Abrahams Accessibility

Abrahams Accessibility blog contains short pieces of news and thoughts on accessibility and usability.

Accessibility covers making all of ICT easier to use by people with disabilities and challenges and how to make peoples lives easier by the use of ICT.

Deeper examination of product and supplier matters appear in Peter Abrahams publications and articles for Bloor Research, a good introduction can be found in A Report on Usability and Accessibility in ICT.

Recent Blog Posts

Accessibility 2010 start this week
2010 is going to be another big year for accessibility. Firstly because, in 2006, European ministers agreed that all public websites in Europe should be accessible by 2010: not all of them are yet so there will be a lot of activity in this...
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 12th January '10

Accessibility Conferences
This blog will be updated each time I become aware of a new conference. If you are running a conference please click on the contact the author button and I will update the blog. Date Location Title and web...
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 12th October '09

Nominations open for Doing IT Differently Award 2009
RADAR's People of the Year Awards, now in its 43rd year, celebrates excellence and achievement by both disabled people and those organisations with a commitment to furthering the equality agenda for disabled people. Nominations for the Awards...
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 3rd September '09

Testing websites with the WebAnywhere screen-reader
When I was at recent conference I was asked how website designers can check their websites using a screen-reader. The concern was that to provide a commercially available screen-reader to all the developers would be prohibitively expensive. I...
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 20th August '09

A hole in section 508
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act is the law in the US that enures that US Government organisations will only buy ICT products that are accessible. When asked about accessibility, vendors will often say their products conform to section...
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 9th July '09

Accessibility on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalguar Square London
Starting on Monday 6 July 2009 for 100 days the Fourth Plinth in Trafalguar square will be occupied by a succession of members of the public, each having their hour of fame. Amongst them will be Jane Scaybrook who at 5am on 15th July will...
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 7th July '09

Apple push accessibility to the front
I have written about Apple and accessiblity on many occasions, e.g. here, giving them a red card quite often but praising them when they added features that improved accessiblity of any product. My overall impression was Apple tried but...
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 10th June '09

Major step forward in Accessible PDF Standards
PDF documents are ubiquitous and therefore need to be accessible to all. The ISO 32000 standard defines the PDF document format and includes specific features to enable PDF documents to be accessible. For example alternate text can be added...
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 3rd June '09

Accessibility has its rewards
Working in accessibility sometimes feels like an uphill struggle with little external recognition. We keep chipping away at the issues because we know it is the right thing to do and because we do know that we are benefiting our target audience....
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 16th April '09

Wheelchairs and accessible ICT
A wheelchair symbol is often used to identify information about accessibility of computer systems. At first sight this might seem reasonable as it is a well-known symbol for disabilities in general; but in reality does not make sense because...
Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research | 17th March '09