As I said a few weeks ago, this week it’s Vint Cerf on Accessibility. So what does one of “the fathers of the Internet”, and new ACM President have to say about accessibility and its importance. Actually, for him even to be talking about accessibility sees a significant change from the past; when accessibility was mainly lip-service.
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The ACM SIGACCESS Student Research Competition (SRC) is a forum for undergraduates and graduate students to present their research, exchange ideas, receive feedback from a panel of experts, and have an opportunity to win awards for their work. Lets see who’s made it this year to the SRC at ASSETS.
Our analysis shows that for the most popular 500 sites, JavaScript is used in 93%, Flash in 27% and about one-third (30%) use XMLHttpRequest, a technology used to generate dynamic updates. Uptake of XMLHttpRequest is approximately 2.3% per year across a random selection of 500 sites and is probably higher in the most popular sites. So, when examining dynamic updates from the perspective of visually disabled users, evidence suggests that, at best, most users can currently reach updated content, but they must do so manually, and are rarely given any automated indication that any update has occurred. With technologies enabling dynamic updating of content currently deployed in about 30% of the most popular sites, and increasing annually, action is urgently required if visually disabled users are to be able to use the Web.
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Or rather – “A cross-disciplinary approach to identifying requirements for an online health and social support system for people with lung cancer”. This was our submission to the ACM ASSETS 2012 Conference, but unfortunately was rejected – to some extent because it didn’t fit a limited -in my opinion- view of the definition of accessibility and its link with disability.
