Category: Web standards

WCAG 2 Reaches Recommendation Status

December 11, 2008

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Topics: Accessibility, News, Web standards.

It’s been a long time coming, but as of today the standards of accessibility expressed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are officially updated. A W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendation is the most final state a document can reach in the W3C standards system, and should now be considered the standard document for accessibility, superceding WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 1. A W3C Recommendation is a specification or set of guidelines that, after extensive consensus-building, has received the endorsement […]

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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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Testing Color Contrast for WCAG 1 & 2

May 14, 2008

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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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Why use semantic HTML?

April 3, 2008

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Topics: Semantics, Web standards.

This is part 1 of 2. Part 2 is my Guide to the use of Semantic HTML (HyperText Markup Language) Elements I’ve seen a lot of articles discussing the importance of HTML and XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language – HTML reformulated as XML (eXtensible Markup Language)) semantics. I’ve seen articles describing what it means for a document to be semantic. Most of these articles, however, don’t provide a serious overview of what HTML elements actually may be considered semantic — […]

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Using standards doesn’t make it right

February 11, 2008

15 Comments

Topics: Semantics, Web standards.

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 […]

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