Accessibility blog posts

  • Scripting Enabled conference/hack day

    The estimable Christian Heilmann has announced Scripting Enabled, a combined accessibility conference and hackday being held in London this September.

  • Captioning Sucks

    As part of the Open & Closed Project, Joe Clark has released a new site, Captioning Sucks, to highlight the shoddy state of captions in broadcasting. Check out the Comic Sans goodness.

  • Colour blind questionnaire

    Call to colour blind readers to help out with PhD research and a point towards my contribution to 24 ways.

  • Ajax and accessibility

    There have been some great articles published recently on the accessibility of Ajax and DOM scripting.

  • Glaucoma and photography

    Sorry not some wonderful cure, but instead a few sites that might be of interest: an great looking, accessible charity site and some approachs to presenting photos on web pages.

  • Colour blindness on the Web

    Colour blindness on the Web isn’t a big deal. You do have to bear it mind, but there is no need to let it dominate any design decisions.

  • Joe Clark in London

    The fine people at Carson Workshops are flying Joe Clark over to London for a one day workshop, in which Joe will be Sharing the Secrets of Web Accessibility.

  • CSS & Accessibility

    Here’s something that’s been playing on my mind recently. What role can CSS alone play in making websites accessible?

  • A couple of accessibility studies

    One by Joe Clark on screen-reader usability at a redesigned, standards-compliant e-commerce site. The other by Russ Weakley and Roger Hudson on the real world interpretation of HTML table mark-up by assistive devices.

  • Speaking browsers

    Eric Meyer recently posted Don’t Read; Speak!, from which I quote: [S]creen readers need to become speaking browsers: they need to ignore how the page is visually displayed, and read the content. Use semantic markup when it exists, and otherwise [...] ignore the…

  • The state of accessibility in the real world

    One of the prime reasons for going to @media was to learn more from recognised experts in the field of accessibility, and yet I came away confused and disillusioned about the state of the things.

  • JavaScript-enhanced image replacement

    Most image replacement techniques work by displaying a background image of text and shifting the real text out of view which is fine unless you have images turned off. This can be addressed with some unobtrusive JavaScript.

  • Photo fades and then some

    Scott Upton of Couloir has taken things to the next level with a resizing, fading JavaScript slideshow. I’ve made some bookmarking and accessibility suggestions (picking nits as usual).

  • I’m back

    And there are photos. And a list of what’s been happening: Odeon crapsters, AMG retrograde, per-site stylesheets, disabling IE6 imagebar, Mozilla security flaw, Malarkey forms, Colly links, Gmail whitelist, XHTML to RSS and fantasy footie.

  • Accessify

    Ian Lloyd has kindly asked me to fill in at Accessify while he and Manda continue their world tour. So if you come across or have any accessiblity links you think the world should know about, then please leave a comment or drop me a line.

  • Structure, presentation & behaviour

    By the miracle of coincidence, the latest issue of Digital Web has a fine article describing the issues I tried to overcome with the Clagnut drop-down menu, as discussed in my previous post.

  • Accessible contents menu?

    Clagnut’s global navigation is a JavaScript-driven drop down (the Site contents button graphical browsers will see top-right). An accessibility no-no, you might think, but I reckon otherwise.

  • Fixing this, sliding that

    Redesigned si-blog uses some cool position-fixed tricks to selectively scroll text over or under an banner. Also, a nifty child-selector sends a gif to IE and a superior PNG to better browsers.

  • Eliminating inline styles

    This week’s MCU web access tip recommends placing printable characters between adjacent links (such as in horizontal navigation). The tip suggests hiding the printable character using spans and inline styles. I show how to do it a little better.

  • Dasher

    Dasher is the most incredible writing interface I think I’ve ever seen. Dasher is a zooming interface. You point where you want to go, and the display zooms in wherever you point. The world into which you are zooming is painted with letters, so that any point you zoom…

  • Accessible interfaces

    The Disability Rights Commission publishes an inaccessible website demonstration. Try the simulation of a user who has difficulty controlling a mouse. Nielsen argues for separate interfaces for sighted on non-sighted users, saying that auditory methods need a 1-D approach.

  • Tabs revisited

    Not so long ago, I posted a first pass at CSS tabs with lists which, importantly, included secondary navigation and mouseover effects on the tabs themselves. My implemenation wasn’t bad but it was flawed. Radu Darvas has since come along and made some big…

  • Give ’em what they want

    The vote for clagnut link is up. Zeldman has stopped his third party links opening in a named window. And about time too. 37 Signals have designed a better Google.

  • Accesskey standards

    One of my goals for Clagnut is to make it accessible beyond good alt tags and valid code. Providing keyboard shortcuts through the accesskey attribute for important parts of the site, such as search, help and home, can help. It struck me that there should be consistency in…

  • CSS tabs

    Mark Pilgrim recently published his version of tabs build with HTML lists and CSS. So I thought I’d publish my version of as well.

  • Frame pain

    Douglas Bowman has been busy with a nice alternative to textual images and a some research into browsers’ treatment of frames given the lack of control provided by HTML standards. The Friday bite of Biscuit: I was just sitting there Eating a salmonella sandwich,
    …

  • The good, the bad & the funny

    Netscape’s DevEdge has been redesigned as a standards showcase. Yes, another important web site has been redesigned and built without table-layout. Visually, it’s hardly cutting edge, but is easy on both the eye and the mouse. The drop down menus are rather splendid…

  • Upgrade now!

    A discussion of the Upgrade Your Browser message so often placed at the top of web pages which can only displayed as intended by browsers with good CSS capabilities. Personally I find find it annoying…

  • Clutching at straws

    A recoding of Zeldman’s ‘previous reports’ button to use a styled link rather than a javascript-driven form button.

  • Handy pointers

    This month in DigitalWeb mag, Jeff Lash talks about using Information Architecture to promote business goals as well as user needs: Using information architecture to meet business goals by focusing on user needs not only proves your professional worth, but makes users happy…

  • Pop off

    The welcome demise of the pop-up, and some welcome alternatives.

  • Linkorama

    I have rediscovered the long-forgotten link tag. Use it to make your site more accessible.

  • bright blog

    Adactio is a beautiful blog from fellow Brighton resident, Jeremy Keith. Try changing themes – impressive stuff. Dive Into Accessibility is an excellent guide to making your website more accessible in thirty days. With tips cross-referenced by disability, browser, design…

  • textualization

    Just been finishing off a contract left over from before my move to Multimap (going very well thank you). I’m building a site for a client (thanks Carbon) with a traditional heirarchical navigation, however the client insists that all their navigation be images. Top level…

  • grinning

    Walking from the station to the office this morning, a peculiarly large number of people appeared to be smiling; almost chuckling to themselves. While this is entirely laudable behaviour, in London it is enough to make one feel somewhat paranoid. On a different note,…

  • Note to self

    …to check out Joe “Accessibility” Clark’s web various weblogs: Axxlog: Links-and-commentary blog on accessible media NUblog: Links-and-commentary blog on online content and everything that entails. Written in a somewhat affected third person.
    …