Here’s the press release from the New York State Attorney General’s Office: SPITZER AGREEMENT TO MAKE WEB SITES ACCESSIBLE TO THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED.
As far as I know, this is the first major legal case in the U.S. where .com web sites are made to provide accessible web sites. The sites are Ramada.com and Priceline.com.
Was just looking up something on the CADL site for my wife, and, as is my habit, I took a quick peek at the HTML code (View -> View Source in Safari). I was pleased to see first that it appears to be valid XHTML 1.0, and quickly noted some nice uses of accesskey attributes in the a elements. Very humane coding. Nice.
Specifically, I noted this pattern repeated for nav links:
<a href="/databases/" title="Research Tools and Databases. AccessKey: d" accesskey="d"> Research Tools </a>
The title attribute will inform users of which accesskey is set for which link.
To see how this works, hold your mouse over the following link.
Capital Area District Library
Then, if you are on a Mac, hold down the CTRL key and that key on your keyboard. If you are using Safari, that should just load up that URL for you.
If you are on a Windows machine, you might need to press ALT or some other key. I’m not sure. Try something. May the force be with you.
The reason we care is that we are always open to ways of making our web sites more accessible for people with disabilities, and the accesskey can be quite helpful for people who may not be in a position to use a mouse. I imagine that some assistive technologies make use of the attribute as well.
If anyone out there knows more of the nitty-gritty detail of how the accesskey attribute is practically applied, I’m interested.