Last week I started working on a research project with Professor George H. Williams at the University of South Carolina Upstate. We’re trying to find out the best practices for developing accessible web sites while keeping Digital Humanities in mind. We are attempting to turn Omeka, a CMS for digital cataloging, into the most accessible form of accessing scholastic information no matter a persons disability.
While I was thinking about the different techniques we could use to make these accessibility options available, and I pondered a cool idea. What if, in the same way we can use OpenID to log into multiple websites, we could use a standard accessibility options “plug-in” that anyone could install/code into their site to make it more accessible. Different preferences, like the ability to use a screen reader or use a braille display, could be carried from one website to another without the user having to setup these options again.
Perhaps this task could be completed easily with a Firefox extension that could communicate with the code on the website to load a specific CSS file that would allow for better interaction with a screen reader or braille display.
There is the possibility that someone has already come up with and implemented this idea of a tool for universal web accessibility, and if you know of a project that currently does this same thing or does it better, feel free to leave a comment and let me know!
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Joe MaCook
