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Creating accessible AJAX interfaces
Currently I am working on the world's biggest grocery shopping web site, which will be fully Web 2.0 enabled, meaning that AJAX is used all over the place – but accessibility requirement is AA!
Creating AA accessible XHTML pages is hard enough, but creating AA accessible AJAX driven web applications – near impossible.
However, we all know that for every problem there are at least three or four solutions, some better and some worse, so there is for this one too.
Creating accessible AJAX interfaces requires one to think about graceful degradation at every point of writing any code for the web site – essentially each page component needs to have a fall-back solution if it is to work properly under all circumstances.
Currently I am working with some real bright and capable individuals who are true experts in their field, all for a client who are member of W3C and who have asked us to compile as many guidelines for creating accessible AJAX interfaces, which is an incredible honour for me, since I have followed W3C guidelines ever since I started programming for the web many, many years ago.
Thinking up meaningful, implementable and reasonably quick solutions for AA accessible AJAX interfaces is a truly brain frying experience and requires many conversations with fellow developers and lots of creative and highly informed thinking.
I am penning down all my observations and findings, which are going to be fed back to W3C at some point, so please do ask questions and post comments here if you are willing to know anything into more detail.
Through our initial prototype development we have come up with some very clever and simple/logical approaches to creating things like required form fields, which can be slightly tricky to implement in a fully accessible and usable manner for screen readers and browsers in all states.
I will hopefully be in a position to post some of my lessons learned on this blog in a very near future.
6:15 PM 
