Accessibility for catalog's

[andy.collie]

Im currently working as web developer designing websites for the disabled, but unfortunately the actinic catalog is not accessible towards disabled people, i was just wondering if anyone knew of a way of making an online catalog accessible, if actinic are working on one or if you are able to purchase an accessible online catalog from actinic.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Mike Hughes]

I can't help here but I'm very interested in this as a topic for discussion.

With current legislation, accessability for disabled people is a legal requirement and I'd really like to hear what we're supposed to be doing to meet the requirements.

Mike

[andy.collie]

accessibility for actinic

so far i have tried creating websites using css this way all the content will show up, and when people have css switched off, but with actinic it is all set out in tables and also uses scripts which aren't that accessible.

the only way so far i can think of is seriously editting the actinic templates to remove the tables and replaces them all with a css table, but its not really a 10 minute job and will take a while.

if anyone can think of anything else please let me know, as im running out of idea's on what to do.

[cdicken]

Hi Andy

It's an interesting issue and one we looked into with v7. There were several key areas in the W3C's Web Content Accesibility Guidelines which we were failing on in v6 which we addressed in v7. These were:

- Relying on colour contrast to show required fields. We now include an asterisk '*'
- Using <h3> tags without corresponding <h1> and <h2> tags. We replaced these.
- Not having 'ALT' tags for the image input buttons in Actinic. We fixed this.
- Using quotation markup for formatting effects such as indentation. We removed the <BLOCKQUOTE> tags.

The one W3C recommendation we were not able to do is to remove all <table> tags that were currently being used for layout. The reason for this is that it would have broken everyone's site when they tried to upgrade to v7.

However, one of my current projects is to remove our current reliance on tables for layouts and provide at least one theme in the next major version where the layout is controlled purely with CSS.

[andy.collie]

we've just ordered a batch of v7 catalog's and these sound better as i am currently working through the w3c standards.

do you have a rough idea of when the next version of the catalog will be released, i understand that you are working on it, but was just curious about the timescale, as this would help alot with what i am doing.

thank you for your help.

regards

[pinbrook]

Is it possible to have a couple of themes which comply. Maybe the clean layouts and an extra option

[garyhay]

This thread also intrests me as my partner works with "People with Learning Difficulties".

They have Care Commission as an external body that says "do this like this and do that like that" this seems great and everyone gets equal access to services and are treated the same.

The reality of this is that many ways of working are just too impractibile to implement. I would love to see someone bulid a site that my partners clients could use but this just aint never going to happen.

Someone needs to draw a line somewhere because at the moment we are trying to make websites useable by everyone. You dont get someone to describe all the products in a shop to a partially sited shopper do you.

Having said that it would be good to meet as many of these standards as is possible.

Just as an add on. How do you up the text size in The News of the World?

[cdicken]

Is it possible to have a couple of themes which comply. Maybe the clean layouts and an extra option

I'm still getting my head around making CSS look really good so I'm not going to be able to do it for a while. I have got it on my to-do list though.