Accessible? Overlays, dynamically changing text in the DOM, and other JS tricks...

[Anastasia Cheetham]

On 7-Mar-08, at 1:17 PM, Josh Holtzman wrote:

> ..."Page 2" isn't really a new page... it's an overlay...
>
> My question is whether this is inherently inaccessible....

Hi, Josh,

Sorry for the delay in responding to your email. fluid-talk is a fine  
place for this discussion, although fluid-work would be just as fine.

The answer to your question is that overlays are not inherently  
inaccessible. They (and any web content) can be accessible so long as  
you are aware of the accessibility issues that DHTML raises, and  
understand techniques for addressing them.

Colin has put together a very useful checklist of things to know when  
developing accessible DHTML content:
     http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/DHTML+Developer 
+Checklist

I suggest that you have a look at this page, and try applying it to  
your work. Let us know if you have any questions about what's  
described there, and when you do have some markup, let us know. We'd  
be happy to have a look at it, and try it out with a screen reader.

-- 
Anastasia Cheetham                   a.cheetham at utoronto.ca
Software Designer, Fluid Project           fluidproject.org
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre / University of Toronto