New Accessibility Guidelines and Standards

[Garrison Locke]

Here is the presentation that Saroj gave at the March meetup as well as the document she referenced with the summarization of the new accessibility guidelines.

[Jonathan Champ]

This is linked to by the docx: http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/refresh/report/

It is very useful for specific explanations of things such as the "situations listed below" from 3-F. Most importantly: 6. DECORATION, Formatting, Invisible Objects: If a NON-TEXT OBJECT is pure DECORATION, or used only for visual formatting, or if it is not presented to users, then it must be implemented such that it can be ignored by ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY.

Of course, I'm still concerned by how vague 3-A is: "Color must not be used as the only visual means of conveying [something]". So does bold count?

Also, calculating the Contrast Ratios using the Relative Luminance of the text and the background over which it lays using the conditional parts calculations which are piecewise combined to form a normalized value for colors which are not black or white is ... interesting. Anyone know of a tool that will take RGB 0-255 and map it to the Relative Luminance? Bonus points for taking two RGBs in hex and providing a Relative Luminance for both and the associated Contrast Ratio.

5:1 Contrast Ratios that you probably want to avoid:
#009100 : #000000 and #FFFFFF : #AD00FF

[Jonathan Champ]

Someone provided a link to a Luminosity / Constrast Ratio tool:
http://juicystudio.com/services/luminositycontrastratio.php

Thanks!!

[Mitch C. Amiano]

Also, http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrast-analyser.html for a desktop utility.

[Jonathan Champ]

Thanks Mitch. Sadly, no Linux version.

Side note: Ning needs emoticons.

[Mitch C. Amiano]

We who are old enough use ASCII :-(

[Jonathan Champ]

My options were the nose-less :( and the more appropriately oriented but less clear muted emotion -_-

[Mitch C. Amiano]

This is not golden, maybe not even silver or brass, but it is a start at implementing the algorithm as a jQuery plugin.

jQueryContrastyTest.html

[Jonathan Champ]

Fun stuff! I have some ideas that I'm trying to send in an e-mail, but SMTP is acting up.