Saturday, December 6, 2008

Enhancing Web 2.0 Accessibility via AXsJAX

This morning, I toured the Google Labs site to see what cool new tools were in the pipeline. As usual, there were lots of cool tools! The one that most captured my attention was an accessibility tool called AXsJAX.

If you'd like to see and listen to the developers, T. V. Raman and Charles L. Chen, there is a YouTube tutorial for web developers. The first 12 minutes were ideal for me. The rest of the one-hour presentation was for web 2.0 application developers. Essentially, the open-source application is JAVA script and can enhance the usability of your website and also be used to enhance other websites. We were told to think of a Google search page as a page of lists. AXsJAX lets you go through a list or switch to different lists and READS ALOUD the title and description included in the search item snippet. It also allows a user to easily enlarge the text of an item (rather than the whole page). There are also audio "ear tics" to indicate the end of a page. Very impressive. Kudos again to Google.

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