Developers of rich, interactive applications like Facebook and Google Maps need to ensure that their masterpieces are accessible to all. The older tools are just not enough — they don’t understand JavaScript and dynamic, event-based page content. Deque’s next generation tools will help busy web developers find accessibility issues easily and fix them rapidly and establish the test scaffolding to ensure their application stays accessible.

A beta version of Deque’s Firefox/Firebug extension will be available soon. We will be previewing this at CSUN – March 22 – 27, 2010 (#CSUN10 on twitter). Register for the beta program.

"...is a collection of resources (tools, code, services) and commentary (site launches, critiques, upcoming events) for web developers and digital professionals at the University of Michigan."

"Welcome to Urban Experience! We're documenting the urban experience with a focus on information, design, interaction and usability."

"the world's first (and hopefully only) universally inaccessible game ... a game that can be played by no one." Why? It's "an educational tool for disseminating, understanding and consolidating game accessibility guidelines."

Column wrapped around the Center for Universal Design key principles.

[1] "turn Greasemonkey on and off" and [2] "tab out of Flash widgets (can tab into them, but then can't get back out to the page again)."

"40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet."

Mahatm sez: "Everything is an image; no alt-text."

"This paper describes some of the authors’ experiences as interns at Google, Inc. We were both assigned to spend time on accessibility issues encountered by visually impaired users. In this paper, we discuss" our asinine clusterfuck summer of disaster.

"Combine a paucity of life experience with an intrinsic inability to empathize with others and the result is Google." Tearing into a total fuckup, clueless student "accessibility interns" instead of any real perspective/backing from teh Googe.

"...is a research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media--captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing."

"At Deaf Gamers the way we review the software is a little different as it's from a deaf persons perspective."

Group of modders / volunteers who are adding closed captioning into computer games: Doom III complete, Quake IV on the way. For Doom III, sound effects are fully captioned and shown on a "visual sound radar" for directional cues.

"What the FCC has done is very serious. This new interpretation of the rules for asking for an exemption from having to closed caption has far reaching effects that go well beyond the specific TV programming in these two Orders" -- read for more details.

Relevant section from an online book about integrating accessibility into UCD.

"This group gives travelers with disabilities, their travel companions, friends, and allies of the disability community a place to post on travel. Sometimes we see (or use other senses) differently; sometimes not. "

What stuff would make the usability lab better?

"We provide audio access to literary works for anyone with a reading access barrier. Talented volunteers record magazine articles and other short works which are then available for download or in our podcast."

"The following files provide the original copy (with almost no graphics, save for Chapter 13), corrected as of August 2005."

Now-controversial use of buttons as buttons.

"Follows are the resources I have found to be most valuable as related to the spoken user interface that is now part of Apple’s Macintosh operating system."