People: Accessibility

The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture, location, or physical or mental ability. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability. W3C Accessibility Basics This is how the World Wide Web Consortium Accessibility Basics article starts. To help make the web more accessible, W3C maintains the WAI-ARIA specification. In a world of ever advancing web technologies, the number of RIA (Rich Internet Application) offerings increase every day. HTML, Javascript and CSS is used to create UI experiences that go far beyond HTMLs inherently document-oriented nature. WAI-ARIA tries...

Telerik has always strived to make its products accessible and available to a wide range of people. It is part of Telerik's vision for providing leading developer products, just like browser support in our AJAX controls, right-to-left language support, localization, performance, and everything else that makes up excellent controls. In the upcoming Q1 2011 RadControls for WinForms will implement Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) support which will make the Telerik WinForms controls the first suite to be compliant with the latest user interface accessibility and UI automation standards (FYI, in Q1 we will also extend our localization support and support for right-to-left languages to all...

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...