The grand old question concerning techniques and choices in web accessibility which, while common, are not necessarily helpful is a popular subject which is always around in accessibility circles. It’s certainly not a new topic for me to write on, but one which (for whatever reason) I’m going to go ahead and write about again. In this case, I’m going to take a single commonly implemented method: the text-resizing tool, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages in some depth. This […]
Continue reading “Developing an effective text-resizing widget” »Author: Joe Dolson
Using standards doesn’t make it right
The Wikipedia article on Standards in software contains a very good definition of standards, particularly as we might need to view them when talking about web standards: Standards (software) Software standards enable software to interoperate. Many things are (somewhat) arbitrary, so the important thing is that everyone agree on what they are. Software standards is one of the Unsolved problems in software engineering On the whole, the article at Wikipedia is a good example of what isn’t so great about […]
Continue reading “Using standards doesn’t make it right” »Why the DOCTYPE switch isn’t broken
(Or, more accurately, why the DOCTYPE is no more broken than any other potential switching mechanism.) In a recent article, “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8“, Aaron Gustafson states that “the DOCTYPE [is] unsustainable as a switch for standards mode.” His argument is based on the problem that many developers and authoring tools now make use of correct DOCTYPEs despite the fact that they are not in fact using standards-based, valid code. Therefore, you can not actually assume […]
Continue reading “Why the DOCTYPE switch isn’t broken” »Graph the Semantic HTML Structure of Your Web Page
In October of 2006, I published a brief article about Marcel Salathé’s interesting Java Applet to generate node graphs of web page structure. In that article, I stated: I’d love to be able to produce graphs where I chose the color coding pattern for particular tags. I could set all non-semantic tags to be bright red, to easily spot the condition of a site in that respect. I could focus my attentions on inline versus block elements, or I could […]
Continue reading “Graph the Semantic HTML Structure of Your Web Page” »A useful CAPTCHA from reCAPTCHA
Just wanted to add the comment, since I didn’t specify it explicitly, that I’m not trying to claim that the accessibility of this particularly CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is all that fantastic — it’s pretty good, but there are serious problems. I’m just saying that it’s a neat idea. 😉 In case you don’t already know, “CAPTCHA” is an abbreviation for “Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” From […]
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