¶ There have been some great articles published recently on the accessibility of Ajax and DOM scripting. For a start, Joe Clark’s usability tests with Basecamp and screenreaders includes real research with real people and real screen readers. Then Brothercake asks and answers the question AJAX and screenreaders: when can it work?. This has been neatly followed up by Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers, in which Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner have collaborated in an effort to come up with techniques to make Ajax and other client-side scripting techniques accessible to assistive technology – it’s important reading.
In a related vein, Garret Dimon has published Front-End Architecture: AJAX & DOM Scripting, and Shaun Inman’s article Responsible Asynchronous Scripting is also well worth a read. As reported on DOM Scripting both of these articles refer to m’colleague Jeremy Keith’s Hijax approach.
And moving away slightly, Bobby van der Sluis’s Unobtrusive Flash Objects has been updated to version 3.10 in part to deal with the latest versions of Internet Explorer which handles plug-ins differently as a result of the (scandalous) Eolas patent ruling. Bobby also points to some research into how the different Flash embed techniques rate on accessibility.
Comments
1
I don’t understand this bubble about ajax. Ajax is not accessible and this is a technology for web application, not for a clasic website.
2
Pajcero – a few points to make. Firstly Ajax isn’t a technology per se, it is a methodology which uses a number of different technologies. in the same way that DHTML was never a technology, but a combination of HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
You say ‘Ajax is is not accessible’ but that is simply not true, as these articles show. It can, however, be difficult, again as these articles show.
Also you talk about ‘web applications’ and ‘classic websites’ as if they are separate entities. I would say the boundaries are increasingly blurred between the two. For example, Apple.com may be a ‘classic website’ yet it has touches of Ajax to improve the user experience. And whether your website is an application, a brochure site or somewhere in between, it should still be accessible. In fact there is probably more legal onus on web apps being accessible than for brochureware.
3
I am sure that AJAX will continue to improve in its ability to provide accessible content the more its actually used.
One quote I will always remember from Paul Boag is that really in this business we are really all “just making it up as we go along in terms to accessibility on the web” – there are no concrete 100% guidelines for our site and technologies in ensuring accessibility, but we will keep find better and better solutions the more work is done. So it’s going to be v cool to see what happens in the upcoming months. I wonder what Nate may have to say about this in his Yahoo! talk at @media
?!
4
For me AJAX is AJAX if it is cross browser compatible. I don’t care if it is implemeted by the XMLHttpRequest-Object or not. By this easy philosophy Outlook Web Access is not AJAX – but who cares?
AJAX has giant potential but the key question, in my eyes, will be if the coming AJAX applications will be intuitional to use. The best apps can’t be the key to success if they break with “naturalized” standards.
The developer need to take a look at functionality of the back button of the browser, at the possibility to set bookmaks to information called through AJAX applications and last but not least there should be a alternativ design for non java script browsers.
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