This year, i have spent many time on that subject. Most of my collegues thought that Javascript is a huge problem for accessibility. But i don't think so and i'd like to demonstrate why.
According to me, the main problem on that topic is : people are always taking this problem in the wrong side. Improving usability of web based applications is a real solution to help deficient people.
Web2.0 applications are great, and usability of web2 applications can help deficient people. The tools are not really ready for that now.
This is why, with some of my coworkers and also with a blind collegue, we are working to build a quite cool webmasters application where usability is there, and where deficient persons are able to use it. I beleive that computers, innovation and upcoming technologies are a real solution for helping this community. To build this solution, we have choosen the GWT framework, and we've improved the rendering of the javascripts web components to make them compatible with accessibility guidelines, we had to use a Javascript hack to make the application accessible.
Here there's some basic rules to follow to build an accessible web2 application :
- Design your application first, then ask an accessibility expert to see the
limits.
- Define your webservices (i mean the exchange protocol between your services
and your ajax client)..
- Use standard frameworks for the server side..
- Use GWT on the client side (i"ll explain this later, but the most important
thing is : your client must be a 100% javascript application for this to
work)..
More to come soon on that topic. (please be patient, i'm a blog newbie ;-))