accessibility

I had the pleasure of heading over to Area 15 in NoDa on Oct 17th for the second edition of BarCamp Charlotte. BarCamp is a user-generated conference, which encourages attendees to pitch for their chance to present a session on a topic of their choice. “The name ‘BarCamp’ is a playful allusion to the event’s ...

Lately there have been a few high-profile websites (notably YouTube and Facebook) publicly announcing there intention to cease support for Microsoft’s stalwart web browser Internet Explorer 6. Many a web designer/developer will have whooped with joy when these news stories broke. Does this finally mean we can stop worrying about this troublesome piece of software? ...

I love a good buzzword. Two of the more recent ones in web design are these multi-syllabic beauties. Graceful Degradation and Progressive Enhancement. They both address the issue of the unknown quantity of the end-user’s browsing technology. Are they using the latest, greatest shiny browsers or are they keeping it retro (whether out of choice ...

I never thought I would say this but for once one spam mail had some interesting information. The email was from an event I went to a few years back and entered my name on their mailing list. Back then the discussion was about the possibilities of having a mobile website, which was hosted by ...

Web Directions North 08 wrapped up a few weeks ago and I have finally found time to write up my notes. As with dConstruct 2007, all of the speakers were excellent and although I didn’t get to see all of the presentations, here are my notes on most of them.

Recently, the San Francisco Federal court held that websites are required by California law to be accessible. The reason for this is that Target failed to make it’s website accessible to the blind. The Target site failed to provide alt tags for images, keyboard options for navigation and navigation headers. There seems to be differing ...

A few of us at Dusted had the opportunity to take a trip to Brighton for the dConstruct 2007 conference. The conference was extremely interesting and covered some topics that will definitely encourage great design for the user experience!

“Take a design… Put it in front of users. Change anything that doesn’t work. Repeat.” According to Jared Spool, customers don’t care about usability and design, it seems they are more interested in increased revenue and getting more business.

For many developers a gentle nudge is often needed to encourage the correct use of semantic (X)HTML, the nudge in this case is Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH). There is a POSH checklist for developers to follow and also some helpful resources. To keep on track just write meaningful markup and put presentation to one ...

An outstanding tool for visualising colour theory, ColorJack: Sphere can be used to create colour schemes or to see how different types of colour-blindness can effect the user’s experience. Also available as an OS X Widget for Dashboard.

One of the drawbacks of web 2.0 apps is that the limitations of (X)HTML can cause usability and accessibility problems. The W3C’s standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) looks to address those limitations.