Accessibility issue: Table, abbreviations and acronyms
Please confirm that you have loaded the following AU page:
physa.html
This page provides the same content as the previous page but organizes it using an HTML table. The table was developed with accessible table markup. This is one of the more challenging topics for novice audiences since current web authoring tools such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver do not provide a way through their graphic interface to add appropriate table markup.
For novice audiences, it may be best to simply state that designing accessible tables requires specific HTML markup that associates column headers with the cells beneath them.
More advanced audiences may want to know more detail, including such specific HTML techniques as how to use the "scope" attribute or the combination of "id" and "headers" attributes.
This page also presents an opportunity to discuss abbreviations and acronyms. The ABBR element was used so that supporting screen readers will read PHYS as Physics and PHB as Physics Building. One could also add ABBR elements to the days of the week - Otherwise combinations of MTWThF can be difficult for screen reader users to comprehend. ACRONYM is not used on this page, but its functionality is identical to ABBR. Adding these elements to pages might seem to some web authors like a lot of extra coding, particularly when they see all those MTWThF's on the page. However, since this is a database-driven site, the code could simply be written once into the script or template and would automatically be repeated as needed, with no further effort from the author.
The ABBR and ACRONYM elements provide a good opportunity to discuss an important issue: There are significant differences between the W3C guidelines and the Section 508 standards. All the issues examined up to this point in the Accessible University demo have been supported within the Section 508 web accessibility standards. Abbreviations and acronyms are one of many issues, however, that are not included in Section 508, but are included within the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The WCAG is the more comprehensive set of guidelines, and developers should be encouraged to go beyond Section 508 when considering the full breadth of how visitors will interface with their web content.
Trivia: Did anyone in your audience notice that all but one of the physics professors at AU are past recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics? The lone exception is Walter Lewin, whom we'll see in the video segment in Physics 101.
After showing this accessible example, follow the link to PHYS 101.
When finished, Go to next page.