Well, it’s a day for updates. Today was (at one point) the deadline for Twitter to permanently disable Basic authentication. The date has now been extended to August 31st, but the difference isn’t really significant.

The one benefit which it will provide is a little extra time to debug the new OAuth version of WP to Twitter before it becomes the only working version.

There are a lot of complications surrounding the OAuth update — most of them unfortunate. For the first time since I began work on this plugin, I had to remove features. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to operate two separate user accounts with an OAuth authenticated application, for example. As a result, I’ve had to remove the ability to assign separate author accounts for Twitter posting. As development progresses, a way forward may show up — but for now, I just don’t really have another option.

My biggest request at this time: if you can, please decide you’re willing to use this version now, to provide me with feedback so it will work as well as it possibly can when all past versions cease to be functional.

There will be problems; I’m sure of it. I just hope to find them all soon enough.

Section 508 web accessibility standards were written as an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act in 1998. In web development terms, this isn’t short of an eternity — and in all practical sense defines an era. The web programming methods and styles of 1998 were radically different to what you see in normal use today. The Section 508 rules have been under revision recently, and were available for public comment until June 21, 2010. Unfortunately, my time didn’t allow me to take a look at these prior to the expiration of the public comment period — but that doesn’t lessen the importance of examining the revisions.

To help explain these changes in Federal web accessibility standards, I’m going to look at three specific questions. These questions will hopefully answer some of the questions concerning what’s coming up:

1. Has this changed anything about who must follow Section 508 guidelines?
2. What has been the primary reference for changes to Section 508 rules?
3. What are the specific changes to the Section 508 documents?

Has this changed anything about who must follow Section 508 guidelines?

No. The section 508 rules still exist under the same body of law — this is not a revision of the application of the law, it’s only a revision of the methods which are acceptable in following the law. Section 508 continues to apply only to Federal departments or agencies or entities providing services or products to Federal agencies. Further, it only applies to the specific services or products provided by those contracted entities, not to any external presence or non-Federally funded projects.

What has been the primary reference for changes to Section 508 rules?

Based on the document guidelines and on references made in the updated document, it seems that the primary reference was the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0, as created by the World Wide Web Consortium. In fact, there is a specific section referring to WCAG harmonization, which indicates that web pages as defined under WCAG 2.0 which are conformant to Level AA will be considered to be in conformance with Section 508 (with a few elaborations on additional requirements.)

This is an excellent change, since it explicitly states a subset of requirements which need to be reviewed in addition to WCAG 2.0, Level AA requirements. From a consulting perspective, this simplifies the process: you can review WCAG 2.0 requirements, then check the additional requirements under Section 508.

The additional requirements are fairly straightforward. A significant percentage of them relate explicitly to video accessibility — an area which WCAG 2.0 frequently describes as Level AAA requirements. It seems clear that the Section 508 review group was concerned about the use of video in government communications, and wanted to be sure to avoid a situation where creating a video would allow Federal agencies to ignore Section 508 requirements — which is certainly a wise concern.

What are the specific changes to the Section 508 documents?

To work through all of the specific changes would be a Herculean labor — and I’m not prepared to undertake it right this moment. I’m not sure an article is the right place to do this, in fact. A permanent document demonstrating the changes may be more valuable, in the long run. Suffice it to say that the basic fundamentals of Section 508 have been updated to reflect the changes between versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The requirements which are beyond the specific conformance expectations of WCAG 2.0, Level AA are worth elaborating on, however!

Chapter 4, section 409: User Preferences. This section explicitly requires that applications allow users to set preferences for color, contrast, font type, size, and focus cursor. Thankfully, the rule is clearly written when it comes to development which is operated within a web browser: web browsers, as platforms which take some settings from an underlying platform, are expected to allow the underlying platform’s settings for these issues to take precedence.

To clarify this in simple terms: web browsers, or applications running within web browsers should not over-ride settings from the operating system.

Chapter 4, section 413: Authoring Tools. Essentially, this is an extension of the web authoring tool accessibility guidelines applied within Section 508. What it requires is that any tool which is used to author content or create documents — such as Microsoft Word, as a desktop application, or as WordPress, as a web-based content authoring tool — must allow the creation of accessible documents (such as by allowing the creation of alt attributes for images) and must not by default remove any accessibility feature — such as a video editing tool which would remove captions if editing a captioned video.

The section seems very reasonably written — it requires prompts for creating conforming documents, but also specifies that not every element should be prompted, as this can decrease usability.

Chapter 6, section 604, part 4: Real-Time Video. Live, streaming video must include real-time video description, with certain exceptions. This seems pretty explicit, and definitely is a valuable addition for people with disabilities. The exception provides for an exclusion for primarily visual and unattended situations. The example provided is a web camera overlooking a national park — it is purely visual, and there is little to no significant information to be gained from live video description.

Chapter 6, section 604, part 5: Multiple Visual Areas of Focus. When a video contains multiple areas of focus — such as a news program which also includes scrolling event notices beneath the main program — video description must be provided for all areas of focus. The provision suggests a couple of methods for accomplishing this, including divided audio tracks between left and right channels. It’s an interesting area to address. I can certainly see that this requirement can open up new areas of information availability to people with disabilities, but I can also see a number of potential problems in implementation. However, that is a question for another time!

Chapter 6, section 607: User Controls for Captions and Video Description. User controls must meet certain standards for accessibility functionality: in addition to the requirement that controls for closed captions or video description need to be present, they must also be present in the same context as other controls. It is not an acceptable option to hide controls for closed captions or video description in a corner — they should appear in contexts which have a similar prominence to other controls such as channel selection or volume adjustment.

Chapter 6, section 608: Audio Track and Volume Control. Essentially, media players must provide users an ability to isolate speech tracks and background sounds. This is obviously dependent on video production in order to function; as such, this section indicates that any videos produced must be produced with separate speech and background audio tracks, in addition to requiring that players must offer controls to separately adjust these tracks.

This clause seems to have some flaws to me — specifically, in the gross generality of “background audio” versus “speech.” Stating “speech” is very explicit, as it only refers to spoken text. However, in practical terms, there are actually three important bands of audio in synchonized media: background audio which is non-referential (music and some background sound effects), audio which is referential (some background sound effects: a knock at the door or other sound which is reacted to by the video), and speech. It can create a great deal of confusion to exclude those key sound effects from the speech track. The issue is closely related to issues with captioning and video description: it’s important to note certain sound events, since some conversations or events will lose meaning if the viewer is unaware of relevant background sounds.

On the whole, in my relatively brief examination of the updates to Section 508 standards, I’m happy with the results. Obviously, there’s always room for improvement — there’s still room for improvement in WCAG 2.0, which Section 508 could have changed — but I’d rather have a single set of base standards to reference than requirements which contradict each other! Working with standards isn’t the answer to every accessibility quandary, but you should never just ignore standards out of ignorance — instead, ignore them out of an educated disagreement.

Steve Faulkner, from The Paciello Group, just announced the beta release of their new Accessibility Viewer application aViewer. The purpose of the application is to give easy access to what information the browser is reporting back through Accessibility APIs. It’s an interesting application, and certainly has the potential to provide useful information in the future.

It is in beta, of course, so it may not function entirely perfectly — in my installation, I had trouble getting a few features to work properly. I couldn’t get the cursor view to do anything at all, for example, nor could I get the cursor tool to turn on using F5, as the documentation describes. The Code view only seemed to show the text values for links — and nothing elsewhere. (For reference, this is on Windows Vista using Firefox 3.6.3.)

Nonetheless, I can see the potential for this software as a helpful tool for exploring both the accessibility of an interface and the awareness of a browser concerning that information. It’s a good idea, and with feedback is likely to become a useful tool, as well!

Steve is asking for feedback, so be sure to install this in your environment and take a look.

Even though many elements of HTML 5 have only limited application at this time due to lacking browser support, there’s little reason not to make use of them. The design of the markup language is intended to minimize dependence on user agents, failing invisibly if the browser doesn’t offer that feature, which helps encourage early use of new elements.

Of course, the lack of support does have some consequences. We can’t just go out writing HTML 5 without having significant awareness of this lack of native support — we have to compensate.

Nonetheless, being able to incorporate great new elements like figure, progress, meter, nav to improve semantics or browser capabilities including content prefetching to provide a faster, more seamless experience for users is actually pretty exciting.

The coolest thing coming, in my opinion, is the numerous new attribute values for the input element. It seems like everybody’s always talking about the video element — but, not being somebody who’s all that excited by video, those conversations just make me say “Meh.”

But new input types…cold shivers.

Sadly, they’re also one of the less useful elements at the moment. Until support is available in browsers, they’ll simply fall back to a text field, unless supplemented by scripting to customize their behavior. But hey — easy upgrade, right?

From an accessibility perspective, this is fabulous news. Or rather, potentially fabulous news. These new input types — including date formats, time formats, numbers, ranges, and colors — are intended to provide user-friendly and accessibility-enabled interfaces for inputting these kinds of custom data. Ultimately, they’ll provide replacements (or fallbacks) to the innumerable JavaScripted widgets used to create date input or color selectors. Users, instead of encountering a different style of calendar every time they need to enter a date, could have a consistent user experience. Having the behavior built directly into the browser, and tied from there directly into any accessibility software in use offers a hugely more dependable experience for users of assistive technology.

Now, this all depends on several factors: vendor implementations need to meet user agent accessibility guidelines; interfaces between browsers need to be consistent; and, of course, the attribute values need to be implemented by enough browsers to make their use truly valuable!

Today, support is pretty limited. You can take a look at Roger Johansson’s HTML 5 input type test page and see whether your current browser supports any of them. If you’re using recent versions of Opera or Safari, the answer will be yes — otherwise, you won’t be seeing very much of interest for a while.

But you can implement these input types today.

All of these different input types fallback to a simple text input. If you’re using the HTML 5 doctype, there’s nothing stopping you from applying HTML 5 input types right now. Any browser that doesn’t support them will simply provide a field to enter plain text — so if you’re currently collecting email addresses in a text input (which seems pretty likely,) then you have no excuse not to change now. You may not see the benefits right away, but why wait? You’re not going to see any downsides, either.

Creating forms has long been a thorn in many a developer’s side. Dealing with how to best layout and collect date information, for example, is always a pain. Do you leave it as a simple text field, and have to deal with who-know-what kind of data received from the user? Do you use multiple select boxes, and force the user to walk through three or more fields just to enter the date? Do you use a JavaScript-based tool to provide a calendar, which may not have great accessibility, may behave strangely in some browsers, and may take a lot of development time to massage into providing the functionality you’re looking for?

Even when browser support for HTML 5 input types is fully available, it’s entirely possible that you’ll want to take the route to custom develop interfaces for various fields. However, unlike the past, you’ll only be needing to do this because something particularly unique is required for the project; for lower-budget projects, you can save a lot of labor and provide a solid interface just by using native features.

In June of 2010, Twitter will be permanently disabling basic authentication in favor of the OAuth protocol for authentication. For WordPress plugins which make use of the Twitter API, this is a change which will have significant repercussions.

The specific repercussion will be that every implementation of a plugin will need to be registered with Twitter as a separate application.

This means that the development of WP to Twitter will need to move in a slightly different direction. After pondering a bit, I’m left with four plausible choices:

1. Let the plugin die
2. Implement OAuth for the plugin
3. Build a pass-through web service to act as an application interface with Twitter
4. Associate with a 3rd party web service in the same capacity

These all have downsides, obviously — but I want to lay out my thoughts on each possibility and I’m asking for comments from the users of my plugin on their preference.

Death of WP to Twitter

Although it’s not really my favorite option, I have to acknowledge that it’s plausible. It’s certainly the easy answer — maintaining an even moderately popular WordPress plugin is a lot of free labor. I already spend more time on maintaining than I really should, from a financial perspective, and this may push it over the edge.

Implement OAuth

This would be a fair amount of work for me, although not insurmountable. The real downside to it would be how much work it would be for users — every one of you would have to register one application with Twitter for every site where you installed the plugin. With one site, this may not be a big deal — but I know it could be a real pain for people with more than that.

It’s not without some potential advantages, of course – when you’re registering your own application, you could customize the application name, the home URL for the application, etc.

Build a pass-through service

One way around the Oauth mess is for me to build a separate service which would handle actually connecting to Twitter. WP to Twitter would authenticate with that service, and pass the post off to Twitter. Again, this would be a lot of work — but, more significantly, it would involve some definite expenses.

I’ve been happy to maintain this plugin for not-much-better than free, but when it comes to incurring expenses, I start to feel a bit unexcited. It’s not like WP to Twitter is a commercially viable business, and I have expectations of profit from it — but I’d prefer not to find myself going into the hole because of it. I’d probably need to see an increase in donations to make this feasible.

Use a 3rd Party Service

Obviously, if I can build a service to connect with Twitter, so can somebody else. This is almost certainly the easiest solution which keeps the plugin usable — but it does mean creating a dependency on a 3rd party to keep the plugin functioning. Depending on Twitter is just natural; obviously, if Twitter goes away, the point of the plugin is lost. Depending on somebody else is something I’m less certain of, on the whole. There’s a reason, after all, that the plugin allows for use of URLs without an external shortener.

Give me your thoughts

This is very important to me — I want to know what direction you’d like to see WP to Twitter go. Please let me know! Do you know another solution? Do tell!

And if there are no responses…well, that has a pretty obvious meaning as well.

A couple of weeks ago, I launched a WordPress Calendar plugin. Now, there are a *lot* of Calendar plugins available out there, so I’ll freely admit that my primary reason for doing this was to meet my own needs — and given the “profit margin” on writing WordPress plugins, that’s generally the best plan when writing one.

Interestingly, the most frequent complaints I’ve heard since launching it were in an area which I had considered to be the least important area of the plugin — what it looks like.

I only did minimal work in setting up the appearance for this plugin; checking whether it basically worked in the default WordPress themes and little else. My assumption was that if anybody needed the plugin, they’d just have to be prepared to customize it to meet their needs. There was no reasonable way I could set it up to mesh with all possible themes, after all!

But apparently, in order to have the plugin be generally accepted, people need it to have “a look.” Most advanced users will probably change it; but I clearly hadn’t considered the more beginner users, without sufficient CSS knowledge to readily customize the output.

What’s really interesting to me about this situation, however, is not whether the plugin is accepted, popular, or heavily designed; that’s just an example. I was intrigued to observe in my own development process an approach which almost entirely ignored what the product looked like. From start to finish, I was really thinking about whether the plugin produced well-structured HTML and whether the various functions involved in producing information worked well.

I just never thought about design. And why would I? If I can’t predict what context the plugin will be used in, why should I design it at all, beyond making the basic functionality clear?

It’s an interesting question; from my perspective, as a fairly advanced WordPress developer, I honestly prefer plugins I use to have absolutely minimal styles, and for me to be able to disable those styles at will so that I can replace them. However, WordPress has a very broad user base. Most of those millions of users probably expect that they can install a plugin and immediately make use of it — and any changing of colors or reskinning to better match their design is purely optional. For those users, I really should be providing something which can be immediately useful.

It actually does come down to usability: advanced users can do what they want with the calendar design regardless of how extensively I’ve set up styles. Beginning users, however, may not be able to fix anything that I’ve left unresolved, or not fully tested. In order to provide the best usability, I need to consider those users, as well.

Having determined that it does make sense to actually design the plugin’s output, but also knowing that there’s no reasonable way I can design it to match all themes, I do have to make a firm decision about what the basic color scheme for the plugin will be. Originally, I’d used a basic, Kubrick-derived color set. Now? Well, the sensible thing seems to be to consider branding; set it up using my own website’s color scheme. It may be subtle, but it will convey my identity, even without my name or URL. That seems worthwhile.

Guess I better get to work!

I just launched the first public draft of an online calendar plugin I’ve been working on for a while. It’s based on a plugin from Kieran O’Shea, Calendar, but has been adapted extensively to better suit my own needs.

Hopefully, it’ll also suit other people’s needs.

• Read more about My Calendar.
• Download My Calendar.
• View a sample installation.

Please leave comments or questions at the My Calendar support page; leave feature requests on the feature request page!