In the past year the government institute I do contract work for has renewed its focus on 508 Accessibility. What this implied for us was ensuring all images utilized the alt tag as a means to provide a text description, or ensuring all tables had summaries of its data thus requiring the tables be for tabular data and not for design and layout purposes. It required a stronger knowledge of CSS and a better understanding of how screen readers interpret web pages. We traversed our text to ensure we applied the acronym tag were appropriate. It also meant that with what javascript we used that there was a alternative means to access the data depending on its usage, when javascript is turned off on the browser.

When addressing the strict adherence to the 508 policy for the government website, it made me look at certain web pages I do in other areas, such as my own or my dad's website. In doing so however, it does make it difficult to utilize certain technologies like extensive flash or ajax. The reason is that today's screen readers can not interpret actions that are not directly communicated back through the browser. This is unfortunate but it doesn't mean that flash or ajax are totally out of the picture to design accessible sites.

When I decided to redesign my blog after a two year hiatus, I downloaded the latest version of Ray Camden's BlogCFC code and went to work with the desire to make the two column default design transformed into the three column design I currently use. As I began make the appropriate modification i saw that to add comments that a javascript window is launched, so I continued to modify so that the comment form would be embedded in primary page. It seemed as though I have already become accessibility minded where before it never crossed my mind.

It is my hope that as technologies such as Flex, Flash, Silverlight and more become more prevalent in websites, that the accessibility assistance programs can catch up. As I look forward to learning more about programming in Flex, it would be a shame to find out many of the things I want to do with it, will only work for only a small portion of my intended audience