I am writing a series of blog posts about the recent update of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to version 2.1. The goal is to cover one of the 17 new success criteria each week. The series has just begun. You can find them on the Knowbility blog Welcome, WCAG 2.1! The Web Content […]
Author: Becka11y
A11y Win – Safari 11 Blocks autoplay video
I hate autoplay videos on web sites. Sometimes it is difficult to sort out which visual “thing” is playing since some sites contain so many advertisements. And while I am annoyed at this auditory intrusion, it can affect people with disabilities more severely. In addition to being difficult to find, many of these videos are […]
Empathy and Leadership
In May I attended and spoke at the John Slatin AccessU Conference sponsored by Knowbility. My good friend and retired IBM colleague, Richard Schwerdtfeger, was the keynote speaker. Rich was the Chief Technology Officer of Accessibility for the IBM Software group. He gave a great talk on “Empathy and Leadership, Where have they gone?” Rich […]
Running JAWS in a Virtual Machine on the Mac
I am a Mac user but I need to test with JAWS and/or NVDA. I use Parallels to run a Windows VM on my Mac. I only test Web applications in the browsers. The main problem I have found is that there is no ins key on a Mac keyboard. I finally saved the mechanism […]
Screen Reader Support for new HTML5 Section Elements
Introduction I will be giving a talk at John Slatin AccessU on May 9, 2016 on HTML5 Accessibility. I will be discussing the new elements in HTML5 that help to support better accessibility. I was doing some research on how well some of these elements are supported by the various screen readers and thought I […]
CSUN 2016
Wow, it has been an entire year since I have posted in this blog! It must be time to start doing more interesting things in Accessibility again! I spoke on EPUB at CSUN 2016 (short name for the International Technology and Persons with Disability Conference). I promised I would post my presentation. Since Microsoft hasn’t […]
Reflections on CSUN 2015
I attended The 30th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference (known as CSUN) from March 4-6, 2015. I haven’t been to CSUN for several years. I did attend briefly last year but had to leave after my presentation on the first day to attend a funeral. The conference has certainly changed over the […]
Adding Captioned Video to an HTML5 page
This is the last post in the series, Creating and Captioning a Screen Reader Demo. I have 3 versions of my video file in .mp4, .webm, and .ogv format. I have a timed text track file in WebVTT format. Now I just need to put them together on an HTML5 page. This part is fairly […]
Creating and Editing Captions
This is the fourth in a series of posts about Capturing and Captioning a Screen Reader Demo. I should start by saying that there is a difference between captions and subtitles although the terms are often interchanged. Subtitles just provide the actual spoken text while captions provide a thorough description of all of the sounds […]
Converting File Formats
This is the third in a series of posts about Capturing and Captioning a Screen Reader Demo. I have a recording of a screen reader demo that I want to post on the Web using the HTML5 <video> tag. The current format is .avi. In order to have the video work in both Windows and […]