Archive for Ted Drake
About Ted Drake
- Website
- http://accessibility.yahoo.com
- Profile
- Ted Drake, a member of the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, has helped build various Yahoo! products over the past five years. He has also spoken about accessibility and engineering at conferences around the world.
- Organization
- Yahoo! Accessibility Lab
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
I remember the first time I tested an iPad app for accessibility. Yahoo! Finance was preparing to launch MarketDash and wanted to make sure it was as accessible as the web site. With VoiceOver enabled and a Flip cam set to record, Victor Tsaran and I began exploring the app. The most confusing bug we found was an empty article page.
It was impossible to read a news article with VoiceOver enabled. It worked fine with VoiceOver disabled and I could read the article in Safari. However, the article within MarketDash was a black hole.
The Finance engineers added confusion by responding with "we needed to remove the accessibility setting." In other words, they made it more accessible by removing accessibility. Perhaps you’ve had a similarly confusing experience.
Continue reading Defining isAccessibilityElement in your iOS Application
Tags: Apple, iOS, isAccessibilityElement, Xcode
Posted in Featured, Mobile |
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Thursday, March 22nd, 2012
Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines encourage developers to create compelling, immersive mobile interfaces. The goal is to delight the user with an inventive interface that invites the user to touch and explore. Often times, this leads to designs with interactions that are not immediately understood.
Continue reading Increase iOS Accessibility with Accessibility Hints
Tags: accessibilityHint, accessibilityLabel, Apple, iOS
Posted in Featured, Mobile |
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Monday, October 24th, 2011
This post is by guest author 
Narayanan Ramakrishnan, whose Open-Captions project parses the closed caption track of a YouTube video to provide ASL translations of words. Caption tracks include timestamps and text, parsing this as meta data opens new opportunities for contextually dynamic pages.
Narayanan is a GeorgiaTech graduate and has a passion for creating accessible tech projects. Previous projects include an accessible map of New York City, transliteration of Facebook posts, and visual guide to Indian politics.
What is Open-Captions?
According to research, over 90% of deaf children have hearing parents who “frequently do not have fully effective means of communicating with them”. The American Sign Language (ASL) is a difficult language to learn, especially as a second language.
Open-Captions makes it easy for parents and children to learn and practice American Sign Language together while watching their favorite videos on YouTube. People can find closed captioned videos on any topic with the Open-Captions search engine. The viewer is able to select individual words in the video’s caption stream and see the American Sign Language representation of the word.
Continue reading Open-Captions, Using Closed Captions as Meta Data for ASL
Tags: ASL, captions, closed captions, video, YouTube
Posted in Featured, Research |
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Thursday, August 18th, 2011
Many times ARIA is used as a quick fix for accessibility issues caused when more semantic elements should have been used. For instance, an input could use aria-label when the design for the page does not include a visible label tag. Another common use is role="button" when links are used for actions instead of the semantic button. ARIA roles and attributes provide simple solutions to low-hanging fruit; something developers with legacy code and screen reader users can appreciate.
Continue reading Create Dynamic Form Labels with ARIA
Tags: ARIA, aria-labelledby, form, JavaScript, jQuery, Labels, YUI
Posted in Forms |
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Monday, August 15th, 2011
Caridy Patiño, the principal frontend engineer for Yahoo! Search Direct, just wrote an article for the Yahoo! User Interface blog on what went into creating an accessible, dynamic search box: Making Search Direct Accessible.
Caridy worked with Victor Tsaran, of the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, to fine tune the experience of screen reader users typing a search query and being notified of potential results.
Continue reading An Accessible Solution for Yahoo Search Direct
Tags: ARIA, Autocomplete, JavaScript, live-region, Yahoo!, YUI
Posted in Forms |
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Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
They say an image is worth a thousand words. This is especially true on the internet; where screen space is limited and an image can give users a quick summary of an article’s content, the appeal of a new product, or a summary of data. Images are also used to give fine control over typography and design.
Internet users also tend to click on images, as they are usually associated with links. Herein lies the problem. Images represent the link’s purpose visually, but how can you ensure the link is usable to non-visual users as well?
Continue reading Creating Accessible Image Links
Tags: alternate text, ARIA, aria-describedby, HTML, image, links, longdesc
Posted in Images |
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Friday, April 8th, 2011
Sometimes it is difficult to keep track of your keyboard focus, landmark roles and tab index. We’ve created a couple bookmarklets for our own testing. These easy to use bookmarklets add CSS to quickly highlight your page’s information. Simply save the following links to your bookmarks, then load your test page and click the bookmark. While these work in all browsers, you’ll get better results using Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer 9.
You’ll learn a lot about the Yahoo! home page’s use of ARIA with the landmark/tabindex bookmarklet. Check it out.
Tags: ARIA, bookmarklet, CSS, JavaScript, keyboard navigation, role
Posted in Tools |
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Monday, March 28th, 2011
Even the best-intentioned web developers can make simple accessibility mistakes. This presentation was put together for an internal Yahoo! conference for front-end engineers. It reminds web developers that there are still some basic problems on the web, let’s fix these today and avoid them in the future. The presentation was written by Thierry Koblentz and Ted Drake.
Continue reading Common Accessibility Mistakes
Tags: CSS, f2esummit, HTML, tutorial, Yahoo!
Posted in Conference |
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Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011
This presentation was given at CSUN 2011, the 26th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference. It’s an overview of where HTML5 came from, what it includes, how it helps accessibility, and where it can cause problems for accessibility.
Continue reading HTML5 Accessibility Challenges
Tags: ARIA, csun11, HTML5, longdesc, Slides
Posted in Conference, Presentations |
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