• A link to Google Maps when JavaScript is disabled.
• Support for the Google AJAX API Loader.
• Using the small map control.
• Keyboard accessibility for all control elements within the map.

As a fallback without JavaScript — because people disable it, because their mobile device doesn’t support it, or because it gets filtered by corporate proxies — Patrick used the little known Google Static Maps API, but for some reason he missed adding the link to Google. Here is the fix:

1. <div id="map">
2. <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps ?f=q&amp;output=html &amp;q=50.110950+8.684666" title="Google Maps">
3. <img src="http://maps.google.com/staticmap?hl=en &amp;center=50.112267,8.678384 &amp;markers=50.110950,8.684666,red &amp;zoom=15&amp;size=500x300 &amp;key=[Your API Key]" alt="City map of Frankfurt" width="500" height="300" />
4. </a>
5. </div>

Then I changed how the map is embedded. As it seems that the API loader is more current, I preferred that way:

1. <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=[Your API Key]"></script>
2. <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/accgmap.js"></script>
3. <script type="text/javascript">
4. google.load( 'maps', '2', { 'language' : 'en' } );
5. google.setOnLoadCallback( GMAP.initMap );
6. </script>

Using the small control elements is trivial: SmallMapControl(). The next thing I wanted to change was keyboard access to all controls, in particular for the map type, i.e. Map | Satellite | Hybrid. Patrick refers to an id, but I found that all relevant controls have a title, so I just checked for that attribute. I also dropped setting the style attribute in JavaScript as that belongs in the CSS file. His original function GKeyboardPatch() now looks like this (note the while loop for a slightly better performance):

1. GKeyboardPatch: function( map ) {
2. var button, divs = map.getContainer().getElementsByTagName( 'div' );
3. var i = 0;
4. while ( divs[i] ) {
5. if ( divs[i].getAttribute( 'log' ) || ( divs[i].getAttribute( 'title' ) && divs[i].getAttribute( 'title' ) != '' ) ) {
6. button = document.createElement( 'button' );
7. button.setAttribute( 'value', divs[i].getAttribute( 'title' ));
8. divs[i].appendChild( button );
9. if ( divs[i].getAttribute( 'log' )) { // only control buttons
10. // override the IE opacity filter that Google annoyingly sets
11. divs[i].style.filter = '';
12. // should really set to 'transparent'
13. divs[i].style.background = 'url( http://www.google.com/ intl/en_ALL/mapfiles/transparent.png )';
14. }
15. }
16. i++;
17. }
18. }

Now remember I said I’d rather separate style and behaviour, so here are a some lines of CSS with the setting of width and height for the #map being most relevant, otherwise it will collapse:

1. #map {
2. height: 300px;
3. overflow: hidden;
4. position: relative;
5. width: 500px;
6. }
7. #maps-static, #maps-static img {
8. display: block;
9. }
10. #map span.note {
11. display: none;
12. }
13. #map button {
14. background: transparent;
15. border-style: solid;
16. border-width: 0;
17. cursor: pointer;
18. height: 100%;
19. left: -2px;
20. margin: 2px;
21. overflow: hidden;
22. padding: 2px;
23. position: absolute;
24. text-indent: -100em;
25. top: -2px;
26. width: 100%;
27. }
28. #map a:focus, #map a:active, #map button:focus, #map button:active {
29. outline: 2px dashed #61bf1a;
30. }

And that’s it, thanks again to Patrick for the solid foundation I built upon. Now download the JavaScript code and try to tab through the map below.

Actually on the other website I extracted hCard microformats from the page as well and displayed the addresses on the map, but I was lazy and used jQuery. I thought it doesn’t look well here mixed with Patrick’s clean DOM scripting, but feel free to take it from the original website.

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.

There’s an illustrious line-up of speakers including Deutsche Bahn, the European Commission, France Télécom, the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, the W3C, the Web Standards Project, and Yahoo! talking about these topics:

• Accessible Web Applications
• Mobile Access — Device-independent or Accessible?
• Comparison of National Accessibility Guidelines
• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)
• Web Standards and Accessibility in Higher Education
• Harmonising European Accessibility Guidelines
• The Business Value of Accessibility

If you have been following my posts in the last two years this will sound slightly familiar. Furthermore I’m honored to have Linda Mauperon, Member of Cabinet of the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media (Viviane Reding) as our keynote speaker. Please see the detailed description of the panels in the conference program.

We would like to take a look on accessibility from different perspectives presenting pioneering thinkers whose organizations have established accessibility in their business and communication long since — and making serious money with it. There should be something of interest for everybody among the topics: for techies, consultants, employees from universities and companies. The conference is limited to a maximum of 200 attendees. Registration opens next week.

Of course there are various gems under the hood of the website, too. Naturally it is extensively accessible (check the cool skip links), but it is also incredibly fast because Yahoo!’s best practices for frontend performance are regarded. There are separate style sheets for printing, for iPhones, and for handhelds. The CMS is WordPress µ, having the advantage of administrating both the English and the German version with the same installation.

I started my conference program with a case study by the BBC. They did a redesign and managed to squeeze formerly 60 images into 3 sliding doors and sprites. Their home page is now under 300K and 30 HTTP requests. Nice to see Yahoo’s Exceptional Performance guidelines go mainstream. About 5% of their users access the site without JavaScript. They don’t get identical features, but they get identical care. For them accessibility isn’t a buzzword, it’s become a natural part of their daily work. So they were able to find out that blur() is not a friend with JAWS. Also the BBC plays well with the other kids: they joined the OpenID foundation, and with BBC backstage they open their content through an API. Another charming idea is their public beta where people can testdrive new features. About 60% have personalized their home page, although one of the speakers described the personalization features with “my mom’s head exploded.” They used agile development with 2 week sprints, run the website in 12 languages, but don’t have a CDN yet because of the license fees.

Another case study about the LOHAS community Edenbee wasn’t that exiting, mostly because I knew the platform since beta and didn’t get quite why I should speak with other people about changing their lightbulbs. But it’s nice to keep track of your carbon footprint, a feature that uses the AMEE open API.

I was curious about HTML 5, so I went to the presentation of Lachlan Hunt and James Graham. Still I don’t see any advantage of having a bunch of new elements that are incompatible with older browsers when I can achieve the same with ARIA attributes. But I understand the rationale behind some of their decisions, although that doesn’t mean I come to the same conclusions.

For example people use a lot of “nav” and “menu” classes. To make their live easier, the WHATWG came up with the idea to create a nav element. A block level element, so you wouldn’t have to use those <div class="nav"> any more. But every time I use something like class="navigation" it will be an unordered list! I don’t need another div, I’m perfectly happy with my ul and role="navigation". It’s truly backward compatible, it’s semantic, I can use it today, and there isn’t a steep learning curve.

Then I went to two design talks by Andy Clarke and Dan Rubin, and though their designs were beautiful, the code examples were not. Imagine the flexibility of a newspaper article and compare that with the inflexibility of absolutely positioned paragraphs with fixed heights. Exactly. Apart from that Andy’s main inspiration came from comic books. It never hurts to throw in some colorful images.

Like in comic books, usability is not about getting from A to B, it’s about the experience of getting from A to B. In comic books the size of a panel and the amount of text strongly influences the reading speed. So you can emphasize content and add dynamics in your web design. That doesn’t mean necessarily that everything has to be in boxes. Emphasis can also be added by removing the boxes.

Dan Rubin used a lot of effects on his designs, like a noise filter to add texture on monochrome surfaces. Nice idea, though that implies the designer explaining the rationale of such a feature to the front-end engineers. They would either ignore it because they overlooked the subtle texture or because they assumed it would be just noise. Some less intrusive hint I will readily adopt was using a letter-spacing of −1 on headlines to prevent tiny rivers between letters.

What slightly worries me is that Dan talked about re-using patterns for some effects in Photoshop. Re-using patterns is the same in CSS, but re-usable effects in Photoshop can mean an unusable amount of work in CSS and lots of pictures making the website slow. What I miss so far is a common understanding of effects and patterns that are both easy to work with in Photoshop and in frontend programming.

The next day started with Nate Koechley’s keynote about professional frontend engineering. He chose the topic because he thinks this is critical to the advancement of the Internet, and I couldn’t agree more. As Frontend Engineers we write software with XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and quite some amount of PHP. Douglas Crockford calls this “the most hostile software development environment imaginable,” and if you take a look at this graphic from Nate’s slides you will understand why. There are a number of knowledge areas that can be applied in a number of ways on three operating systems and half a dozen browsers in two rendering modes. If you ever wondered why you sometimes see little clouds of smoke coming out of your frontend engineering heads, that’s why.

There are four guiding principles:

1. Availability and accessibility for all users worldwide
2. Openness: share, learn, support, advocate
3. Richness: provide, but not too much
4. Stability

Then there are three core techniques: Graded Browser Support, Progressive Enhancement, and Unobtrusive JavaScript.If you haven’t heard about those concepts, please read about them now.

At that point the presentation turned into giving advice for quite a number of best practices and tips, like using JSLint, YUI Unit Testing, or YUI Profiler to enhance the quality of your code. Or serving cacheable assets from cookie-free domains. Or anticipated preloads: sneak in your new JavaScript and CSS files a week before the relaunch. Or did you know that the iPhone 2G can keep only 19 assets in cache, and that it doesn’t cache anything larger than 25K? Uncompressed 25K? Needless to say, Nate’s presentation was one of the conference highlights.

Later I heard a few things about building applications with existing frameworks and APIs, a timely comparison between JavaScript libraries held by no other than jQuery’s John Resig, some tips on internationalization by Richard Ishida, and a panel about accessibility. The one sentence that stuck most in that panel was: “Don’t be the guy with the problems, be the guy with the solutions.” In fact it’s very hard to be passionate about your job while being pragmatic and providing solutions instead of just saying “no.” Something Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote about in a different context:

Working in the accessibility field is extremely difficult. It requires very specialized skills — including incredible persistence. Accessibility is often viewed as additional work that is not always planned for. It requires a person who is tough, committed, patient, and caring to deliver an accessible solution that is usable to our customers. To do this you must have tremendous passion for your job as there is always someone or something to trip you up.

Combining passion and diplomacy is a goal many web evangelists still have to work on… In the meantime remember that accessibility is most likely to have a sustainable impact when it is supported by senior management, when there is an accessibility policy for a company, and when smart companies realize that there is money to be made by maximizing the target audience.

Also ARIA became a bit of a buzz since only three days before Microsoft announced support for it in Internet Explorer 8. So there is partial support in Firefox 1.5, more in Firefox 2.0, and full support including liveregions for dynamically updated content in Firefox 3.0. Also Opera 9.5 has it. It can be used today as it doesn’t break old browsers, they will simply ignore the new attributes. Don’t hesitate, you can do good with it right now.

In the meantime Aaron Leventhal and his fellows were busy negotiating with members of the HTML5 working group to find a way of implementation without namespacing. So as of Firefox 3.0 it will be <img role="checkbox" aria-checked="false" /> instead of the previous namespaced notation aaa:checked="false".

Microsoft also thought about addressing the new attributes in the DOM, alas they did it the old proprietary way instead of sitting at a virtual or real table with the other browser vendors and thinking of a common way to do this. Opera’s Anne van Kesteren and the participants at the Browser Wars panel at SXSW were picking heavily on that subject. I believe the IE team got the message, but for the moment I would suggest to ignore the non-standard DOM attributes.

Thanks again to Gez, Becky, Lisa, and Shawn for their input and help. You made this a first-class experience!

Further reading

• W3C WAI-ARIA Overview
• Mozilla Developer Center ARIA FAQ
• A List Apart: Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA