Accessibility and design of AJAX applications
Accessibility is a very important topic for web application design and specially large scale applications. There is many Strategies and techniques that have been developped for web accessibility during the last years to make the web accessible to people with disabilities. Is is possible to introduce accessibility for AJAX applications ? Or AJAX is an inaccessible concept ?
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is a W3C organisation which guidelines which are widely regarded as the international standard for Web accessibility, support materials to help understand and implement Web accessibility and create resources, through international collaboration ...
What interest us more in the WAI works is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and if we have a look on changes that have been introduced by AJAX applications we find two important topics : Page organization and Scripts, applets, & plug-ins.
Page organization
If an AJAX application is loading dynamic content to display it via scripts there is no more static pages and we cannot talk about the classic definition of "page organization". Structure of the page is subject of changes anytime after the page is loaded.
Scripts, applets, & plug-ins
Concerning scripts the WAI recommand to provide an alternative content in case active features are inaccessible or unsupported. That's why gmail is accessible via pop, because it's simply not accessible !
AJAX is not accessible
This is the short answer for developers who worry about accessibility of their AJAX applications, simply provide another way to access your web pages. It won't be interesting to develop two versions of a web application, specially if it is something advanced and which require lot of development.
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