Making Java Applications/Applets More Accessible:

Java Application/Applet Development Tools - Recommendations

Java development tools should make developers aware of accessibility issues, providing default methods which encourage creating accessible application/applets. A clear example is from the HTML-authoring world: when the user authors a page using a tool (e.g. Adobe Pagemill), and uses the tool to place a graphic on the page, the tool should ask the user for ALT text for that graphic. Such descriptive resources as ALT TEXT for animations, sounds (e.g. PlaySound() equivalents in Java) graphics, screen change events could be included in the AWT (or added by overloading the primitives with ones that take an additional argument which is a text description) and exposed to the developer. The presence of this resource has to be exposed to the developer. If the developer does not add this resource, warnings could be generated by the Java compiler or prompted by a dialog box (Peter Korn, Sun). Preventing the code from compiling unless the developer added these attributes would also encourage compliance.

Many people require a reasonably high contrast between text and the background to be able to read. Aids for choosing correct color could include appropiate default colors and means of notifying the user when low contrast colors are choosen.

The developer doesn't have to be aware of accessibility issues to use the accessibility attribute. The inclusion of these attributes can make the product easier to use.

As the number of development environments increases, care must be taken that the default filling in of the same accessibility attributes is universally present.