The RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People), in conjunction with The Paciello Group (pronounced ‘pass-ee-ello’, not ‘patchy yellow’ as I’d always assumed!), has announced a beta release of the Surf Right toolbar, an addition for Internet Explorer that reveals numerous settings that are tucked away in various options in the browser and places them right there, right in your face, big button style.

The Surf Right Toolbar is really for anyone who wants to adjust the way they view content on the web to make it easier to read. This could include people with mild disabilities, the elderly, people with reading problems, cognitive problems, using dial-up, photosensitivity and so on.

It will certainly find some receptive fans, although I’m still dubious whether someone who does not know where to change the settings in the browser as-is will be likely to download and install a toolbar like this (on the basis that if they don’t normally tinker with settings, they’re not likely to install this kind of thing) but I am happy to be proven wrong; besides, the RNIB are in an ideal position to promote a tool like this.

You can download the Surf Right toolbar here; more details about the toolbar on RNIB’s blog here.

But now it’s history. The Perfect Popup is dead, long live The Perfect Pop-up.

After many years of sitting there advising about how to create accessible pop-up windows using inline event handlers (onclick), I have finally got around to updating this article using unopbtrusive JavaScript and also the accompanying Popup Window Generator (the two go very much hand in hand).

Please do take a look. If you can spot anything wrong with it, or perhaps you want to make a suggestion or two on how you can improve it, then please feel free to add something to the comments on this post.

• The Perfect Pop-up (article)
• Pop-up window generator (in the Tools and Wizards section)

This little dev tool seems to have gone down quite well, so I thought I should let you know about a small update to it. As it has been requested a few times, I’ve added in the following options:

1. Choose the doctype for the generated markup
2. Choose wether indents in the generated markup use a space or tab

I’m resisting the urge to add too much more in - it was deliberately kept simple - but one other feature that’s been requested is an option to include comments after each closing div to state which div is being closed down. I actually tried to do this but got in a bit of a pickle trying to get it to work. The good news is that I’ve had an offer to ‘have a poke around and get that working’ for me, so this may be added very soon.

You can find the Markup Maker here. As before, please add all comments here.

This is another of those little tools that I put together primarily for my own use but you may find it of great use, hence it’s gone into the Accessify toolbox.

Markup Maker takes a simple list of page ids that you enter and converts it to a valid XHTML document. It also creates the shell of the CSS that you need so you can start to apply styles/layout etc.

If you like the tool, please do link to it, Digg it or add to del.icio.us

If you have any comments or questions, please add them to my personal blog (just trying to keep comments in one place)

Enjoy!

Due to various writing commitments (none of which, rather evidently, include this site right now!) I have a backlog of emails to respond to which just keeps on growing. I managed to work through a few of them today and noticed a couple of requests for plugs on the site that, while overdue, I though I should share anyway (just in case you hadn’t heard):

• Web Accessibility Toolbar for Opera - the link pretty much says it all. The teams from Web Accessibility Tools Consortium, Vision Australia and The Paciello Group have ported the useful toolbar that they built for windows/IE. (Congratulations to Steven, also, who’s making the move over to The Paciello Group - and London - in the near future. Any chance of an exchange deal, Steven?)
• Ability panels goes live - The site blurb reads “ABILITY is a group of online panels for people with disabilities, their family members. advocates, and other stakeholders. Participants in our research have the opportunity to make their voices heard by participating in groundbreaking Market Research, Mystery Shopping, Surveys, and other specialized studies.” The company behind this venture are looking to recruit people with disabilities nationwide in the US. Want to get involved?