Learning the World

When I saw this picture of Bruce Lawson taken in a very poetic pose at London’s Standards.Next meetup, I remembered a haiku contest my favorite record label Bloody Fist hosted during the 2000 Australian Summer Olympics. People were asked to write haikus about the Olympic Games, and I almost wet myself reading some of the entries. […]

So it’s been a little quiet here, the reason is that I’ve been busy organizing the European Accessibility Forum Frankfurt on March 27th. The main idea is to present leading innovators and their perspectives on eAccessibility from the technical, political, and economic side. Experts on seven panels will briefly describe their own work and their view of accessibility and then discuss the issues. […]

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 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 […]

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. […]

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. […]

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. […]

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. […]

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 […]

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. […]

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. […]

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. […]

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. […]

Many good people have expressed their concern about the state of the W3C. Tim Berners-Lee responded earlier, now he announced reforms in his blog. […]

Joe Clark’s article “To Hell with WCAG 2” was an eye-opener. It raised critical awareness for the last-call W3C working draft, which lead to the extension of the comments period. Still the degree of concern and fear didn’t need to be raised. He exaggerated many issues, distorted them by omission, or in some cases he’s plain wrong. […]