Accessibility support in the Toolkit
Accessibility has long been one of the most neglected aspects in the software development process. Those who do take it up, do so because they wish to secure a customer who has government compliance clauses. Getting resources assigned for accessibility work is a tough job with few takers. We, the Toolkit team, think it is a fulfilling and worthy task and do not want to deprive users with disabilities of the Toolkit's coolness!
Although accessibility on the client has been pretty stable in terms of Assistive Technologies(AT) and platform support, web accessibility remains in its nascent stages with the web redefining itself. W3C is working on the WCAG 2.0 draft which will be the second attempt to flesh out web accessibility guidelines in the wake of the AJAX movement. Its charter is to deliver a web accessibility standard that will guide web developers to author semantically correct web sites which will communicate better with AT devices.
We eagerly await the industry standard that both web technologies and AT devices will comply with. However, till then the Toolkit controls need to be as accessible as possible to everyone, including users with disabilities within the current scope of accessibility guidelines. To achieve that goal we have an Accessibility Plan in place and hope to deliver support one issue at a time. We have already started making efforts to fix issues as we find them and we have a lot more in our Issue Tracker that we would like to take up soon.
So join us in your efforts to make the Toolkit more accessible. We are not Accessibility experts but working on it, so if you have accessibility domain knowledge, we see a potential partnership here! How can you help? Know about issues in Toolkit that could be changed to improve the accessibility experience, send us an email, post it on our forums or simply create a work item.
Some useful links:
- Section 508 is the US Law that states that all software should not discriminate against users with disabilities by disallowing them access to features that normal users have and prevent them from making the best use to operate effectively.
- European policies are also in place to ensure that the software is accessible to all.
- Juicy Studios is a site which provides guidelines on authoring accessible websites
- Learning the world is very good blog on web standards and accessibility
Toolkit for all!
