Clearing out my Closet
Apologies to anyone who has e-mailed me in the last few weeks and not had a response - I am moving from one laptop to another and there are some messages that have blackholed or have been left on the old PC with notes to follow up. So, this post is a general list of things people have informed me about that I need to post up here, in no particular order (and likely to grow in next couple of days!).
- Birmingham Focus on Blindness - Jeremy Hurst tells us about a new site for visually impaired, developed by Slightly Different, to highlight the work of a
Birmingham (UK) based charity in an accessible way to enable
people with sight impairment to find out information about
the services offered on their behalf. Jeremy tells us: "We seized this project as an opportunity of demonstrating our
skills and abilities in the field of online accessibility.
Rather than just talk about it, we actually put our words
into practice as, by raising the bar, we have shown that the
combination of design, advanced functionality and true
accessibility is not only possible, but should be the way
ahead for the Internet. If more people took accessibility as
seriously as we do, the Internet would be a much better place
for everyone."[update: it seems that the site is a little too over-enthusiastic, as Tom Gilder points out on his weblog. Go on over and join in the commenting fun, folks]
- Rick Mason informs us about an Accessible Form Creator: "The HiSoftware Accessible Form Creator allows you to create forms for web sites containing all the additional markup required to make the forms accessible under Section 508 standards and the W3C WCAG 1.0 Priority 1-3 Guidelines".
So far, I have not tried this out but it looks fully featured and probably offers everything that our own tool does, if not more (although at 5.3Mb it may be a bit large to download for dial-up users)
- Design Idiocy at gov level? - Holly Marie tells us about a new system at The Whithouse that allows people to send mail to President Bush, but only if they’re willing to go through nine web pages: "Under a system deployed on the White House Web site for the
first time last week, those who want to send a message to President Bush
must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form
that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House
policy or differs with it." - quoted from NYTimes article [requires subscription]. - Westciv update course materials: Westciv released all new revised and updated editions of their widely
acclaimed standards-based web development courses (back in July, sorry been sitting on that one for a while). All Westciv courses come in downloadable self paced format. Students work
their way through guided exercises as they develop real world projects. - Oops: From one reader: "The popup window generator gives the following error:
‘Sorry - this tool does not work in Netscape 4 or Opera. The JavaScript used to dynamically create the code for pop-ups is standards-compliant. However, Netscape 4 is not standards compliant and Opera’s implementation of the Document Object Model (DOM) is very poor.’
As far as I’m aware the latest version of Opera (7) no longer has a poor DOM implementation. Is this being unduly restrictive?". This is correct - it probably could be made to work for Opera 7, so I either need to change the error message or re-work the tool. I don’t have the time to address this right now, but rest assured that I have it on my to-do list.