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.

HTML5 Datetime input in Opera 10.53

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!

One of the most famously cliched spy movie themes is the absurdly complex method (and accompanying explanation) in which the villain intends to kill the hero. Layer upon layer of killer sharks, laser beams, poisonous gases, and robot assassins employed with the sole intention of killing one fundamentally normal person (albeit a very suave person, of course.)

And, naturally, it always fails. Something goes wrong in the system; gross negligence of maintenance causes a malfunction; or some unanticipated exception allows the hero to escape.

This is an important thing to keep in mind when designing or building a web site, in every aspect. When you think you’re adding fabulous new functionality or greater accessibility, you should always be thinking about whether you’re ultimately supporting your visitor’s needs — or just making your system needlessly more complex.

Jared Smith, from Web AIM, recently published an article on web accessibility preferences expounding on the notion that in most cases, providing tools for your disabled users to change their experience usually means that you haven’t done your job right in the first place. Perhaps, rather than adding a tool to enable people to adjust your site, you should simply fix the site. Jared makes the very good point that in most cases, the people who need text enlargement have already taken care of it through their browser settings or operating system; and those who need extreme enlargement can’t be helped by a common accessibility widget — they need software support.

So, given this case, what do you actually accomplish by adding accessibility widgets to a web site?

If you’ve added them to a global element, to make them available throughout the site, you’ve made your site more complex: there’s more information on every page which needs to be sorted through or skipped over. You’ve added an additional technical element which needs to be supported and maintained — as browsers change, you’ll need to be rechecking not just your default settings, but all of the various combinations you’re providing, as well.

If you’ve added the same options to a page dedicated to these accessibility options, you’ve pretty well avoided the problem of having a globally more complicated interface. However, you need to ask yourself whether the problems your accessibility options fix will prevent the users who need them from finding the options! Take this example: you’ve chosen a relatively low-contrast (but attractive) text color for your footer and secondary header navigation. Since this color is below the WCAG 2 color contrast requirements, you’re providing a link to a page where the user can select a high-contrast option.

Unfortunately, since the link is in your footer, that user who needs a high-contrast page can’t actually find the page where they can make the change.

Problems with site complexity don’t only effect web accessibility, however. Any additional function to your web site needs to be carefully considered before implementation: is it worth while to add an audio player with auto start to your home page? What are the consequences of making this change? You may think that it’s a great opportunity to immediately promote your band’s music to those who want to hear it; but you’re making the gross assumption that those visitors want to hear it right now. They may not. And if they’re in a sensitive situation — checking you out from their quiet office cubicle, for example — then their first reaction is likely to be “How do I turn this off!”

Assuming you have decided to add this audio player to your web site — you may not realize that the most important control you need to have is a prominent STOP button. Otherwise, the most natural way to stop the music is to leave your site.

Any piece of new functionality adds complexity to a site. It may create an undesirable reaction, it may create user confusion — or it may be a brilliant idea which turns your home business into a multi-million dollar corporation. You shouldn’t avoid adding functionality on the grounds that anything complicated is going to be a problem; but you should certainly take a very close look at every new feature and decide whether it will add to the user experience. When making that decision, the points to consider are not limited to the value of that feature alone. You need to also consider all the other features which will be simultaneously available; you may want to add a new feature, but move an existing one. It’s usually not any given feature which causes problems; it’s having too many paths to follow which may confuse your visitors.

Authoring forms is an important part of keeping the web fully accessible — not just providing access to information, but allowing users to fully interact with the web in all it’s glory. Interactivity is what makes the web powerful and persuasive.

As such, I can’t help but be frustrated when I run across basic form construction which is simply well below the standards I’ve come to expect. A form like this one, for example, is incredibly irritating to my sense of what the web should be:

  <form action="/store/add_event_to_cart/53" autocomplete="off" method="post">    <table>
  <tr>
    <td nowrap><span class="required">First Name:</span></td>
    <td><input id="attendee_first_name" name="attendee[first_name]" size="40" type="text" value="" /></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td nowrap><span class="required">Last Name:</span></td>
 
    <td><input id="attendee_last_name" name="attendee[last_name]" size="40" type="text" value="" /></td>
  </tr>
 
...[numerous similar fields deleted to avoid boring the hell out of you]...
 
  <tr>
    <td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="2">
 
      <input name="attendee[sponsor_email]" type="hidden" value="0" /><input checked="checked" id="attendee_sponsor_email" name="attendee[sponsor_email]" style="vertical-align: top;" type="checkbox" value="1" />
      <p style="display: inline-block; width: 360px;">Please sign me up to get occasional information from select sponsors, partners, and other fun people.</p>
    </td>
  </tr>
    <tr>
    <td colspan="2">Discount code (if applicable): <input autocomplete="off" id="attendee_discount_code" name="attendee[discount_code]" size="10" type="text" /></td>
  </tr>
    </table>
 
    <input name="commit" type="submit" value="Add Attendee" />
  </form>

But in this case, it’s not just the nature of the form itself. There’s a lot wrong here — the use of table for layout is a big problem, but even if you’re accepting the table as logical (and there is a particular logic which would except tables for forms,) the lack of a summary or headings in that table and the use of empty table cells to provide spacing is a big problem. Then we look at the form itself — not a label element in sight; instead we have plain text using a span and class to indicate if a field is required. There’s no coded indication that a field is required; it’s a purely visual indicator.

My sense of accessibility hurts.

And do you want to know where this code came from? Here it is.

Here are a few good articles on high quality form construction – but don’t bother reading them. After all, they didn’t.

• Sensible Forms
• Pretty Accessible Forms
• Making Compact Forms more Accessible

This is something that pisses me off; but you can find it everywhere. Large organizations responsible for web publishing don’t always maintain the standards they talk about. Is it just talk, then? Does the fact that An Event Apart does what A List Apart condemns mean following standards and implementing accessibility doesn’t mean anything?

Thankfully, no. It does mean that web sites aren’t perfect; and the people doing the labor are frequently not the people who know best how it should be done. But it is a problem — as much as we can evangelize best practices, it doesn’t mean that they’ll be used.

There’s a lot of pressure in the web industry to produce fast results. Sometimes this means people take shortcuts; sometimes it means hiring people who may not be as fully trained or qualified as you really wish you had; and sometimes it means things just go wrong.

But I’m left with a definite feeling of frustration to find that a leading web standards event like An Event Apart should exhibit this kind of HTML on their web site.

How can this be avoided?

Ooh, that’s a tough one. Work processes, new employees, insufficient testing — all of these can allow inferior code onto a site. As a freelance designer, it’s positively rare that I have sole control over new content or template changes after the initial launch. As a member of a team, I can only imagine that it’s even more difficult — anybody with sufficient permissions to commit a change can change the overall level of competency exhibited on the site.

Application of a tool like Marco Battilani’s Big Red Angry Text technique can help, but it’s a little scary to put into a published site if you know that the editing won’t always be done by knowledgeable people. It may demonstrate mistakes, but can sometimes serve to do nothing more than piss off or frustrate your client or staff. It depends on the control and education you’ve been able to impose.

1. Educate. Teach the people who will be doing work on the site as much as you can – the what and the why.
2. Review the site. Review the work that’s been done; a 30 second glance at the code is likely to result in fixing at least some errors, and will hopefully prevent future errors of the same type.
3. Provide tools for self-checking. Not a first choice, since all automated tools are flawed by their very nature, but they can still be of use.

It’s not always practical; but if following these steps is at all an option, it’s really worthwhile.

On Wednesday of last week, I published an article on disability statistics in Practical eCommerce magazine. Although there’s nothing particularly wrong with the article, I find myself wanting to publish a follow up article with more detail on the statistics. Statistics are complicated beasts, and I feel that detailed explication of sources and statistical problems is well worth while.

First, sources:

Americans with Disabilities: 2005

The primary source for statistics in the Practical eCommerce article was a report called Americans with Disabilites: 2005, produced by the United States Census Bureau. The data dates to 2005, but the report was released in December of 2008, so it’s not far from the most current information available which is based on truly extensive research.

This report was released from data gathered in the Survey of Income and Program Participation in 2005, updating the information from a 2002 report of the same name. The report is limited to the civilian, non-institutionalized population of the nation, and estimates that the overall percentage of the population demonstrating disabilities would rise to 15.7 percent from 15.1 percent if that population was included, referencing information from the 2006 American Communities Survey.

The American Communities Survey

The ACS is a continuous data collection effort by the U.S. Census Bureau used to produce annual estimates at the national, state and local level on the characteristics of the United States population. In 2005, the ACS collected information from approximately 3 million addresses in the United States and 36,000 addresses in Puerto Rico. In 2006, it will also include 2.5 percent of the population living in group quarters, (U.S. Census Bureau, 2003).

Given the rapid pace of technological development, access to ongoing current statistics is of inordinate value to internet-based businesses, although the data is not currently detailed enough to be fully appreciable in web accessibility.

There is a more recent report, from the 2006 American Communities Survey, but the data collection is organized differently, so I elected not to mix the two to avoid introducing errors caused by relating data sets which are not a definite match. Regardless, both sets of data include valuable information, and are well worth consulting.

The primary flaw in this period of American Communities Survey data is that it does not break out separate types of sensory disabilities; blindness and deafness are collapsed into a single category. Although both of these issues have a bearing on web accessibility, the response to the issues is so radically different that this is a major flaw in the data when it comes to web accessibility analysis.

More recent American Communities Surveys have broken this information down further. As of the 2008 questionnaire (downloadable from the Census website), sensory disabilities are separated between blindness/low vision and deaf/hard of hearing.

Cornell University: Disability Statistics

A third fabulous source for disability statistics (with easily the best interface of the group) is the Disability Statistics project at Cornell University. The data is sourced from the American Communities Surveys and the 2000 United States Census, along with a few additional sources, so the base data is the same, but a greater variety of perspectives are available.

The Cornell database requires an account to access statistics, but they do provide free access using a public “guest” account. The email and password entered for the guest account are both “guest.”

Issues with the Data

It was necessary, of course, to summarize the data used for the report. However, each of those numbers should be viewed in context, as well. All of the data referenced is accessible as a Excel download from the U.S. Census Bureau (linked above).

The data is excellent for gaining an overview of the disabled population of the United States, but is not specific enough to give a clear sense of whether these disabilities will impact your web site. The statistics from the American with Disabilities report clearly state, for example, that 3.4% of individuals over 15 years of age have difficulty seeing; a total nearing 8 million people. However, exactly what is included in the data is hard to specify. The information was gathered by asking a series of questions, gathering whether the person had difficulty reading newsprint, etc. It doesn’t specify anything about the nature of the problem.

In general, my assumption is that the data may include some individuals who struggle with reading due to dyslexia, dependent on the exact phrasing of the questions, but not all, and presumably includes no or very few individuals with color blindness.

Download the reports (all in PDF format):

• Americans with Disabilities: 2005
• Disability Status and the Characteristics of People in Group Quarters
• 2006 ACS Content Test Evaluation Report Covering Disability