accessibility Archives - Page 48 of 60

WCAG Samurai stir things up

A group led by Joe Clark and calling itself the WCAG Samurai has taken a stand against the much criticized WCAG by issuing a set of “errata” for the guidelines. Start with the Introduction to WCAG Samurai Errata for WCAG 1.0 and then read the complete errata.

This is a powerful idea for a way to make (or force) change. There will be lots of blogging, conference talks, and other noise about the work of the WCAG Samurai in the future, and I fully expect it to create change within the “official” world of WCAG guideline drafting.

The great thing about errata is that you have to give the corrected information in connection with the notice of the error. Maybe the Democrats should come up with a list of errata for the Bush administration. With specific corrections for each mistake. Might make an interesting party platform.

Captions for Video with Flash CS3

Don’t miss this great article by Tom Green at Digital Web Magazine about Captions for Video with Flash CS3. Tom’s been the leading the field in making sure people could create captions in Flash for some time now, and he’s updated the information for Flash CS3.

31 Free Online Tests

Here’s a handy reference to tests for your website: Grade Your Website: 31 Free Online Tests.

Hope you missed me. I’ve been traveling for two weeks but I’m back now. Photos on Flickr soon.

My article about making your site mobile friendly at Vitamin

Check out my article called Make Your Site Mobile Friendly published at Vitamin today.

If you have my book Mastering Integrated HTML and CSS, you know there’s a chapter about CSS for handhelds in it. This article contains material that isn’t in that chapter, so even if you are one of my faithful readers, do take a look.

If you have any comments about the article, please leave them at Vitamin.

Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, Dreamweaver, Web Standards, Mobiles, CSS

Dreamweaver CS3, Spry widgets, and accessibility

I had a chance to try out Dreamweaver CS3 recently. One of the new features is called Spry. It’s a set of widgets that put some cool looking stuff on an HTML page with Dreamweaver ease. These work using JavaScript, XML, and CSS. While they are definitely cool, I suggest you test them carefully in differing circumstances before deciding to use them. Do at least the following browser tests.

Try them with JavaScript turned off to make sure your users can still get to your content if they are without JavaScript
Try them with CSS turned off to see how much sense it makes without styling
Run some online accessibility tests with Cynthia Says or some other test app

I’m not saying don’t use them. Each one of the widgets comes through testing like I just described in different ways. So much depends on which of the Spry widgets you pick that it’s hard to generalize about them all. Use them if you want, but only after making sure that your decision to do so is based on the knowledge that you aren’t making your content unreachable to large numbers of your visitors.

Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, Dreamweaver

Principles of Accessible Design

Here’s a handy list from NCDAE that neatly (think: handout) lays out the Principles of Accessible Design. A good resource.

Event: AccessU

Access U is Knowbility’s annual accessibility training institute. Improve your skills and understand both the need and the techniques for inclusive IT design. It’s set for Tuesday, May 8th and Wednesday, May 9th at St. Edward’s University, Austin, Texas. Register for April 1 and the fee is $525. After April 1 it’s $595. Knowbility training is the absolute best.

Technorati Tags: accessibility