Went to Mesa Verde the other day. An inspiring place that remains one of my favorite national treasures.
I’ll be going walkabout for a few days and won’t post for a while. I thought I’d let you know what I’ve done at eHow this month before I go.
Category: accessibility
Opera Web Standards Curriculum
Opera announced their Web Standards Curriculum is now available. This is a big deal to many of us working on web standards and education. Here’s their intro:
Learning Web Standards just got easier. Opera’s new Web Standards Curriculum is a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics. It already has support from many organizations (including Yahoo! and the Web Standards Project) and universities.
The introduction and table of contents, written by Chris Mills, explains what is there now and what is still in development, who will find the curriculum useful, and how to use it.
Chris Mills is also a member of the WaSP Education Task Force that is also developing a web standards curriculum.
Useful Links: search Flash, WaSP EduTF on Facebook
TechCrunch reports that Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with the technology to search and index Flash files. Flash websites will no longer be invisible to the search engines. Well, that certainly changes things. Now that Flash won’t be the whipping boy of web design, in the same category as table-based layouts, we have a lot of rethinking to do. What do you think this is going to mean to the look and feel of the web?
WaSP Education Task Force decided it needed a Facebook page. Which means that I finally joined Facebook. I’m probably the last Facebook holdout in America. I’m so beyond the high school/college demographic I’ve never been tempted by Facebook. In my world, Facebook has officially become ubiquitous.
Added 7/2/08: Adobe’s FAQ page about searchable SWF files.
What’s your position on pixels, ems and percentages?
What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of the various measures—pixels, ems, percentage—used on the web? Do you have a favorite that you fall back on using most of the time? If so, why?
Useful links
Migrating from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 by Roger Hudson at the Web Industry Professionals Association website is a well organized summary of the changes.
Even if you aren’t an iPhone user, you may be a .Mac user. Apple announced today, along with a bunch of stuff about the new iPhone, that .Mac is becoming MobileMe at me.com. Me.com works for both Mac and Windows users to sync everything from your iPhone or iPod touch with the stuff in your computer’s email, calendar, etc. Another announcement I thought was important that might be overlooked in all the 3G, price drop hoopla—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are all now fully functional on an iPhone.
W3C: Web Accessibility for Older Users
The W3C released Web Accessibility for Older Users: A Literature Review recently. It isn’t guidelines, it’s merely a review of existing material.
This document provides a review and analysis of guidelines and articles relating to the needs of older people with Web accessibility needs due to ageing, and compares these with the needs of people with disabilities as already addressed in WAI guidelines. The focus is particularly on Europe but applies internationally as well. This review is being undertaken in order to inform the development of educational materials which can better promote the needs of people who have accessibility needs due to ageing, and potential development of profiles and/or extensions on WAI guidelines.
Here’s part of the table of contents with links intact:
- 2. Older adults and age-related functional limitations
- 3. A Review of the Literature
- 3.1 Existing literature reviews
- 3.2 Previous approaches to ‘senior friendly’ Web guidelines
- 3.3 WAI guidelines
- 3.4 Training older adults to Use ICT and the Web
- 3.5 Studies of older Web users’ specific disabilities
- 3.6 Aspects of Web Design affecting the elderly
- 3.7 Involving the elderly in Web design and development
- 3.8 General usability studies involving elderly people
This review of literature is not so insulting to older users as a set of guidelines published at Webcredible a few months ago titled Usability for older web users, which implied that anyone “older” was an untrainable dolt with no cognitive ability.
A Senior PC?
Who is a senior? Someone over 65? Boomers are between 44 and 62. Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By defines elders as anyone over age 50. Does being of a certain age mean that you require special accomodations in the form of a “Senior PC” or an extra simple cell phone or an adapted elderbrowser?
Microsoft Corporation just announced a project in the UK that will start development of what they are called a Senior PC.
Read the full post at BlogHer.