Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
This post simply serves as a summary of the 4 posts published recently that distill the information from the W3C about how the guidelines and principles of WCAG 2.0 apply to mobile devices.
I thought it would be useful to have a single post with links to each of the previous posts. The posts take the 4 POUR principles and explain what they mean in terms of mobile application.
If you’ve been watching events unfolding in Egypt on Twitter you are aware of what Andy Carvin from NPR has been doing in terms of collecting and broadcasting tweets. Here’s a good interview with him from My Heart’s in Accra: Interview with Andy Carvin on curating Twitter to watch Tunisia, Egypt.
“The phrase “programmatically determined” features prominently in six of the 61 WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria.” In Programatically Determined at Accessible Culture, you can find out what it’s all about. Here’s a key bit.
When content is properly marked up in HTML, its semantic structure and relationships are in the markup itself. That is, they can be programmatically determined. Because this information is in the code, as it were, supporting technologies can programmatically retrieve it and present it to users in different ways. The information can be
transformed…into different sensory formats (e.g., visual, auditory) or styles of presentation needed by individual users.This is a key aspect of accessible web content and a core concept in WCAG 2.0.Such information can then be passed along by the browser to whatever other device or software is able to make use of it. Screen readers, voice recognition software, alternative input devices, etc., can tell what each bit of content is and allow users to interact with them accordingly.
Read the comments, too. They are valuable.
HTML5 Accessibility Challenges by Steve Faulkner is a quick summary of some of the issues.
Accessible forms using WCAG2.0 from Web Usability. Code examples, screen grabs, video and transcripts of screen reader interpretations of forms. Very valuable. For educators: this is a great resource for an assignment. If I gave stars to my useful links, this one would get 5 stars.
Smashing Magazine is doing something interesting using Twitter. Their first post based on questions from forums/Twitter is Ask SM: CSS Quick-Question Edition. Questions posted to the SM forums or to @smashingmag or @chriscoyier are given complete answers in a column of the magazine. Common CSS problems are tackled in this post. I find this idea an example of “getting it.” A design magazine takes questions from readers/followers and answers them in SM’s well-illustrated fashion for all to see. This is a super example of a two-way street working well, of a magazine that gets what social media is all about. Looking for an example of a business that communicates in an effective way with its audience? This is one.
Compare what Smashing Magazine is doing with what Dell just did with it’s Della site. (SEE Big Aaargh! for Dell’s Della.) That’s an example of doing it wrong.
The articles I published on eHow in May are listed.
Jemez Springs is about 45 minutes from Albuquerque in the Jemez Mountains. I went to a Tai Chi Retreat there and took a bunch of photos. There are about 4 places to eat in this tiny town, all serve very good food. Deb’s Deli serves real homemade pie, ice cream, and you can get a hair cut in the shop in the hall. I ate a lot more than I soaked in the hot springs, and I did Tai Chi a lot more than either of those things.
For eHow in May, I opened a new Twitter account for @Veesites. Veesites is my eHow username, and this Twitter account will contain only tweets about eHow content. The new account will give me an RSS feed from Twitter for my eHow content, since eHow doesn’t provide for a way for individual users to get a clean RSS feed for articles.