Thanks to an off-hand comment from Steve Green while discussing a forthcoming Accessites article, I’ve spent some time today thinking about what it takes to write for accessibility. Most of the time, the primary focus of information about accessibility has to do with making non-text information available as text. Captioning and audio description for video, transcriptions for audio, simple text alternatives for static images. Next in the list tends to be availability of functionality: progressive enhancement for client-side scripting, ability […]
Continue reading “Best Practices: Writing for Accessibility” »Author: Joe Dolson
WebAnywhere: a Screen Reader On the Go
Hat tip to Henny Swan. “WebAnywhere” is a new screen reading product (available in May of 2008) from the University of Washington and the WebInSight project. The basic concept is simple: it’s a web-based service which provides a proxy service as a screen reader. Fantastic tool for anybody requiring a screen reader at a computer which they don’t control: at a public library, a friend’s house, or any imaginable situation where your normal setup isn’t available. The project is designed […]
Continue reading “WebAnywhere: a Screen Reader On the Go” »Review of “Mobile Web Development”
This new book from Packt Publishing & Nirav Mehta is a quick and effective introduction to developing websites specifically targeted at mobile device users. I say “users” for a reason — one of the strongest advantages to the book is a strong focus on considering your user and their needs as a key element of mobile web development. My overall reaction to this book was positive. It covers a wide variety of key issues for mobile web programming in an […]
Continue reading “Review of “Mobile Web Development”” »Long-awaited update to PHP/MySQL poll
This is an old project, now obsolete. Links have been redacted. It didn’t quite take 2 years, at least. But very, very close. The last release of this script was May 25th, 2006 — so I made it just under the wire. But this is also a bit more than just a script update. In fact, this is a complete overhaul. I’m not certain that there’s actually a single line in the poll script which is the same as the […]
Continue reading “Long-awaited update to PHP/MySQL poll” »Guide to Semantic Use of HTML Elements
This is part 2 of 2. Part 1 is Why use Semantic HTML (HyperText Markup Language)? This guide only deals with HTML4/XHTML elements which have a specific, human-readable meaning. The semantics of elements such as link, which are not seen in normal browsing, have been left out, as have replacement elements like img or object. In some cases, I’ve also addressed specific attributes which are critical to providing semantic value to an element. This is not a guide which demonstrates […]
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