After being out on beta for a while now, Opera 7 has now been released in 42 different languages as a finished product. The browser promises better standards support and a new navigation method called ‘Spatial Navigation’ – trialled in their interactive TV browsers, it allows users to move left,right, up and down across the page using the arrow keys rather than simply following the defined tabbing order.
The Illinois Center for Instruction Technology Accessibility (CITA) is offering an online course covering accessible web design. Course title is: Designing Universally Accessible WWW Resources for People with Disabilities. The course lasts just under three months and looks pretty thorough.
The University of Washington’s DO-IT program have put together a series of videos, some covering the topic of accessibility. Of particular interest are Accessible Web Design and Computers and People with Mobility Impairments.
“Dear Ian,
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) would like to invite you to become part
of the WaSP team. As you likely know, we are an all-volunteer
organization, and we realize your time is valuable. We are greatly
interested in your participation because you’ve shown an interest and
dedication to the subject of Web Standards.”
OK, so it was a standard letter – but only for a handful of invitees – so I’m honoured to be invited to take part. Not sure what it will involve as yet, but it’s nice to be asked all the same. Accessify will still be updated on a regular basis folks. More news as I get it …
One for all you developers out there. If you are in the habit of using favelets to check for accessibility or to validate your HTML/XHTML and so on, you will probably be interested to hear about Checky – a validator plug-in for Mozilla. I have installed it myself and found it to be .very handy.
Here are some further screenshots. It will validate using 18 different services, and more are promised soon.
There’s a new article on this site: Checking your pages for accessibility with Opera. Like the title says, this tutorial demonstrates how you can use just a humble browser to see how well your web pages hold up to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. As ever, feedback is appreciated.
New on Builder.com today: ‘Tips for managing Section 508 testing‘ written by William T Kelly, aimed at the project management types out there.
Apple recently released a new browser called Safari. We know that it doesn’t render this site properly, and this will be fixed very soon. However, that’s not the purpose of this post. Are you a Safari user? Or are you a Macintosh user that has yet to try out Safari? We would really love to find out what you think about Safari’s support for accessibility features. How does it compare with Mozilla, Opera and IE? If you have any thoughts, please get in touch – we’d love an article if you’re feeling generous!
Kicking off the reviews section of this site, we take a look at the Glasshaus book ‘Constructing Accessible Web Sites’. It’s not a brand new book, but it is new to me.
For those who didn’t get Joe Clark’s book for Chrismas (Hello Nicky!), you can read it piece-by-piece online. Joe is posting the book online and has put out two chapters so far. Read Chapters 1 and 2 of Building Accessible Websites