictures of Recognizable Objects p. 26
• Document-Level Metadata p. 29
• Role and State p. 32
• Relationships p. 33
• Link Text p. 33
• Summary p. 34
• 4 Structure and Design p. 35
• First Principles p. 35
• GET and POST p. 36
• Semantics p. 36
• Headings p. 38
• Links p. 39
• Tables p. 40
• Lists p. 40
• Color p. 41
• Color Differentiation p. 41
• Color Contrast p. 42
• CSS Highlights p. 42
• Liquid Layout p. 42
• Text Size p. 43
• Positioning p. 44
• Images p. 44
• Text Versus Images of Text p. 44
• Flicker and Patterns p. 47
• Designing for Email p. 48
• Summary p. 49
• 5 Forms p. 51
• Labels p. 52
• fieldset and legend p. 52
• The accesskey Attribute p. 54
• Tab Order p. 60
• Error Handling p. 60
• Client Side p. 61
• Server Side p. 63
• Captcha p. 63
• The Future of Forms p. 65
• Summary p. 65
• 6 Tabular Data p. 67
• Data Table Basics p. 67
• Headings and Data p. 68
• Caption p. 68
• Complex Data Tables p. 69
• Summary p. 70
• Specifying Relationships Between Data and Headings p. 71
• Readability, Layout, and Design p. 73
• Color p. 73
• Footnotes and Keys p. 74
• CSS p. 74
• pre p. 75
• Summary p. 75
• 7 Video and Audio p. 77
• Web Video: The Early Years p. 77
• Video and Universal Design p. 79
• Optimizing Web Video p. 80
• Accessibility in Video p. 81
• Captioning Your Video p. 83
• Hiring a Captioner p. 85
• Audio Description p. 86
• Accessible Mobile Video p. 87
• Transcripts and Text Alternatives p. 88
• Summary p. 88
• 8 Scripting p. 91
• Building on a Solid Foundation p. 92
• Disappearing (and Reappearing) Acts p. 93
• Summary p. 105
• 9 Ajax and Wai-Aria p. 107
• Taking Stock of Existing Code p. 107
• Code That Works Well Universally p. 108
• Code That Can Be Made to Work Universally p. 108
• Code That Needs a Workaround p. 108
• Support in Browsers p. 108
• Support in Assistive Technology p. 109
• Direct Accessibility-Wai-Aria p. 110
• Summary p. 123
• 10 Rich Internet Applications p. 125
• Features of RIAs p. 126
• Assistive Technology Support for RIAs p. 127
• Flex Accessibility p. 128
• Creating the Look: Accessible Custom Components p. 130
• Creating the Feel: Accessible Custom Components p. 133
• Backend Considerations p. 134
• User-Generated Content p. 135
• Testing Your Code p. 136
• Microsoft Testing Tools p. 136
• ACTF p. 137
• Photoshop CS4 and Illustrator CS4 p. 138
• Summary p. 138
• 11 The Process p. 139
• Universal by Design p. 139
• Tools and Testing p. 140
• Development Tools p. 141
• Evaluation Tools and Resources p. 144
• 20 Questions p. 150
• Team Structures and Strategies p. 158
• Appendix Cross-Reference for Universal Design for Web Applications p. 163
• Index p. 171