Guideline 6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully.
Source Article: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/#gl-new-technologies
With today's technology, many web developers have started building pages using flash or other applet style programs. This can make for a very simple, elegant, and effective page if the user has all of the software on their computer and is free from any handicap. However, these devices are blocked on many networks, slow loading with many connections, and innaccessible if the user cannot see or read the screen. Of course, the page needs to be text equivelant. If, as in my example, the whole page is designed in this way, there needs to be a whole text equivelant page. More often, there are only small features of this type on the page.
The first thing to do is to make sure that the page can be read without style sheets. An easy way to test that is to turn off style sheets on the Web Developer toolbar. The page should still be clear and easy to breakdown and read at this stage. If dynamic content is pulled from a recordset, it must be updated when the content changes. If any objects are used, they should be used as a help to your page, not a necessity. The user should be able to read and understand your page, even if they can't see your object.
For scripts and applets, attributes can be set to cause changes when the mouse or keyboard moves or selects something. Not everyone uses the same devices so these event handlers should be device independant. Lastly, dynamic content is pointless if it doesn't do something for the user. It should be accessible or there should be an alternate page for it.
I feel like these things are pretty on track for now because I don't really have this kind of technology for the most part. If I figure it out though, I will take these extra steps and make it usable to the user as well.
