accessibility Archives - Page 45 of 60

Useful links for today

Empty Links and Screen Readers at the Yahoo! User Interface Blog says, “The conclusion is that the most accessible link is one that contains link text. Different techniques of hiding links, from no link text, through to hiding by CSS can cause an accessibility barrier to screen reader users. Each screen reader presented its user with a different set of problems and barriers.” They go on to give individual screen reader test results.

Introducing WAVE 4.0 from WebAIM is an update the to popular WAVE accessibility testing tool. Version 4.0 is still in beta.

Our Tech President Endorsements from TechCrunch is based on TechCrunch reader polls and interviews by TechCrunch. See why they picked Obama and McCain. They have technological reservations about McCain. This was all decided before the Republicans announced that they were technologically the coolest because of upstream.tv covering the Republican National Convention. Does this help McCain in TechCrunch’s eyes?

$10K bounty for Blogger’s Identity suggests a new job niche. Internet ID bounty hunter!

Useful links for month’s end

Testing for Accessibility – CalWAC 2008 is Jim Thatcher’s presentation and includes the slides and all sorts of accessibility testing resources. Organized in Thatcher’s customary clear and easy style, and full of goodies.

Compatbility and IE at Laura Carlson’s Web Design References will keep you on top of the list of posts and articles discussing the raging question around Microsoft introducing a meta tag that would look for a specific IE 8 rendering mode. At last count, she had 23 links already, but I don’t see Burningbird’s Tyranny of Microsoft among them yet. It’s a firestorm out there!

Education 2.0: Top Online Learning Resources should be of interest to educators and students. From Wired Magazine.

HTML5 First Working Draft

The W3C released the first working draft of HTML5. They really, really, really want your help and input. Here are a few of the phrases from the spec that prove how in need they are of careful critical appraisal for this spec.

This specification should be read like all other specifications. First, it should be read cover-to-cover, multiple times. Then, it should be read backwards at least once. Then it should be read by picking random sections from the contents list and following all the cross-references.

Almost everything is marked “non-normative” but just in case you don’t get the point, they say,

All diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative, as are all sections explicitly marked non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.

The working draft is sprinkled with sentences similar to this one:

The current situation with IDL blocks is pitiful.

There is a section on the DOM, the semantics, browsing contexts, APIs and the language context. In the HTML section, they explain new HTML elements which are under consideration, such as the section element.

The section element represents a generic document or application section. A section, in this context, is a thematic grouping of content, typically with a header, possibly with a footer.

Examples of sections would be chapters, the various tabbed pages in a tabbed dialog box, or the numbered sections of a thesis. A Web site’s home page could be split into sections for an introduction, news items, contact information.

The document is huge. To comment helpfully, you’ll need to devote several hours to studying it prior to having your say. The more people to apply some sharp intelligence to this effort, the better off we’ll all be in the end.

Technorati Tags: W3C, HTML5 Working Draft

You Can Do Astronomy

Noreen Grice’s efforts to make astronomy accessible may not be the usual topic for this blog, but she’s inspiring. She’s written several astronomy books in braille. They are also accessible to the sighted, using colorful tactile images of astronomical features. The books are listed at You Can Do Astronomy, her web site. There’s more information on Grice there.

Touch the Invisible Sky cover Her latest books is called Touch the Invisible Sky. She’s also written Touch the Universe: A Nasa Braille Book of Astronomy, Touch the Sun and several other books. A description of Touch the Universe gives you an idea of how these books are created for both blind and sighted readers:

“Touch the Universe is the most innovative and unique astronomy book ever published. It is a combination of Braille and large-print captions that face 14 pages of brilliant Hubble Space Telescope photos with embossed shapes that represent various astronomical objects such as stars, quasars, gas clouds, and jets of matter streaming into space. Universally designed for both the sighted and visually impaired reader.”

Grice also designs visiual, tactile, and vibrating kiosks for museum displays. And she’s worked to make planetariums accessible.

The kind of innovation and creativity Noreen Grice has applied to astronomy all her life can spill over into other areas, as well. Those of us who care about accessibility in other areas can learn a lot from her.

Technorati Tags: You Can Do Astronomy, Touch the Invisible Sky

Useful links roundup

Web Worker Daily has a great set of links to online browser testing services. They list seven, some of them free, such as IE NetRenderer, which will show your page in IE 5.5, 6, or 7.

Flocking to the pictures, in TiKouka, gives an excellent overview of what the social media browser Flock is all about. If you are a big user of social media, Flock sounds like a good app to investigate and perhaps use.

Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet provides some good advice from Internet Duct Tape. Don’t let yourself get disemvoweled.

The Kimberly Blessing Interview by Christopher Schmitt is worth a read. Blessing started as an Interactive Developer for AOL. She currently works for PayPal as the manager of their Web Development Platform Team. Kimberly authored the “The Circle of Standards” chapter for the book, Adapting to Web Standards. She’s also a co-leader of the Web Standards Project. The conversation ranges from web standards, to coping with SXSWi when you’re an introvert, to fan sites. (This last was of interest to me, since I’ve been running a fan site for years, but mine is a definite Web 1.0 site.)

A Look at Weebly

I recently tried out Weebly. It’s a site that offers drag and drop web page creation, along with free hosting of the pages you create. You can publish the pages you create on a domain of your own choosing.

They offer a blog among the choices as to what you can make with their interface, but if you add a blog to a site, it must be hosted at Weebly to work.

I was trying it out because I was writing a how-to article about it for eHow. I made a test web site, which reflects my quickly done effort while testing for the eHow article.

It is easy. Very easy. But if you run an HTML validator on the test site I made, you find 48 validation errors on the first page. The blog, where I didn’t go as wild dragging and dropping widgets and elements onto the page only (only?) has HTML 22 errors.

I didn’t make an effort to create anything real that I would use. I just tried out the elements to see if they fulfilled the promise of letting an inexperienced user create and publish their own information in a web page. Weebly does that. However, I don’t think it provides any useful fodder for education in web design. If you are teaching programming and want to look at a smoothly working example of a web 2.0 site, it could be instructive.

Are sites like Weebly going to eliminate the need for instruction and education in web design by making it so simple to get published on the web that even a kid could do it? I don’t think so. They have a place, a niche. For example, if you were getting married and wanted a short-term, fast and easy site to store information about the wedding and its related events, maps, gift registration sites, and such info, Weebly would be a solution. But Weebly is limited. Which means a solid grounding in the web development nuts and bolts is still necessary for most web site creators.

ADDENDUM: July 27, 2010. Weebly made news today with a new drag and drop image editor called Image Perfect. You can read about it at TechCrunch.

Technorati Tags: web design, Weebly

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