Javascript and Accessibility

Question

As a web developer, a number of the projects I work on fall under government umbrellas and hence are subject to 508 Accessibility laws, and sometimes W3C accessibility guideline

Answer 1

I think the answer is really in how you architect things. JQuery has the capability to be unobtrusive and therefore accessible. The trick is to have redundancy around your AJAX calls so browsers without JavaScript can still utilize your service. In other words, wherever you have JavaScript responses, dialogs, etc you need to have a degraded equivalent.

If you have accessibility in mind and you're properly testing for both use cases (JavaScript vs. Non-JavaScript) you should be able to write applications that cater to both audiences.

Example ($(document).ready call omitted for clarity and brevity:

Say Hello

A trivial example but basically this will only evaluate the click JavaScript event if JavaScript is supported. Otherwise, it will perform like a normal link and go to say_hello.htm - your job as the developer is to make sure that both outcomes are handled for appropriately.

Hope that helps!