Learning the World

A couple of days ago the German version of the Web Accessibility Toolbar 2.0 for Internet Explorer was released. It was developed by Steve Faulkner and translated by Benjamin Grießmann from Web for All with contributions from your humble host. Which reminds me that I also translated Gez Lemon’s new and improved Colour Contrast Analyser for Firefox earlier this year.

I always wanted to implement one thing since I started the blog: a simple inclusion of Amazon items. I didn’t want to search through results that existing plugins provided. When I wrote about something like a book, I already used machine tags to identify the subject! So I found the inspiration to write my first real WordPress plugin: Amazon Machine Tags. […]

Today is World Usability Day! In honor of this day my colleagues and I would like you to take a photo of any item or application whose usability you appreciate. Upload it on flickr with a short description what you like about it and (machine) tag it with bluemars:event=wud and worldusabilityday so they will appear here. […]

His Holiness the Dalai Lama visits the Hessenpark near Frankfurt on September 22, and as our agency is involved in the organization of that event, we sponsored the website Friends for a Friend. […]

South by Southwest (SXSW) is a huge conference for interactive media as well as a film and music festival in Austin, Texas. Every year it attracts the best designers and developers, and there is an immense number of panels to choose from. Exactly 128, out of which 80 are chosen from an open submission process. Gez Lemon and I plan to run a panel about WAI ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). Please vote for us. […]

Most rollovers have become obsolete because they can be performed on background images with CSS sprites. However, there are those rare cases when there is just an icon without text, like a “play” or “pause” button. This article discusses how to apply CSS sprites for foreground images. […]

Last week I talked at a geek meeting about the cost-effectiveness of accessibility. Inspired by Dave Wilton’s talk at the European Accessibility Forum about their most impressive redesign of the Legal & General website, I decided to do some research and adopt it to the German market. The presentation is now available in German or English. […]

Several groups of out-of-town neo-Nazis have called for a demonstration in Frankfurt tomorrow. To my surprise the website of the Anti-Fascist Coordination Frankfurt features a clean design with a tag cloud-like navigation, sliding animations with jQuery, YouTube videos, and a very basic microsite for mobile access. What rocks most is the creative use of twitter to keep protesters informed through their mobile phones. Brilliant! […]

Nate Koechley presented the research results of the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Team two weeks ago in London. The traditional focus of performance optimization has been on the backend, i.e. system efficiency. But comparing a number of high profile websites, the Yahoo! team found that frontend performance is responsible for 80-98% of the perceived response time. Therefore doubling the frontend performance gains more than doubling the backend performance. […]

Accessibility organizations from three countries agreed on the mutual recognition of their respective labels. That will lead towards a harmonization of accessibility in Europe. So far AnySurfer (Belgium), Technosite (Spain), and BrailleNet (France) partnered to create the “Euracert” label. If a website is already certified with one of their labels, an additional review grants the European level. […]

Sum-up of the @media conference in London that I attended June 7th-8th, 2007. Read about Jesse James Garret’s keynote, passionate evangelists, and how to get great design ideas on the loo […]

Like last year I will try to link all presentation slides and podcasts from the @media conference in London, June 7th-8th, 2007. I hope you find it as convenient as I do. […]

Joe Clark’s talk at London’s @media was the most controversial today. To add insult to injury, there was no time for comments or questions from the audience. […]

At the dawn of a new version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the inevitable ensuing updates of national anti-discrimination laws and eAccessibility guidelines, it is time to review the state of current accessibility legislation. There are two generations of models: one that sticks to the book, and another with a more holistic approach. […]

Based on Nate Koechley’s concept of graded browser support we terminated support for Firefox 1.5 because it’s no longer supported and upgraded by Mozilla. Also we changed Opera support from 9.0 to 9.x, where “x” stands for the latest stable version. […]

Web 2.0 applications can enhance usability, alas a lot of issues remain to make them accessible. Gez Lemon has come up with scripting solutions to inform screen readers about the change of content, but when I talked with Jan Eric Hellbusch he deemed it rather confusing because the user’s work flow is interrupted. The W3C’s standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) addresses those limitations. I held talks about the upcoming standards in Cologne and Frankfurt, which resulted in writing a blog entry about the topic that eventually became an article for A List Apart. […]

In his recent article Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design Tantek Çelik came up with some interesting hypotheses about the usability of computer interfaces. It was a brilliant idea, but I’m afraid the well-established method for Human Computer Interaction KLM-GOMS describes his hypotheses pretty well. Unfortunately somebody came up independently with that, 27 years ago. […]

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has a new International Liaison Group (ILG) of which I’m a member now. […]

When I switched from HTML 4 to XHTML 1.1 a couple of years ago, I soon found the target attribute was missing. I have never been in love with the target attribute anyway, but some clients insisted that their links should open in a new window. So I did some research. […]

The First European e-Accessibility Forum in Paris was organized on January 29th by the French accessibility initiative BrailleNet in cooperation with the European Design for All e-Accessibility Network (EDeAN). Some 270 participants attended the conference. There were some remarkable presentations and a couple of things I would like to share with you. […]

In the last six months I became more aware of techniques for optimizing website performance. I learned about memory leaks and JavaScript performance, but what impressed me most was Nate Koechley’s presentation about large scale website performance issues in “Yahoo! vs. Yahoo!” at the @media conference 2006. In the meantime there have been more blog posts about particular aspects of performance optimization, so I wrote a summary. […]

There are two (un)conferences on January 29th that I can recommend, and a third in June: the 7th Webmontag in Frankfurt, the First European e-Accessibility Forum in Paris, and @media 2007 in London. […]