Author: Joe Dolson

Looking for Translations

June 12, 2008

15 Comments

Topics: Web Development.

I’m looking for people to provide alternate language translations for my Color Contrast Tester. I’ve already got people offering to provide Italian and German language files, but once you’ve gone that far…why not keep going? If anybody reading this can provide additional translations, let me know in the comments — I’ll respond privately to make arrangements. It’s an easy job; the language file is independent of the rest of the script, so there aren’t any serious challenges in sorting what […]

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Web site Tune-up: 8 Quick Checkups

June 2, 2008

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Topics: Accessibility, Web standards.

Perfecting a web site is a long and involved process. There’s no getting around the fact that if you want every aspect of your site to be right — accessibility, search optimization, and just all-around pizzazz, you’ve probably got some significant work to do. However, that’s not to say that there aren’t things you can check quickly and efficiently to make sure you’re not making some of the more egregious errors! Here are 8 speedy checkups (in no particular order) […]

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Review: W3-Markup Code Preparation Service

May 21, 2008

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Topics: Accessibility.

There are a lot of services in the web marketplace offering code conversion. You give ’em a design, they spew out some junk code for you. This isn’t the way it has to be, thankfully. There are, believe it or not, PSD to HTML (HyperText Markup Language) conversion services which are committed to creating standards compliant, semantic code. Well, there’s at least one — http://w3-markup.com/. I’m not personally aware of others… But the point is that if you’re a designer […]

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Speaking at SES Toronto 2008

May 15, 2008

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Topics: Search Marketing.

On June 18th, 2008, I’ll be speaking on a panel at Search Engine Strategies Toronto discussing Accessibility, Usability and SEO along with Jane Motz Hayes of WebFeat and Chris Adams from Lyris, Inc.. If you want to learn more about how accessibility and SEO cooperate (and how badly- or unwisely-performed SEO can hinder the accessibility of your website) come to Toronto in June!

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Testing Color Contrast for WCAG 1 & 2

May 14, 2008

32 Comments

Topics: Accessibility, Web standards.

Use the Color Contrast Spectrum Tester or compare the contrast of two colors. Some time ago, while pondering whether web accessibility posed limitations on design, the thought occurred to me that there are presumably some colors which simply cannot be used for text or text backgrounds in any site. WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 1 does not, in fact, provide any specific guidelines concerning color contrast. The formulas commonly used to judge this were specified in Techniques For Accessibility Evaluation […]

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