We are happy to announce that even more RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX now have support for WAI-ARIA - a W3C standard with growing popularity in the past couple of years. Remaining true to our tradition of keeping up to date with the latest technologies and web standards we have further improved many of our controls which are now WAI-ARIA compliant.

Accessibility is becoming increasingly popular for websites and critically important for their success. The idea behind accessible website applications is allowing people with disabilities or limited access to Internet to freely navigate your content. This could be achieved by adding additional attributes and elements which could be used by special readers to provide more in depth information for what certain part of a web application is used for.

When you create a site you want it to be accessible as well as beautiful. We strive to give you both and this is why we have taken up a major campaign to improve the accessibility support of Telerik’s  ASP.NET AJAX controls .We, as developers, are quite used to getting things done through the keyboard and we want to give your users the same experience. This time the Dock and TagCloud controls are leveling up.

RadDock now has keyboard support

Since Q3 2012 RadDock has the ability to execute DockCommands using keyboard shortcuts. To enable this new feature all you need to do is set...

Taking a Step Back – What is Accessibility?

Accessibility is always  a large concern when creating applications. Whether these are meant for the web, desktop machines, or even mobile devices, accessibility is a huge factor. I have often run into scenarios where developers are not even aware of accessibility concerns, or decide to leave it as one of those “oh, I’ll get to it later” tasks on their TODO list. Some of you might even be asking yourself what accessibility actually is. Well, when I talk about accessibility I’m referring to the ability for your application to function for people with...

Here at Telerik accessibility support has always been important. We strive to ensure that when you are developing an application with our ASP.NET AJAX controls you can rest easy knowing that they provide compliance with some of the highest standards in the industry. Ease-of-mind and ease-of-implementation, does it get any better? :) Let’s take a look at just how we are making your applications more accessible.

Accessibility Guidelines

For a while now Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX controls have been in compliance with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0/2.0 (say that a few times fast!). These guidelines set standards for applications providing accessible content by...

With the newest version already out, I am happy to present you the latest accessibility improvements of our RadFileExplorer control from the ASP.NET AJAX suite. Now, you don't need the mouse to delete a folder or open a file!

Simply focus the FileExplorer, navigate to the grid or treeview using the [Shift+]Tab key, select the desired folder with the Arrow keys and press Delete. A popup dialog asks you to confirm the deletion. Hit Enter to delete, or Esc to cancel.

 

 

 

This was just an example of a common scenario, that could be carried out using the keyboard only. We have ensured that any use case...

Telerik has always strived to make its products accessible and available to a wide range of people. It is part of Telerik's vision for providing leading developer products, just like browser support in our AJAX controls, right-to-left language support, localization, performance, and everything else that makes up excellent controls.

In the upcoming Q1 2011 RadControls for WinForms will implement Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) support which will make the Telerik WinForms controls the first suite to be compliant with the latest user interface accessibility and UI automation standards (FYI, in Q1 we will also extend our localization support and support for right-to-left languages to all...

One of the major goals for our AJAX RadEditor control is to provide an accessible content creation experience. For us, this task is divided into two major categories - having an accessible editor UI and helping the end user produce accessible content. With the Q3 2010 release, we made improvements to both and I want to share the results with you.

 The first major improvement is the new AccessibleRadEditor control. It is a stripped down version of the full featured RadEditor and has a simpler toolbar to allow easy navigation using only the keyboard. All tools have assigned shortcuts and even the...

I am posting this on behalf of the editor team here at Telerik.

It has been a really great experience to work with the folks at the Royal National Institute of the Blind People (RNIB) and Content and Code. The folks at RNIB helped us a lot to improve the accessible feature set of RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX and we are very happy with the results. We are proud to be the chosen component vendor for an accessible HTML editor.

The required changes to the editor client code were not difficult and added the needed features for blind and partially sighted people. Some...

As you may know accessibility standards require a web page to work when JavaScript is disabled. In this blog post I will show you how to make RadMenu work even without JavaScript. I will also show how to make JAWS reader "see" all items rendered by RadMenu (even the hidden ones).

Disabling JavaScript

First we need to find a way to disable JavaScript in our browser of choice. For FireFox you need to install the web developer toolbar plugin. Then you can easily use the "Disable JavaScript" option:

In Internet Explorer you should first edit the security settings for the zone in which your...