Has Levin Alexander achieved the best
variant yet of the Fahrner Image Replacement technique? Go judge for yourself now, then comment on it in the forum. [Note this has already been mentioned in the forum, but not on this page before, so perhaps this method is new to you]
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!).
[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]
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)
For the People
("Bringing our world together, one voice at a time.") is
a voice chat service that’s worth checking out, not least because tomorrow they will be having a presentation by Gary Moulton from Microsoft’s accessibility division. You will need to join to take part (and hopefully there’s still time to do this, as the page reads "Most membership requests are processed within hours of their receipt, but please allow 72 hours to receive your confirmation of membership via Email before contacting us."). This is a great opportunity to ask someone from Microsoft about the issues that matter to you.
Just got an email from Watchfire regarding an upcoming free on-line seminar.
We thought your might find this seminar of interest, and wanted to extend you an invitation. This is a free hour-long webinar; all you need is a phone and a browser. To register, please click below.
Website Compliance with the UK’s DDA
August 21st, 2003
2:30 PM British Summer Time (BST)
9:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) North America
Did you know that if your website is not accessible you could be losing customers. Millions of disabled people, both in the UK and abroad, have billions of pounds to spend and they will go elsewhere if your site is inaccessible to them.
The UK Government estimates that there are 8.6 million people with some form of disability in Britain, with an estimated annual purchasing power of �40-�50 billion. By the year 2010, 40 percent of the UK population will be over 45 - the age at which the incidence of disability begins to increase significantly. However, many websites, most unwittingly, are discriminating against this large and potentially profitable group. What business can afford to ignore such an opportunity?
Companies providing services online in the UK are subject to new accessibility laws, following the publication of a Code of Practice. This Code of Practice addresses discrimination against people with disabilities in the UK and removes the uncertainty surrounding Web site accessibility.
Until now there has been ambiguity over the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, because the wording of the Act does not specifically mention Web services. The Code of Practice makes it clear, however, that any company providing services through a Web site has the same responsibilities as a company providing services any other way. And recently, the Disability Rights Commission has launched its first formal investigation in to Website accessibility.
Join Watchfire in this free seminar and learn:
This will be a 50-minute presentation, followed by a 10 minute Q&A session.
Register now for this free web seminar
Discussion of: Website Compliance with the UK’s DDA - Free Seminar
A new feature over at Dave Shea’s Mezzoblue, A Second Voice kicks off with an enjoyable article by disabilities rights activist Nic Steenhout entitled build it, and they will come. Good stuff…
IMG headings whilst keeping structural meaningFahrner Image Replacement and its even more accessible and semantically clean variants are certainly a huge step in the right direction when it comes to taking the separation of content and presentation almost to its very limits. However, for those who are not prepared to completely abdicate the use of the humble <img> tag for pretty headings, but who want to still maintain their documents’ structure semantically correct, here’s an intermediate solution: wrap the image in the correct heading tag.
Example: if you’re using a graphic as a heading, you could do far worse than writing it like so:
<h1><img src="blah.jpg" width="100" height="100" alt="I am a heading"></h1>
Of course this does not have the “purity” of markup of the CSS solutions, but it’s certainly better than merely sticking an <img> tag in your documents when it is more than “just an image”…and it can be used for more than just headings…
![[Digital Web logo]](/images/dw_accessify.gif){kind=small}
Folowing on from the post the other day regarding Image Replacement, Digital Web features an article by Dave Shea - In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement.
“The number one problem is that screen readers render display: none, hiding the content which the image is meant to replace. We can�t even do so much as provide alt text to compensate. Any accessibility advocate worth their copy of JAWS would tell you something�s fishy, and they�d be right.”
Congratulations to all the authors of Separating Content from Presentation whose book is to be given a re-print with revised content - and special congratulations to Dave Shea at Mezzoblue whose CSS Zen Garden will be a featured case study.
I read about this moments after explaining to someone in my place of work about how much we could do regarding style switching if our web pages were table free, using the Zen Garden as a case in point. The strange thing is I said to my colleague: "I guarantee, this will be featured in the next batch of design/markup books released as a perfect example of separating style/structure".
I’m off to buy a lottery ticket, I’m feeling lucky.
AccessifyForum.com is now live, head on over and discuss anything and everything related to Web Accessibility, or use the Coffee Break forum for general chat and get to know others in the Accessibility community.
If you look at this site using a CSS-compliant browser, you will see a logo at the top of every page. If your browser does not support CSS, you will get a standard heading - an <h1> (as in this example, Netscape 3). The technique relies on some hacks which can fail under certain circumstances (if you have images disabled but CSS enabled, you will not see the image, nor will you see that hidden <h1> text).
Spotted at Simon Willison’s site today - some alternative ways of doing this that seem to offer a less hacky approach (they negate the need for a superfluous <span> tag), but we still have an issue if images are disabled - you don’t get the text to fall back on, and because the images are generated as background images, not inline, you have no alt attribute to rely on.
Take a look at the alternatives - but think, can you solve this last puzzle? Can you think of a way that allows this level of device independence while not causing the accessibility issue under those circumstances? Winner receives a sticky bun.
