Many talented, creative clients and colleagues have physical limitations, such as blindness or vision impairment, hearing loss or limited hand use or mobility. When you schedule a meeting, do you take potential disabilities into consideration? Accessibility considerations help people with disabilities overcome barriers they may experience in participating fully in your meeting. And, these same considerations can benefit others, especially remote attendees.

via IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center | 10 steps for making your meeting accessible.

The possibilities for expansion are endless, with Siri potentially becoming a household assistant, turning on and off lights, televisions, cookers, electric blinds, and doing other everyday tasks that we would rather talk to our Iphones about than do in person.

via Hacker gets Siri to work with a radio thermostat – The Inquirer.

Tommy Edison shows us how someone who is blind or visually impaired crosses the street alone. This video features a crosswalk in Connecticut that is accessible and a crosswalk in New York City that’s not accessible.

via How Blind People Cross The Street Alone | Yahoo! Accessibility.

Oregon was first in the nation to have all residents vote by mail. Now it’s pioneering another idea: vote by iPad.

Oregon officials decided to try iPads because their other equipment for helping disabled people vote is nearing the end of its life. The old tools, including laptops with various accessibility modifications, were hauled around in two suitcases and were difficult for election workers to set up.About 800 voters used it in 2010, according to the secretary of states office.Officials hope the iPads portability, simplicity and relatively low cost will make it easier to deploy to more places and reach more voters. People with their own accessibility tools like joysticks and paddles can connect them using Bluetooth wireless technology.”Some people want to vote independently, and theyre the ones that were talking to,” said Steve Trout, state elections director. “Others just want someone to help them, and thats fine too.”

via Oregon looks to iPads to help disabled people vote – Yahoo! Finance.

via UNH Institute on Disability | News > IOD Report Finds Significant Health Disparities for People with Disabilities.

Given the diversity of Yahoo!’s audience, we wanted to make Search Direct as accessible as possible. Initially, we believed that this would be an easy task since this product would be based on YUI 3, a JavaScript library with accessibility baked into its DNA. Contrary to my expectations as an engineer, this task turned out to be more difficult than we anticipated.

via Making Search Direct Accessible » Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog).

Sections 255 and 508 regulate accessibility standards for electronic and information technologies, created by the U.S. Access Board.

The current regulations can be found here and to read more about the subject read Peter Korn’s blog post: The next step in the Section 508/255 Refresh, and Oracle’s public comments.

“Even as innovation continues, advancing HTML5 to Recommendation provides the entire Web ecosystem with a stable, tested, interoperable standard,” said Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. “The decision to schedule the HTML5 Last Call for May 2011 was an important step in setting industry expectations. Today we take the next step, announcing 2014 as the target for Recommendation.”

Source: W3C Press Release

Touch Events Specification

• Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites
• Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility
• Shawn Henry’s Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design
• Sarah Horton’s Access by Design
• The Encyclopedic Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance
• Jim Byrne’s excellent tome Accessible Web Typography – an introduction for web designers

All excellent resources by great writers. I would add few more resources:

• CPD’s WebAim: Introduction to Web Accessibility.
• W3school’s Web Quality Tutorial provides a succinct but quality introduction.
• Derek Featherstone’s excellent article on A List Apart ARIA and Progressive Enhancement.
• The Web Standards Project’s WaSP InterACT.