Ruby on Rails and web accessibility
Posted by Eric Stewart Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:27:00 GMT
It so happens that much of the web work I have done in the past (and at present) has had a strong accessibility requirement. Most of the standard accessibility techniques are not difficult, improve usability anyway, and encourage use of standards.
Certainly there are many wrenches to through into the accessibility cogs. Javascript and Ajax are two big ones right now that make things more difficult. But from what I can tell they can be utilized also with careful design (and knowledge of degradation techniques).
In any case, since I enjoy the Ruby on Rails platform so much these days it seems natural to want to bring tools that help the average developer create a more accessible site.
The first of those I will make available soon. Last night I wrote a custom assertion plugin for rails called assert_accessible that works like and is based on Scott Raymond’s1 assert_valid_markup plugin. It still needs some polish and cleanup before I put it up for everyone to use.
assert_accessible sends the last page rendered through a get or post call in your rails test to the WebAim accessibility validator and fails on any errors.
I’ll hopefully have something publically available later this week and have more ideas in mind. Stay tuned!
1 See Scott’s post about this
I like this! :-) Hope the plugin will grow.
Great post. As Ruby on Rails grows, there will be a need for accessibility. This is one of the few references I could find in Google for accessibly ruby on rails.
Thanks. Yeah, that’s probably because so many web developers overall don’t factor in accessiblity. Couple that with the fact that Ruby on Rails is a pushing and enabling many leading edge techniques (i.e. Ajax) and you have a lot of people concentrating on non-accessible development.
What I’m especially interested in is making accessible development easier, especially in combination with the wiz-bang stuff.