Web Design Topic
Welcome to the beta of the new saila.com. Send in your bugs.
Accessibility
-
Joe Clark micropatronage
The highly-esteemed Joe Clark (arguably, one of Canada’s most passionate online personalities) is initiating a new research project around a topic he’s been passionate about for decades: accessibility. The Open & Closed Project’s aim is to create standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. Not surprisingly, the project requires full-time focus and that’s where we come in. -
WAT the?
Just as the buts had begin to settle after Matthew Somerville–Odeon conflict, IBM releases a tool that converts normal Web sites automagically into accessible ones. The Web Adaptation Technology is a non-specific-site extension that is currently available only to a select audience, but it may inspire others to release a similar tool via open source -
Singing with Opera
You can talk to your browser…or, at least, the next version of Opera. The Norwegian browser will use IBM’s Embedded ViaVoice to let users navigate and fill-in forms just by speaking. Using the proposed XHTML+Voice (X+V) specification, the voice-enabled — or multimodal — browser neatly hits three markets: -
CSS filter results; screen readers study
Thanks to those who tested the CSS filters I posted here a couple of weeks ago, my initial tests are now confirmed. -
Accessify’s Acrobot
Ian Lloyd, of Accessify, has put together an excellent little tool called Acrobot to automatically parse a text sample for abbreviations, and wrap them with the appropriate abbr and acronym elements. Not only that, the resulting mark-up includes the relevant definition. -
Standard savings; accessibility: do as we say, not as we do
ESPN.com redesigned its homepage a while back, and now uses CSS to lay the page out. Given its size, a lot of people took notice including Eric A. Meyer who interviewed ESPN.com’s associate art director Mike Davidson about the process. The second half of the interview appears this Friday. -
OJA surprise; accessibility and the law
The winners of the 2002 Online Journalism Awards were announced on October 18, 2002. Unfortunately, I had to search out the results myself. Despite being a screener for the Awards, I received no notice (granted, it could have been lost). -
Building accessible web sites
Joe Clark’s long anticipated book, Building Accessible Websites has been published. Clark is probably the accessibility expert for electronic communication, and it’s technical editor was Mark Pilgrim (of Dive Into Accessibility fame). If you care about accessibility online, this book is a must read. -
Accessibility tests, OJA finalists
Last Wednesday, Yahoo greyed-out its homepage to commemorate the events of last September 11. On the MACCAWS list, a discussion began about how easy it would have been to do this using CSS. Others commented how this was a good way to see the Web as the colour blind do (yes, it was also mentioned that most people who are colour blind can see some colour). -
SatireWire clipped; online-media accessibility
-
Accessibility problems with the Post
The National Post redesign has been unveiled, and although looking clean and crisp it’s an accessibility nightmare. -
Bigger ads ands distracting text
Two unrelated notes today, one was actually meant for yesterday but between grading assignments for the online journalism class I teach, and being interviewed by an reporter for an Israeli newspaper, I never got a chance to post it. -
Is an
An alt attribute is required, even if the image requires no description (for example, it could be a purely decorative element). In such a case, use the alt attribute, but leave it empty, like this: alt=""altattribute needed if there is no description for the image?