About AJAX and accessible Web pages

AJAX is a very powerful way of making your web page interactive. It is a straightforward instrument for experienced web-developers and therefore it is very popular nowadays. But AJAX has a very big problem with accessibility.

Sometimes, pages with AJAX can trigger a script that simply changes the way the page looks like or changes the contents of the page. For someone that is using a screen reader to navigate through it, it is very hard to understand that possibly a text is somewhere changed.

So, in order to make AJAX accessible, there are four steps: optimise the content, mark up content semantically XHTML, create a CSS presentation layer and finally create the behaviour DOM scripts.

AJAX is such a kind of tool, that in the hands of the experienced people, it may result in creation of bright and interesting pages for everyone. But even experienced designers are advised to use AJAX as sparingly as possible. But as AJAX is a very interesting technology, in time it is very possible that it will be used more and more for the creation of web pages.

This is caused by the fact that many AJAX scripts, in contradiction with the WCAG, are unable to work with the JavaScript turned off. Many browsers still do not support JavaScript and many users are turning JavaScript off basing on security reasons.

The people and communities that are concerned about the web accessibility of client-side scripting and in particular AJAX for the production of Rich Internet Applications are working on adapting screen readers for working with AJAX. Nowadays Steve Faulkner, member of Vision Australia and fonder member of the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium, together with The Paciello Group are working on creation of technologies that would enable the screen readers in future to understand the AJAX output.

But nowadays, if you are thinking about creating an accessible web-site, think three times before using AJAX in it.