Learning the World

Last week I talked at the Vienna Accessibility Day (“A-Tag”) about the emerging W3C standard for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA). I half expected a crowd of suits as the event was co-organized by the Austrian Ministry of Health, Family and Youth, instead there were many young faces and a fair percentage of women. […]

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother the second time, this time on my iPhone using the plugin Stanza, an incredibly useful tool that turns your iPhone into an e-book. That’s so convenient because I have my mobile phone with me anyways and get the chance to read a few pages during the four stop ride to work, where the hardcover book would be too bulky. […]

One flaw of the iPhone is its inaccessibility for visually impaired users, despite some built-in accessibility features for other users. Now there’s light at the end of the tunnel: a few days ago Apple filed a patent for multi-touch in combination with features such as voice commands and speech recognition, facial recognition, gestures, fingerprint input, body temperature, heart rate, skin impedance, and pupil size. […]

A few days ago a co-worker asked if DHTML drop-down menus pose a problem with accessibility. Since the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG) declared all JavaScript evil in 1999, assistive technologies (AT) have made significant progress. So we cannot condemn pull-down menus altogether, but there are various reasons to keep an eye on them buggers. […]

Allow me a little self-promotion while pointing you to interesting conferences where I will hold presentations. […]

A while ago I wrote about using CSS Sprites in img tags — Foreground Sprites. Thus you avoid HTTP requests, but the page turns really ugly when CSS is switched off because the sprite image will be displayed in its full size. Now Google’s accessibility specialist T.V. Raman explained their idea of using sprites for foreground images — a much better solution!

I had the chance to visit the @media conference in London again, for the third time. Again it was different than the last times. Perhaps less spectacular, a little less people, no real revelation. There were excellent talks inside the halls, but the best talks happened outside. Like speaking with Nate Koechley about […]

At the BIENE award ceremonies in December 2006 the Parliamentary State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, Franz Thönnes, announced that the Federal Ordinance on Barrier-Free Information Technology (BITV) will be revised in accordance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG). Ever since I was trying to find out who would be participating in that working group, to no avail. […]

The XML declaration is not required as long as you encode in UTF-8 or UTF-16, you are only strongly encouraged to use it. So as long we are stuck with IE6 I will refrain from using it. […]

In what is to my knowledge the first W3C online course, the Mobile Web Initiative offers a free introduction to mobile web best practices starting May 18th 26th. […]

OpenSearch is known as an open source format to syndicate and aggregate search results. It was developed by Amazon / A9 and quickly gained support from the big search engines. Their involvement is somewhat intimidating — your site’s not Google, so who wants to syndicate your search results anyway? But if your blog or a client has a loyal readership, it would be convenient if they could just use their browser’s searchbar as a shortcut. […]

When Chris Heilmann had the splendid idea to add captioning to YouTube videos with Google’s JavaScript API, I asked myself if there wasn’t a better way. There is, but to my surprise neither YouTube nor Yahoo! Video take advantage of that capability. […]

A little known W3C standard is the Platform of Internet Content Selection (PICS). PICS is a system for self-labeling. Think of an early predecessor of the Semantic Web. Or in microformats it would be hPorn. […]

John Slatin is dead. In more than two decades he published numerous articles about making digital information accessible to people with disabilities. As co-chair of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group and as founding director of the Institute for Technology and Learning at the University of Texas in Austin he contributed greatly to web accessibility as we know it. […]

Gez Lemon and I had our core conversation at South by Southwest (SXSW) on Sunday, and it went really well. No wonder, we had Shawn Henry from W3C WAI in the audience as well as Lisa Pappas who is one of the authors or WAI ARIA, plus Becky Gibson from IBM who initiated the whole thing with Rich Schwerdtfeger a couple of years ago. […]

Today was my last day at BlueMars where I worked for a total of about five years. Then came the day when Web Standards Project colleague Glenda Sims asked in her blog “do you love your job?” And I had to admit I wasn’t challenged anymore. My new employer is the Swiss company namics, in particular the branch office in Frankfurt. […]

Accessibility testing tools are great for quality assurance (QA), even when the website doesn’t have to be accessible. For example, color contrast is a very subjective thing. It depends on technical factors like the quality and settings of the screen, environmental factors like glaring sunlight, and the physical abilities of the person viewing it. It’s literally subjective in the eye of the designer. Color contrast analyzers give us an impression how fore- and background colors are perceivable by other people. […]

I would like to introduce the XHTML Access Module, a new working draft released by the XHTML 2 Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The module is intended to improve accessibility and extend XHTML Roles. […]

Christmas is over, but I thought I might share a few of the scripts used on this site with you anyway. The key is an incredibly useful plugin called inlineRSS that pulls everything you throw at it into your site. You only need some XSLT magic. Since XSLT isn’t everyone’s strength, just copy my files. […]