Another lawsuit by blind users has been filed. This time, it’s Oracle under fire. Oracle sued by blind workers in Texas.

The suit, filed in Texas state court, alleges Oracle’s human resources software and other products do “not provide equal access to blind persons using screen access technology”. One plaintiff says he is unable to review or enter hours worked, leave taken or information concerning employees he supervises without the help of a sighted colleague. The suit names Oracle and at least three Texas officials. It alleges the Oracle software replaced a package that was largely accessible to blind users.

Hat tip Rosie Sherry

In case you were bored and looking for something to do this weekend, here are some excellent blog posts that came out this week on accessibility. They are “how-to” oriented, not too technical and perfect learning experiences.

The first are written by Joe Dolson.

Designing With Accessibility In Mind. This one has code examples. (Okay, this one wasn’t written this week, but it’s too good to ignore.)

Creating Accessible Navigation.

The principle behind accessible navigation is about providing access to content - not necessarily about creating a menu which can be used by people with disabilities. It’s critical to provide access to your content - but not to make a visually impaired visitor use the same method to get there as a sighted user.

The next one is by Mads Kristensen.

Making Accessible Menus In HTML. This one also contains snippets of code.

Lastly, I leave you with an inspirational piece by Matt Bailey, called Accessibility Testing Labs

I had the privilege of attending accessibility testing for an enterprise-level software application and found some interesting issues that are not typical to many projects. Actual user testing is strange like that – dealing with humans brings out all of the random factors.

I appreciate it when I find a place that does something way better than how I was doing it. I used to have a usability research directory that I kept up. It was mostly for my own use, to keep track of case studies and articles that would back up the work I do. I became too busy to keep it up.

However, there is an incredible resource that some of you may not be aware of, that I wish to share. It is the Web Design References by the University of Minnesota Duluth. Topics covered:

• Accessibility
• Associations
• Books
• Cascading Style Sheets
• Color
• Dreamweaver
• Evaluation & Testing
• Events and Conferences
• Flash
• Information Architecture
• JavaScript
• Misc
• Navigation & Labeling
• PHP
• Sites & Blogs
• Standards
• Tools
• Typography
• Usability
• XML

Every page is packed with articles and publications culled from authoritative sites.

My favorite haunts are Accessibility and Usability. When you visit each section, you’ll find they’ve broken them down into a wide variety of sub-categories.

I had thought I’d bring back my own resources and the free testing section at some point. But while we wait for me to decide on their usefulness, I feel good about showing this enormous goldmine of information available to you now.

I was thrilled to see Matt Bailey interview Lee Laughlin in his accessbility blog. I know Lee as well, and instantly liked her. She’s warm and funny, but in her role as an event planner, always professional, on top of everything, gracious to all her guests, and has a tough streak I admire. Do not ever tell Lee she can’t do something.

Matt’s interview with her focuses on her sight problems due to albinism. She is the one I referred to in another blog post, where watching somebody struggle to use a website in a usabilty workshop, who is seeing impaired, left a huge impact on me.

I am also seeing impaired. Without glasses or my bi-focal contacts (my brain handles different messages from each eye, in addition to the position of my head), I can not see. The first time I saw what I really look like was when I was 23 years old, when I took off my glasses at a party and someone was shocked at how different (better) I looked without the “coke bottles”. She took my picture, mailed it to me, and I stared and stared at it. I had trouble looking at her. She had pretty eyes. That’s not what stared at me every day in a mirror. Mirrors showed a blurry blob with long dark hair.

I love the beach, but I don’t go into the ocean unless someone is near me who I trust. There were too many episodes of me being left in the water, unable to find my way back to the blanket and my friends forgetting I couldn’t see.

Lee’s eyesight is much worse. What she faces is described in Matt’s interview. It’s a perfect reminder that accessibility is not just for physically handicapped, blind or deaf Internet users. There are all types of limitations, including being color blind, or coping with a disease that renders mouse movement impossible or painful to do.

Lee’s visual preferences are different from my own. She once told me that she likes serif fonts better than sans serif, because serif is easier for her to see. That means she’s okay with Times Roman or Courier for example. I struggle with those fonts, especially online.

In her interview she says,

“I prefer a black background with yellow or white text.”

I, on the other hand, can barely stand to sit in front of a web page with black or very dark backgrounds.

The sheer scope of the job of making web pages readable is enormous, given that sight problems vary so widely.

Hats off to Matt and Lee for sharing her story. Matt has other interviews in his blog that are also worth cuddling up to your computer for.

One Step Closer For Accessibility

The Usability Professionals Association (UPA) has announced its appointment to Telecommunications and Electronic and Information
Technology Advisory Committee (TEITAC), a U.S. Access Board
Federal advisory committee.

TEITAC will provide recommendations for updates of accessibility standards issued under section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and guidelines under Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act. These standards cover technology procured by the Federal government. Members of this advisory committee include representatives from over forty industry, disability groups, standard-setting bodies in the international community, and government agencies.

When a blind person arrives to help explain what its like to use websites, there’s bound to be some education. Designing A Website With Blind Users In Mind is one of those opportunties.

Everything that I talk about is from experience as a Blind computer user and a as a person who has trained Blind users how to use their computers.

The discussion has been helpful for everyone who reads it, from search engine marketers to website creators.

It’s so easy to forget the universe extends past our own elbows. I was trying to recall when I first became interested in website accessibility, and I can’t remember. For me, incentives to make improvements to websites for special needs people likely came about because many of them spoke up about their problems.

Sometimes we hear them. Sometimes we don’t.

Witnessing a severely seeing impaired person trying to read a website on a laptop, a few years ago, made a big impression on me. I find it hard to get her struggle out of my head, and yet her attitude was of gracious acceptance. For her, this is how things simply are.

My friends, Matt Bailey and Joe Dolson are my teachers for accessible web design. Each of them found their passion for it because something in their personal everyday lives made accessibility issues obvious. They could see past their elbows because there was something to look at.

What about those of us who don’t?

My friend, Elizabeth Able, came to Cre8asiteforums as an unknown person. As we got to know her, we learned that her mother has a school for blind or partially sighted children called the Louis Braille School. She is now a Moderator and our Blog Editor. When the time came for web design help for the school’s website, Liz sought the help of the forums. The experience of making the school’s website accessible for its target market provided the perfect opportunity for the rest of us to learn.

Recently, Joe accepted an invitation to become a Moderator at Cre8asiteforums. Liz has posted an Interview with Joe Dolson on the forums blog. One source for his passion is also his mother.

My mother is the executive director of VSA Montana, the Montana state affiliate for VSA Arts - an organization dedicated to making the arts accessible to people with disabilities.

There are times when I feel frustrated because I wish to be “doing more”. That phrase’s meaning changes on a regular hormonal basis. Some days, I want to rush out and save something (environment, children in poverty, people in war torn countries, struggling single parents) and some days I want to recycle or give to a good home every bit of waste I see in the house (Stefan’s socks in the living room, the stupid junk mail from the mailbox).

As a person doing business on the web, who some people know, I think that I could do some good somewhere, for someone, the way the companies do in this piece called Simple Question: Who Else Can Win?

Maybe all it takes is one new image alt attribute or text link title attribute a day, to get a feeling of accomplishing something positive for somebody.

It’s a terribly small piece of html code, but a leap forward for humankind.

“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Walk beside me, that we may be as one.” Ute, Native American proverb.