A turbo-charged style-sheet switcher- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Providing user customisation options by making css files scriptable. During a recent discussion with Gez Lemon of Juicy Studio, about the best way to set the text size on text pages - and the merits or otherwise of using web page based scripts to provide customization options - Gez reminded me that many users do not know they can change text size (and many other things) using their browser preferences. I have to admit, that in the past, I was not an advocate of providing an alternative.http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=48 Underwhelmed by WAP - Impressions from the coalface- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Mike Banahan gives his Impressions of Using WAPWML "WML is terribly limited in what it will display on the screen, with an extremely restricted set of markup tags supported and a curious deck of cards' metaphor where each page is considered to consist of a deck' - individually displayable sub-pages within the whole page itself. The usefulness of the deckcard division is unclear in the tutorials that I have seen so far and I haven't discovered a compelling argument for it yet." It was Michael..http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=35 Disability Rights Commission web accessibility study points to a need for training- (Found June 24, 2008 ) The latest E-Access Bulletin has an article about the most recent findings from the Disability Rights Commission's web accessibility study. There was a poor response among organisations participating in the study to the quesion 'How interested is your company in web accessibility' - and those who did respond showed a lack of awareness of the issues. The investigation team conclude that there is a need for more training in this area. Interestingly in response to questions about the usefulness...http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=34 This weeks tips: add structural meaning to image based headings- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Cascading Style Sheets allow a certain degree of control over font choice, line height, font size, and so on. But for many designers this limited control is still not enough - and they continue to images instead of text for their web page headlines. Here is a tip for adding some structural meaning to those image based headings - a technique first suggested to me by Patrick H. Lauke as a comment on an article about make non-text elements accessible...http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=33 Accessify Discussion Forum a hit- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Matthew Ogston sent me a note about the new Accessifyforum.com discussion forums: - which look like they are already a great success. Discussion topics include, Accesible website building, Legal issues and standards, 'beginners' and many more.http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=32 This weeks tip: don't try to control the visitors to you site.- (Found June 24, 2008 ) There is nothing more irritating to a user than a site that appears to be trying to control them, either by forcing them down particular paths, of by disabling features of the browser interface. Here are a couple of examples of what I am talking about: Opening new windows, so that the original site is still hovering in the background. If the user wants to come back to your site they can click the back button, and if they want to open a new window they can do it themselves. Using scripts to.http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=31 A Dyslexic Perspective on e-Content Accessibility- (Found June 24, 2008 ) A Dyslexic Perspective on e-Content Accessibility by by Peter Rainger with contributions from EA Draffan, Simon Ball and Lawrie Phipps of TechDis.http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=30 The MCU contributes to European Commission Social Inclusion Workshop- (Found June 24, 2008 ) As a representative of the Making Connections Unit I was invited to Brussels to attend a workshop to discuss how 'Cultural and Memory Organisations' (i.e. Libraries and Museums) can use digital technologies to increase social and economic inclusion. The workshop and research is being carried out by Ecotec Research and Consulting on behalf of the European Commission. I was invited to provide my expertise in relation to accessibility issues. The main objectives of the study are: To identify..http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=29 Accessible Web Design Tip: get your 'character encoding' sorted- (Found June 24, 2008 ) If you have ever used the World Wide Web Consortiums (W3C) HTML validator (http:validator.w3.org) to check the validity of your web pages, you will have noticed that it requires information about character encoding before it will carry out the check. But what does 'character encoding' mean, and what encoding should you use I will not try to explain it in any detail, as it is a complicated subject - however the following simplification should give you the basic idea. A character encoding.http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=28 United Kingdom Web Accessibility Congress Postponed- (Found June 24, 2008 ) The United Kingdom Web Accessibility Congress Conference Postponed. If I find out why, I'll pass on the information.http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=27 |