A nice facelift for one of the web design world’s most valuable sites

WebsiteTips.com HTML Tutorials, Web Design Tips, Web Master Resources, Web Page Design Tutorials, Articles, HTML Color Charts, CSS Resources, Cascading Style Sheets – Web Resources, Website Tips – WebsiteTips.com This site has been updated by owner Shirley Kaiser and looks very nice. She’s updated her content and generally improved things site wide. Way to go, Shirley!

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Thoughts from Eric on Mix 06

Read all of Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Mixed Impressions to learn a few really interesting things. Here’s an important highlight from Eric: “A little while ago, I said that designers should remain calm and not hack their sites to fix them in the IE7 beta because it was a moving target. That is no longer the case. It’s now time to start testing sites in the IE7 beta and identifying any layout problems that may occur. (And there will be problems. No browser is perfect.)

I’ll be doing this as soon as I can, and I encourage everyone who can to do the same. Here’s the other key point: IE7 is scheduled to go final in the second half of 2006 (I couldn’t get anything more specific), so we have a calm period of at least three months in which to find out how things stand before IE7 goes final. This isn’t an accidental circumstance, either. The IE team has deliberately done this in order to give Web developers time to figure out what’s coming and how to deal with it.”

How Mike Cherim solved the Accesssite.org problem

The folks at accesssites.org strugged with the problem I talked about several times here in which their showcase page was unreadable by Safari 2.0 on Mac OS X (Tiger). It was indeed baffling and the resolution is still a little baffling to everyone involved. Mike documented it all here. Beast-Blog.com | Mike Cherim’s Professional and Personal Web Log | C.H.U.B. – Comment Hyphenation Ugh Bug

It turns out to be comments with two nested hyphens in them that caused the problem, but the weird part is it only affected the showcase page and not other pages coded the same way. Mike would like any others who’ve had a similar problem to let him know, as this does not seem to be documented anywhere else within Google’s range.

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Make Firefox into a self-voicing browser

Knowbility had a booth set up at SXSWi with working examples of JAWS and other demos. A fellow named Charles Chen was at the Knowbility booth too, giving away software that makes Firefox self-voicing. Information and download CLC-4-TTS here. CLC-4-TTS is a cross OS compatible (Windows, Mac, Linux) collection of JavaScript functions that can be used for transforming Firefox into a self-voicing browser. This software is open source and is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Now you can get access to a disabled user

UsabilityExchange: “By connecting content providers directly with disabled end users we provide an environment in which accessibility and usability issues can be resolved quickly and easily.”

You can register to have your sites tested by users with various disabilities and get feedback. A UK site, so the laws affecting accessibility may be slightly different from those in the US, but a valuable service.

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A Public Apology to Access Sites

I had given “the mean mouth” to Access Sites a couple of times recently about their Access Sites Showcase page. It turns out that my normal setup on Mac OS X with Safari 2 is the rare combination that had a problem with the page. Most people were seeing a perfectly readable page with a white background.

Here’s what I heard from the Access Sites folks, “We did test extensively on other platforms, other browsers and operating systems, and UAs like Jaws, Lynx, etc., knowing full well that people would be giving us the eyeball (plus we do care and try to do it right anyway), but it is possible we missed something. Based on your reply we took 240 screenshots today and it seems as if we may indeed have an issue on the Macintosh OSX 10.4 using Safari 2.0.”

So the short version of the story is that they will indeed tackle this one and I’m sure they’ll have it fixed ASAP. My job, now, is to issue this public apology to the folks at Access Sites for sending out harsh words in their direction.

I once again encourage all my readers to prepare and submit accessible work to them for consideration in their showcase. My original thought when I first heard of the site was what a great idea and I still think it is. Not only a great idea, but accessible to everyone, even Mac OS 10.4/Safari 2.0 (and every other device out there in page rendering land).