May 6, 2003
The W3C has published a Working Draft for version 2 of their widely referenced Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Working Drafts are generally unstable and subject to change, so you should not start adjusting your accessibility techniques until it becomes a recommendation. The current recommendation is WCAG 1.0.
However, the Working Draft does give developers an opportunity to review possible advancements in the field of web accessibility and welcomes feedback on the document to w3c-wai-gl@w3.org.
May 1, 2003
New articles, new features, new shoes
Some minor updates to let you know about. First of all, Acrobot has a new option now. Because IE does not support the <abbr> tag, you can now get the tool to automatically write in an additional <span> tag.
For more information about why you would do this, read the notes on this site or for more detailed notes (and an alternative solution that removes the need for separate <span> tags) read Marek Prokop’s article ‘Styling <abbr> in IE‘.
Secondly, we have a new article on the site. Well, I say new, but it’s actually republished now that the six month quarantine is up! If you haven’t read it before, I hope you enjoy Nigel Peck’s Introduction to Accessible Web Design.
Oh, I lied about the new shoes bit.
April 30, 2003
Take care with your captioning …
About time there was something fun on these pages, eh?
If you are involved with closed captioning for deaf users, you might take note of this page: Captioning
glitch on national TV news program transforms an "enlarged prostate" into something considerably more exciting.
"We initially refused to believe an alert ABC News fan who told us that the closed captions for the 6:30 p.m. Tuesday feed of Peter Jennings’s "World News Tonight" informed viewers that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was ‘in the hospital for an enlarged prostitute.’
But yesterday a network spokeswoman confirmed the wording — provided by ABC’s Pennsylvania-based closed-captioning contractor. Apparently the typist hit the wrong key, or keys. The glitch was fixed for the 7 p.m. feed.
‘We strive for perfection,’ ABC’s Cathie Levine told us, ‘but when you’re typing that fast, there are occasional mistakes. We regret the error.’
Greenspan was home recovering yesterday from prostate surgery, said his wife, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. As for that ‘enlarged prostitute,’ Mitchell told us: ‘He should be so lucky.’"
April 29, 2003
Submit to acrobot at the click of a button
New in the Accessibility Checking Favelets page: a favelet that lets you quickly highlight text on a page and submit it to Acrobot. Highlight some text on your web page (or perhaps some text that you are
entering into a <textarea>, for example a Blogger or
MovableType post), then run this favelet - the highlighted text will be
passed through the Acrobot,
converting all your acronyms and abbreviations. Please note: this has
been tested in IE5
and IE6 on Windows
but does not always appear to work with <textarea>s
in Mozilla (although any other text highlighted on the page does work
OK).
Thanks to Matt for providing!
DRC Briefing report
This post was so long it was almost an article in itself, so guess what I did? My report on the DRC briefing can now be found here.
April 28, 2003
Request for screen shots
Since the last redesign of this site, we’ve not been able to see how well it renders in some browsers and operating systems. Some we’ve seen but don’t have screen shots for, others we can only guess at. If you are using anything other than a Windows-based (common) browser, please take a look at the supported browsers information. If you can supply a screen shot for any that are missing, that would be mighty fine - just mail it to accessify At yahoo dot co dot uk (sorry have to spell it out to avoid those nasty spam merchants latching on).
You’re all smashing super lovely people and I would thank you all personally if I could afford the air-fares.
Accessible Museum Website Award launched
The Museums Computer Group (MCG) is seeking nominations for the most accessible museum website of the year award. This is the first Jodi Mattes Access award and the winner will be announced at the RNIB (Royal National Institute of the Blind)’s Talking Images conference on 20th May 2003.
Criteria for the award will be usability and content accessibility. Technical compliance will be measured to level A of the Web Accessibility Initiative Guidelines. If entries are sufficient in number, there will be two prizes for ‘Best Large-scale Site’ and ‘Best Shoestring Project’ . Websites from all countries are eligible, but must contain some navigation and content in English.
April 25, 2003
Update to Acrobot
There’s been a bit of an update to Acrobot - the tool now has categories of acronyms that you can choose from. If you are a registered member, you can log in and add your own acronyms and abbreviations (or edit existing entries).
The tool still needs some extra work. Currently there is no duplication of acronyms/abbreviations, but if you do add a new one that conflicts with an existing entry, both will be accepted on the database, but when running a conversion, only the first entry will be used. This is on the ‘to-do’ list, folks!
I was also asked if I could provide the list in a machine-readable format. This is sort of answered here - a comma separated list. You’ll still need to copy and paste for the moment (unless someone can tell me how I can use an ASP variable to generate a separate .csv file on the server using ASP classic, not Dot Net).
Formal Accessibility Investigation Kicks off with Open Meeting
I know it’s short notice, but if you are in London (or thereabouts) on Monday
28th April, you should try to get along to the City University. The Disability Rights Commission is hosting a meeting to discuss the implications of their forthcoming investigation into accessibility of public service web sites.
More information about the briefing can be found here, and if you want to register (and assuming it’s not too late), here are the registration details required.
I’ll be there representing Nationwide, so if you want to say hello, just look for someone who looks like this (only with less hair).
Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seemlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.
Work on Amaya started at W3C in 1996 to showcase Web technologies in a fully-featured Web client. The main motivation for developing Amaya was to provide a framework that can integrate as many W3C technologies as possible. It is used to demonstrate these technologies in action while taking advantage of their combination in a single, consistent environment.
Amaya started as an HTML + CSS style sheets editor. Since that time it was extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents.
