April 2006 - Web Teacher

Link Roundup

Here are several links of interest today. First is E-Learn Conference in Hawaii October 13-17, 2006. The E-Learn Conference is the International Forum for Researchers, Developers, and Practitioners to Learn about the Best Practices/Technology in Education, Government, Healthcare, and Business

Two articles about accessibility from Felix Miata are worth reading: Browser Defaults are Not Too Big and The (In)accessible Web.

Microsoft talks about what it is planning to do with the new Forester Research that shows that 57% of adults can benefit from accessible technology.

Dave Shea talks about the advent of IE 7 in Stop Hacking, or be Stopped. Once again, if you have CSS hacks and haven’t yet figured out how to use conditional comments, I urge you to take this step. This article explains why and more.

Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, usability, CSS, education

Another winner from Project Seven

I’m a fan of Project Seven products. Their newest is PVII Image Gallery Magic, a very nice, standards-based gallery that uses CSS and the DOM to do its magic. I am not affiliated with this company in any way, I just think their products are high quality resources for Dreamweaver users.

WaSP Accessibility Task Force Manifesto

Manifesto – The Web Standards Project: “Since its inception in 1998, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) has been campaigning for the general adoption of web standards. While great progress has been made in getting browser manufacturers, web designers and even some authoring tool developers to understand and leverage the advantages of standards, there still remain crucial parts of the “web equation” to be tackled.

“Assistive technologies (such as screen readers) that some people with disabilities use still do not consistently take full advantage of the possibilities offered by standards-compliant markup.
Sophisticated and expensive content management tools produce poor-quality, non-semantic, inaccessible markup.

“A lot of authoring software (including CMS and blogging tools) cannot be easily used by people with disabilities, because they don’t conform to Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) – the W3C recommendation for web authoring tools.
Corporations and their web developers mistakenly believe that accessible web development is incompatible with branding and beauty.

“Those that do care are often sold expensive and erroneous solutions by that new phenomenon: the Accessibility Snake Oil Salesman – companies claiming a thorough understanding of web accessibility issues and promising “miracle cure” systems that automatically take care of them, but only delivering solutions which are anything but accessible.

“The rapid adoption of DOM scripting and AJAX introduces further problems with regards to support by Assistive Technologies.

“The Accessibility Task Force believes that now is the time to address these problems. We want to highlight the daily issues faced by designers and developers which perpetuate inaccessible processes and output, and work toward the swift eradication of these problems. And we want to change the focus of accessibility from simply quieting an automated tool to addressing the real barriers encountered by real users of all abilities.”

Read the full manifesto.

Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, web standards

High Ed Accessibility Policies

WebAIM has a survey of Web Accessibility Policies (and Pseudo Policies) in Postsecondary Institutions: “The list of policies on this page is not all inclusive, but represents a broad
sampling of policies across the United States and other regions around the
world. Many of these policies can be more accurately described as suggestions
than policies, since many institutions do not have any binding formal policy.”

Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility

Design Decisions

Here’s a good magazine I don’t think I’ve mentioned before in these pages with a good article by Eric Meyer about layout decisions.Vitamin Features: Making Popular Layout Decisions

Vitamin, by the way, has one female on its advisory board: Molly. But who’s counting?

Two new accessibility tools

Use GrayBit v1.0: Grayscale Conversion Contrast Accessibility Tool – Main Page – Presented by GrayBit to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition to test contrast. The other tool is Colour Contrast Analyser 1.1 from the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium. The Colour Contrast Analyser is primarily a tool for checking foreground and background colour combinations to determine if they provide good colour visibility. It also contains functionality to create simulations of certain visual conditions such as colour blindness.

Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility

What to do while the TV is off

Next week is TV-Turnoff Week. Welcome to TV Turnoff Network If you participate, I have some suggested reading that you can use to fill your time. Here are three books you may not have tried yet. They are more in the realm of high-level thinking about web design than nitty gritty details.

If that doesn’t do it for you, I can recommend one more book that will give you plenty of details, projects, and hands-on work with CSS. The book? More Eric Meyer on CSS

Technorati Tags: web design, usability, CSS