I read an article today by Roger Johansson where he mentioned an interesting situation surrounding the use of high resolution screens. The impact of these newer screens is not something widely considered; but it’s certainly important!

Newer laptop screens are beginning to come available using higher than usual resolution – that is, they have more pixels crammed into a particular area of screen than the normal 72 or 96 DPI. This can have an unfortunate effect for websites, because all of a sudden you’ve got a minuscule interpretation of your elegant page design. Perhaps you can increase the text size, but there’s nothing you can do about the images.

This is not yet a wide-spread issue – but then, accessibility is not about dealing with issues only when they become common. The principle we want to strive for is universal accessibility – and that requires accommodation for high-end products, as well.

Accessibility is very frequently viewed as a means of making something available to those who have disabilities, or for devices with inferior capabilities. But that’s a very inaccurate description – accessibility is about providing equal access to all devices. Practically speaking, however, nobody can actually TEST for all devices. This is why accessibility is so closely tied to web standards.

By adhering to a common set of standards, we can strive to match a template for what will be commonly usable by all user agents. The burden of accessibility is shared between the device designers, user agent creators, and content creators. Only with a commitment to common standards can all information truly be granted equal accessibility.

My little boolean search engine has been receiving a fairly substantial amount of traffic, so I thought I should make it a little bit more user friendly. I just uploaded a new version of the zip package which includes a template file to connect to your MySQL database and, most importantly, a little readme file with some very basic instructions for installing and modifying the search engine for your site.

Finally, I put up a example implementation so you can try it out for real. Also made some minor changes to the script itself, but no real spectacular changes – it should be a TINY TINY bit faster now, but that’s about it.

Edit: put up the wrong link to the search script. Oops!

One chronic problem in writing web development articles is keeping your writing readable. The world of web design, programming, and web accessibility is loaded with industry terminology which are undoubtedly not immediately obvious in meaning to someone who’s just begun researching the subject.

However, neither the option of excluding all industry terminology from an article nor the option of including a definition inline for every term is really palatable for me. With the first option, the article becomes simplified to a point of abstraction, and is less useful for the practically-minded designer trying to get a firmer grasp of the subject. Inline definitions, however, can easily interrupt the flow of the text, rendering the overall readability lower because of the extraneous information.

The fact is, a constant barrage of definitions is not the right choice for every audience; and neither is the assumption of too much or too little knowledge.

What I’ve done to attempt to tackle this sticky problem is begin work on a glossary of web accessibility terminology.
I will gradually be adding contextual links to these terms in articles where I deem it necessary or useful. Those who need the definition can follow the link, those who don’t won’t need to. I’ll also be implementing an alternate look for links to these definitions, to attempt to make it clear that these links are different from the normal, run-of-the-mill outbound links.

Why write my own definitions? So I can have continuous control over the definition of a term, and so I’m not dependent on some other authority site remaining authoritative or, for that matter, failing to include all the terms I may want to refer to.

The glossary has a long way to go – only 26 terms so far, but I’ll keep plugging away as time allows. Feel free to suggest terms I may want to define, as well…

Well, it’s a work in progress, so it keeps mutating bit by bit. Today, I fixed a minor bug which caused some images to be produced at the wrong length and added the ability to use a wider variety of colors for your poll images. No longer are you restricted to monochromatic! The whole rainbow is available. Aww, how cute.

At any rate, the new package is available and you can download it as you please.

Afterthought: Oh yeah, I forgot. I also added a minor feature which prints the vote percentages after the images.

There’s no doubt that the eventual release of Microsoft’s new Vista operating system is a big thing for the world of computing. Windows holds the vast majority share of office and home computing, and the release of their first new system in over 5 years will be very significant.

Matt Bailey recently pointed out Microsoft’s claims that Vista would be the most accessible Windows ever. His description of their new features sounds promising – one of the key improvements will be an extensive set up wizard which, rather than focusing on "normal" options and "accessibility" options, will interview the user about their work habits and demonstrate new features, hopefully resulting in operating system settings which match the needs of the user.

It’s a good idea – the interview process removes the stigma of disability from your computer settings, and instead focuses on the user experience. Whether it works, of course, is another matter – but that won’t really be testable until there’s a much larger body of users. Not to mention the inevitable bugs in a beta system…

Vista will also incorporate substantially reworked versions of existing accessibility options. These options will include speech recognition (now with a learning engine which will adapt to your own style and vocabulary) and more advanced magnification. The new magnification style will render images and text at a larger size, rather than simply stretching the view, which has always created distortion in the magnified view.

All of this is discussed at some length with Rob Sinclair, the Director of Microsoft’s Accessible Technology Group, in Microsoft’s PressPass. The press version, of course, carries the usual highly-positive spin of a Microsoft press document, but is thorough enough to give you a pretty accurate sense for what’s coming up.

Finally, Vista will incorporate a testing model to allow 3rd party software providers to incorporate accessibility features into their software. This is unquestionably a great addition. The easier you make it for developers to make their software accessible the more likely it will be they’ll take the time and effort.

I just fixed an error in the code for my PHP based poll script – please download the new version! No change to the version number; this wasn’t that major of a fix, but if you are producing a poll which will have fewer than 5 result choices you will need to use the new version.

 Thanks!

Recently made some minor revisions to my MySQL/PHP Poll. The previous version was very limited in that it was only capable of handling polls with exactly 5 options. The new version is still fairly limited, but can now handle polls with anywhere from 2 to 5 voter choices.

Download now!