Ajax and accessibility

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.