Category Archives: Accessibility
iPods get speech, Apple gets accessible
The new iPod nanos (4th generation) now have speech-enabled menus, so you don’t have to be able to see the screen to operate it. This is obviously a boon for the visualy impaired, but with my old iPod I quite often used it from my pocket, or whilst driving. Could …
Strange sIFR / screen-reader bug
I was writing a little accessibility article for .net magazine about text-replacement techniques, including sIFR. I was blithely saying that "yea, don't worry, it's fine" with a couple of caveats. But, rather than rely on memory I did a quick test, and discovered something strange. ABBR pattern accessibility
I'd been meaning to post on the microformat-accessibility issue, but Patrick Lauke just posted a great sumary. As a sort of +1, I'd just like to share what I would prefer as an accessibility aware developer. Where SEO and accessibility collide
Recently a link to a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) cheat sheet came across my radar, and I was curious what sort advice is given for SEO these days. I'm not an SEO expert, but I thought a short analysis of how SEO and accessibility overlap or conflict would be useful.
Galleries in WordPress 2.5
The recent (and quite significant) overhaul of Wordpress' admin area is very good, streamlining your blogging and making previously diffiicult things quite simple. One of the new features is the ability to automatically create a gallery within a post of all the picture uploaded to that post. I wasn't very happy with the code output for galleries, so I took it apart and tried to improve it. WCAG Samurai release errata
Joe Clark has released the final WCAG Samurai's errata, an update to the (almost) 9 year old Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 guidelines.
Voiceover 2 – a WebDev’s guide
VoiceOver has undergone a major update, this article looks at the new functions, and what that means for people browsing websites. I am not looking at VoiceOver in general, just how different aspects of web pages affect the experience when using VoiceOver. Accessibility findings vs recommendations
This article on newspaper site accessibility dropped into my inbox, from the author hoping to get some coverage from accessibility related sites. Whilst the aim is good (testing sites to increase the awareness of accessibility), I wouldn't be happy with the recommendations.
Voiceover HTML navigation updates
There were quite a few updates to the VoiceOver screen reader on OSX Leopard, not least of which was the new, very smooth voice "Alex". What will be of interest to developers is the new commands to help people navigate HTML. Comparing Tagged PDFs from Office and Acrobat
After my initial disappointment with the Office 2007 pluggin for creating PDFs, I've had some discussion with the Microsoft team, and a chance to do a bit more testing. This post compares the conversion of a simple Word 2007 document with the Office pluggin, Acrobat 8.1, and OpenOffice.