Eat Your Own Accessible Dog Food · 158 words posted 03/26/2004 06:57 AM
As part of a current Flash project, I’m tasked with creating a combobox to filter the contents of a grid by region. The space in our interface is tight, so I’ve attempted to work the visual key into the combobox itself.
What’s wrong with the combobox on the left? That’s right—it’s inaccessible to color-blind users. Unless I reproduce the entire region name in the dependent grid, a color-blind user has no way of using the key. How do I know this? Because the project’s ColdFusion programmer is color-blind and told me he couldn’t use the color key.
His solution: add an abbreviation for each region and include it in our combobox, as shown on the right, and then simply show the abbreviation in the grid. He offered this solution so quickly that I’m sure it’s not the first time he’s encountered an inaccessible combobox. I’m just lucky my boneheaded mistake was caught internally, before a paying customer complained.
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