Comments on: AJAX and Accessibility

By: Vincent Murphy

Vincent Murphy — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:38:27 +0000

Perhaps the most important aspect of accessibility is that it must work without javascript or any of the other fancy functionality. Your calculator didn’t work for me because I don’t use javascript – it would have been easy to make it work. It would also mean that those with accessibility problems could bypass the disadvantages of ‘AJAX’ by disabling javascript to use the ‘fall-back’ standard behaviour.

By: Aaron Leventhal

Aaron Leventhal — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 16:08:42 +0000

Accessible DHTML is being designed at S3C to address these sorts of issues. In fact I've been saying we should call it AJAX accessibility because people don't realize it applies. Currently Firefox implements it. There are things like accessible alerts which allow the author to have text spoken as soon as it changes or appears. We have accessible custom controls like spreadsheets, menubars, tree views and tab panels, which work like their desktop counterparts.

I invite you to take a look at http://www.mozilla.org/access/dhtml

By: Robert Nyman

Robert Nyman — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 12:03:28 +0000

Hi Pete,

My hope is that my new concept, ASK, shall address these issues and at the same time help people to easily implement an accessible approach:

ASK - AJAX resource kit

By: Edward Clarke

Edward Clarke — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 22:54:54 +0000

Regarding Luca (comment #34) and search engine placement, there is an article at AJAX and SEO that offers a few ideas about indexing content within an AJAX application.

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 11:48:46 +0000

Michelle, thank you for your kind words.

jeff_we34: I am not quite sure what you are looking for with your questions. I suggest doing a Google search for more information.

By: michelle

michelle — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:27:09 +0000

i’ve been a lurker for quite some time and i love your site. great article, it’s the best that i’ve read about how web accessible is AJAX. thanks!

By: jeff_we34

jeff_we34 — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 05:34:53 +0000

What kinds of applications is Ajax best suited for?

By: jeff_we34

jeff_we34 — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 05:32:08 +0000

Does this mean Adaptive Path is anti-Flash?

By: Emrah BASKAYA

Emrah BASKAYA — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 14:16:56 +0000

For a really easy color fade technique, please visit: Introduction to Javascript Animation, color fades and resizing Hope you like it, I have programmed it so it is very easy to use, and the functions can be used to animate any CSS property which uses numbers.

By: Luca

Luca — Sat, 27 Aug 2005 13:52:27 +0000

I believe that Accessible is a more wide word then think-about-blind-peoples, this is only part of the issue. Tim Berners-Lee said: "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." When we project a website or a RIA, we should pay attention to this fundamental concept. There are disadvanced peoples that have some limitations: physical or cognitive disability, obsolete hardware, old software, little common systems or configuration, low speed connection, etc.. Accessibility is a noble intention, but also means open our website to a more wide slice of costumers (people that can't access to our products, doesn't use/buy them). Think to access growth to internet from country likes India and China, they have low speed connections, old hardware with open source software. They will represent soon the future of web-surfer, and they can't access to your contents. We know that build an universal website is impossible, but we have some standard compliant tools and methods that give us the possibility to be near to our goals. I think that AJAX actually bring us far from universality of web. New technologies must enhance usability, not decrease it!!

I've known AJAX about a month ago and i said: "Wow!! This is the future of web". So, i've read a lot of documentation and searched existing code library, but I think that this model development have some limitations / problems.

JavaScript must be enabled. Recent statistics (w3c statistics) reports that on July 2005 about 10% of user doesn't use this tecnology (Disabled or not supported from their browser). we have total dependency, we fall back to alterative version of a website?
On Windows platform XMLHTTPRequest requires to enable ActiveX;
Many libraries doesn't support minor browsers like Konqueror, Safari and Lynx (textual browsers can't support JavaScript);
Many development libraries doesn't support 5.x browsers generation (Internet Explorer 5 is still used from a large slice of web-surfers);
Too much JavaScript code can produce "dirt" (X)HTML code and increase page weigh;
Too many client-side code can increase time of rendering and/or make unusable the interface (I've read about the medium system requirments of an AJAX commercial library: 600 Mhz CPU, with 128 Mb of RAM. Whaaaat? We talkin' about of a website or an operating system?);
In some cases there isn't separation beetwen contents and presentation (if you use JavaScript to do visual page modifications);
Dinamic changes in a page can't be perceived to disabled people and screen readers can't recognize them;
in SPIs we lose the browser back-button use, we can't bookmark a page and download it to access offline;
We have problems with spiders and of course search engines positioning;

Of course this is only a fast overview of the problems, but represents big limitations to accessibility. I think that the use of AJAX is dangerous, we can use it, but with care.