Accessibility Internet Rally

This course was developed in September 2003 for Knowbility as training material for the Austin Accessibility Internet Rally. All rights reserved until we have time to find an appropriate Creative Commons license.

Advanced Training Course Overview

If you’d like to start immediately, choose from one of the following views:

• Introduction as a web page (this style),
• Introduction as a presentation, or
• Introduction as plain text.

Presentation

The information in this course is available to any user-agent or web-browser, but styles are only available to standards-compliant, CSS-capable browsers. The presentation template of this course works in any of these browsers but looks better in a browser that correctly handles fixing positioning and CSS2 — that is, not Internet Explorer for Windows.

Again, the course will display in any browser or resolution, but the presentation view was targeted for the Opera browser (version 7.11 in full screen presentation mode) on Windows at a screen resolution of 1024x768 (my laptop settings). We chose Opera for the following reasons.

1. Opera has better presentation features than Mozilla, our favorite browser.
2. Opera has better CSS support than Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Printing

A print style sheet has been provided so that any CSS-compliant browser can print as normal from any page. However, if you desire to print the entire document, we’ve compiled a single page that includes the full text for printing. It will save you a bit of paper and many clicks of the mouse. We used it for printing instructor notes. This page also comes in handy for validating all the XHTML at once.

We recommend printing from Mozilla, Opera, or Safari because there are print style features (attribute selection for link and abbreviation expanding) that are unavilable in Internet Explorer.

About this Resource

This resource is far from finished, and is completely open to suggestion. If you’d like to make a suggestion on how to improve this resource, please email James Craig. Note: If you have trouble using that email link, the email address is “james” at cookie crook dot com.

If it isn’t painfully obvious, anywhere you see the text “unfinished content,” has yet to be completed and is under construction. We are still working on the content and will finish it as free time allows.

Author’s Disclaimers

While this course strives to “practice what it preaches,” there are a few disclaimers the author(s) would like to make:

Follow what I say, not what I’ve done.

— Fat Mike, NOFX

• Presentation view

  I’m sure the plain text view is 100% accessible, and I’m 99% sure the web page view is 100% accessible, but the presentation view uses a few techniques known to cause accessibility problems. They are relatively minor, but the author would like to note this as an ‘alternate’ view only. Since other stylesheet views are available for all browsers, this isn’t really an accessibility problem for the material.

• User style sheets

  This entire course is in compliance with the methods it recommends, but my main site, cookiecrook, ignores a few problems discussed here. Sorry... That template is over a year old and I’m planning to redesign it soon. I’ll fix this problem then.

• Alternate style sheet switching

  We have set up the style sheets as actual alternate style sheets defined in additional <link /> elements, but we choose to do the style sheet switching by a server-side method for a few reasons:

  1. We wanted to demonstrate that the alternate style sheets would even work in Internet Explorer, a browser incapable of selecting alternate style sheets natively.
  2. We wanted the entire course to work without JavaScript (Except for the JavaScript examples, of course). We could have used the alternate style sheets method described at A List Apart, but that would have relied on JavaScript, a practice the material recommends against.

Reusing this Resource

Using or linking to this resource is encouraged, but reusing the material for training or publication should not be done without written permission from the author(s) for a few reasons:

1. We need to verify that the person doing the training fully understands the material. It is easy to say the wrong thing, and sometimes teaching material incorrectly can be worse than not teaching it at all.
2. If the course material is to be reused on a web site, the authors would like to verify a minimum level (WCAG 1.0 Level A) of accessibility for the host site.
3. This material is subject to update at any time, so if you will be using it at a certain time, let us know so we aren’t in the middle of breaking updating it.
4. We’re curious to see who uses it for training.

Once the course is complete, the dynamic files (server side includes, etc.) will be available upon request for approved trainers. The instructors used a local instance of the Apache web server running PHP 4 so that network connectivity was not an issue during presentation. Any Apache server running PHP 4 should be able to host the files.