Guild of Accessible Web Designers opens for business- (Found June 24, 2008 ) The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS.org) - a membership organisation set up to promote the practice of acccessible web design, and the interests of accessible web designers - went public for the first time today. The official launch of the Guild will not be until early in 2004, but todays 'soft launch' is intended to attract new members who have the time, enthusiasm and skills and motivation to contribute to the development and growth of the organisation in its early stages. Already.http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=52 3 tips: free Bobby, free Waizilla, and use Acrobot- (Found June 24, 2008 ) I am sorry that I was unable to provide my usual accessible web design tips over the last couple of weeks; I got caught up in a number of projects that kept me very busy. To try to make up for my tardiness, this week I am offering 'three tips for the price of one'. Tip 1. Although Bobby, the web accessibility evaluator, is now a commercial product (and the website version only lets you evaluate a page once a minute), did you know that you can still download a free version of the Bobby...http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=53 The web accessibility toolbar- (Found June 24, 2008 ) In this weeks tip, I recommend you check out a new Toolbar for Internet Explorer, developed by Steven Faulkner, of the National Information and Library Service (NILS). Support for the toolbar is confined to Internet Explorer on Windows, so I haven't been able to try it out myself (I use a Mac) - however, Gez Lemon of the website Juicy Studio is giving it glowing reviews - and I trust his judgement. According to the blurb, 'It is designed to help the user to interrogate aspects...http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=54 Weekly tip: Adding Tags to PDF documents improves accessibility- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Here is my first weekly accessibility tip for 2004: Adding Tags to PDF documents helps to make them more accessible. A screen reader is not a particularly useful tool if it cannot not read out the text of a document in the correct order, or if it cannot distinguish between structural elements such as headings, links or paragraph text. With this in mind Adobe has, adopted a strategy of 'marking up' the structure of PDF documents using tags; much in the same way tags are used to markup...http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=55 Accessible Web Typography, an introduction for web designers - now online- (Found June 24, 2008 ) The full text of my short(ish) book, Accessible Web Typography, an introduction for web designers is now online. Please add your comments, disagreements and tips to the bottom of the relevant pages.http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=56 Use Javascript to add default text to input fields.- (Found June 24, 2008 ) For as long as I can remember I've puzzled over whether or not to put in default characters in edit boxes and text areas in my web forms. On the one hand if I don't my page will not will not pass Guideline 10.4, and will have no chance of WAI AAA compliance. Guideline 10.4 exists to ensure visitors using some older screen readers (which don't recognize empty form fields) - can fill in web forms. Unfortunately, if I add default text in my form fields I create problems for another set of...http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=57 Oralux: Audio GNULinux Distro for Vision Impaired Persons- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Here is an interesting Linux Distro for people with Visual impairments - just stumbled across it when looking for something else. The user turns on his PC, which boots up the CD, the cock Oralux sings... Then, the user selects his preferences using a vocal menu available in 5 languages. Oralux 0.6 proposes two desktops, Emacspeak and another one based on Yasr (pronounced Yas Er), a few multilanguages voice synthesizers, and is able to select a braille display or drive an external...http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=85 How to make client-side image maps accessible.- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Although client-side images are preferred over server-side image maps - as equivelent text can be provided for each image map 'hot-spot' - server-side image maps are sometimes necessary, e.g. when the active regions of a client-side image map cannot be easily defined using an available geographic shape. In such cases the answer is to provide redundant text links relating to each link provided by the server side image map. The following markup example is typical of the code used to...http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=86 Develop your sites for a standard compliant browser first then modify for IEWin- (Found June 24, 2008 ) This weeks tip: develop your sites for a standard compliant browser first, and then add workarounds for Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows (MSIEWin). I picked up this tip while reading through, 'Throwing Tables Out the Window', by Douglas Bowman; an article about how he used CSS to re-do the layout of the Microsoft home page. Instead of concentrating on getting your design to work in Internet Explorer on the PC (the most popular web browser), he recommends that you do all your initial.http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=87 How to make your pages validate when they include urls with ampersands in them.- (Found June 24, 2008 ) At some point you will run your web page through the W3C validator and get the error, "unknown entity section"; this is due to the presence of ampersands (&'s) in page link urls. The validator assumes that this is an error because it expects an ampersand to be the beginning of an entity. I had this very problem myself when creating the weblog links for my own CMS. For me the solution was simple; I just get the CMS script to turn all ampersands into their equivalent entities....http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=88 |