Is AJAX Accessibility a major issue?
With yet another perspective on the wealth of Ajax usability discussion flying around, Hari Gottipati shares his thoughts on his blog on XML.com. Specifically, he’s responding to the eWeek article posted a while back.
inally people realized the disadvantages of Ajax and they are trying to overcome them. The main disadvantage of Ajax is a Web page is not required to reload to change, many screen readers or other assistive technologies used by sight-impaired or otherwise disabled users may not be aware of the dynamic changes. Particularly this is the major hurdle for federal sector because all federal government web sites/applications has to meet the Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
Hari makes the comment that, in the eWeek article, they talk about using the Bindows framework to build compiant web applications, but that they don’t mention how (or what kind of result it will give). He also asks whether it is even possible to create a 100% compiant web application using Ajax in any framework.
If we fail to overcome this issue, we will see the Ajax implementations just to say “ooh look at me I’m web 2.0 too!” or to target the users who enabled JavaScript and using the particular versions of the browsers(by ignoring the blind people). Since majority of users has the latest browsers with Ajax/JavaScript support(90% of browsers have JavaScript enabled), do you think Accessibility is not going to be an issue?