Hello!
Sorry for the delay! I have been extremely busy with other things during
some weeks.
> within the context of AT
Do you mean "Archivists Toolkit" or "Assistive Technology"?
> in order to make the inventory comprehensible to
> someone using a screen reader to access the page.
The question of accessibility is very wide. It also includes visual
displays in different scales, for example. Many newer, standard compliant
web browsers provide the possibility to use Ctrl-plus and Ctrl-minus to
change the scale. Some browsers also use a ruler or the possiblity to use
different scales for text and pictures. For this reason, it is important
to check how web pages are rendered in different scales with different web
browsers to ensure that text and images don't overlap when the scale is
modified.
Consistent language tags within @xml:lang and / or @lang attributes are
also important for speech synthesis, because words with exactly the same
spelling may be pronounced and mean totally different things in different
languages.
In a wider persective, accessibility is a question of trying to avoid to
bind one's web pages to any specific hardware, sofware, operating system
etc. and try to make the best possible use of relevant standards.
Pragmatical testing with "real" browsers should of course not be
neglected, though, including the text based web browser w3m.
Accessibility is also a question of wording. Choosing appropriate words is
significant, for example, avoiding to write "See also" instead of "Read
also" for text. I am aware that this is not easy because many words carry
huge amounts of connotations.
> something to keep an eye on for accessibility.
An eye towards a visual display ... or fingers on a braille display ...
That is a question of wording.
> I think CSS is the better choice
I consider that CSS is very good when used appropriately, which is not
always trivial, though. Furthermore, many CSS authors neglect to validate
their CSS, at
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ for example.
Being aware of those problems, I tried to help the web community with
that. I wrote some code a couple of years ago, which code I would not
write today exactly as I did at that time. What I did does not take into
account the lastest subtleties of the newest screen readers and braille
displays (etc.) and it may therefore seem rather "primitive", but on the
other hand, this "primitivity" is maybe a strength: If the result through
my code provides some consistent and useful information (albeit not
necessarily complete of course), then the code tested is more accessible
than the code of the majority of web pages. If you are interested, you can
use my code from this page of mine:
http://www.acc.umu.se/~saasha/braillev/
The theme of Braille is also present on
http://listserv.loc.gov/archives/index.html but the Braille related
activity there seems to be quite limited, though.
Below, I add a few links that might be of interest (not all of them
validate, though ...):
http://jfciii.com/presentations/wasp/accessibility.html
http://colorfilter.wickline.org/
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-TECHS/C29.html with an example at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-TECHS/working-examples/C29/ex1/index.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CSS-TECHS/#style-color-contrast
http://colororacle.org/
http://gmazzocato.altervista.org/colorwheel/wheel.php
Regards!
Saašha,
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