Having just returned from the premiere conference on accessibility and technology, it was inevitable that I would find myself brimming with new ideas. This year, it started quite early, when John Foliot caught me and told me he had something he’d like for me to do. John being who he is, I was already quaking in my comfortable shoes. The history of longdesc in HTML5 is complicated: the decision to keep the attribute required many long arguments and defense of […]
Continue reading “Update to WP Accessibility: longdesc” »Category: Accessibility
On Detecting Assistive Technology
It’s what everybody’s talking about, so why not chime in? Karl Groves Marco Zehe Dylan Barrell Dennis Lembree And spawned by the results from WebAIM’s 5th Screen Reader User Survey. First off: the original question was whether screen reader detection should be allowed, and not about detecting all assistive technology – and there’s a good reason for that. The relationship between screen readers and browsers is much closer than, say, the relationship between an adaptive keyboard and a browser. The […]
Continue reading “On Detecting Assistive Technology” »Accessible Video in WordPress
Since version 3.6, WordPress has incorporated the MediaElementJS library in core to handle the output of video files. It’s a great library — it has support for captions and subtitles; support for chapters; support for fallback formats of video; support for YouTube; keyboard support — everything you’d want to have for displaying video accessibly. That’s totally exciting! But there’s a “but”. WordPress manages media through the media manager, which doesn’t offer any way to associate caption and subtitle files with […]
Continue reading “Accessible Video in WordPress” »Update to Color Contrast Tester
So, I originally wrote my color contrast evaluator in September of 2008. Now, 5 years later, there are some key differences that merit an update. Visit the Color Contrast Tester In 2008, support for rgba color was virtually nonexistent on the web. Accounting for transparency was only something you needed to do with images. Mobile devices were something to consider, but it wasn’t that big of a deal – if a tool wasn’t mobile friendly, that was really the norm. […]
Continue reading “Update to Color Contrast Tester” »Stop WordPress Spam with BotSmasher
My latest WordPress plug-in is now released: BotSmasher, a plug-in to stop spam by filtering WordPress comments, registrations, and contact form submissions. This project owes a lot to Karl Groves, who developed and maintains the BotSmasher API (Application Programming Interface). So, what can you do with the BotSmasher WordPress plug-in? Well, the obvious: filtering comments and registrations. The plug-in takes user-submitted comments and registrations, checks them against the BotSmasher database of spam names, emails, and IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, and […]
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