People: Accessibility

One of the major goals for our AJAX RadEditor control is to provide an accessible content creation experience. For us, this task is divided into two major categories - having an accessible editor UI and helping the end user produce accessible content. With the Q3 2010 release, we made improvements to both and I want to share the results with you.  The first major improvement is the new AccessibleRadEditor control. It is a stripped down version of the full featured RadEditor and has a simpler toolbar to allow easy navigation using only the keyboard. All tools have assigned shortcuts and even the...

Starting with the 2010 Q2 Beta release of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, RadTreeView adheres to the WAI-ARIA specification for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. With this feature on-board, it’s now possible for screen readers and other accessibility tools (supporting WAI-ARIA) to semantically parse the html structure of the tree. Summary of the new feature Making a quick peek inside the html of RadTreeView with enabled support for WAI-ARIA, one can see the “roles”, “states” and “properties” that the standard requires. They all are represented through attributes in the html structure of the tree, decorating the elements with semantic meaning. Having them applied, the...

I am posting this on behalf of the editor team here at Telerik. It has been a really great experience to work with the folks at the Royal National Institute of the Blind People (RNIB) and Content and Code. The folks at RNIB helped us a lot to improve the accessible feature set of RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX and we are very happy with the results. We are proud to be the chosen component vendor for an accessible HTML editor. The required changes to the editor client code were not difficult and added the needed features for blind and partially sighted people. Some...

The sole purpose of this blog post is to answer to frequently asked questions concerning the support of the visual clues (focus dots) of the checkboxes and radio buttons styled with RadFormDecorator. The focus dots that appear upon tabbing on a clickable HTML element (a, input, button, checkbox, radiobutton, etc) is a visual clue showing that the element is accessible via the keyboard or other device facilitating its manipulation. Unfortunately, browsers differ in the support of focus dots. According to the accessibility specifications, a checkbox or radio button has to be associated with a label tag, in order to make the clickable area of the...

The purpose of this post is to summarize the tools and resources for UI Automation/Accessibility testing in Silverlight 2 available at the present moment as well as to share a few details on what’s expected in the nearest future. There are a lot of resources on the web about Microsoft UI Automation framework and Active Accessibility so I’m not going to put any general information here. Still, you can refer to the list at the end of the post for additional information. The UI Automation testing tools are quite important to developers and testers (like me) that are interested in ...