Category Archives: Front-end code

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.

Nested conditional comments

In a recent test with Internet Explorer's conditional comments, some of the more complex operators didn't seem to work. For example, trying to target IE 6 and 7 defensively, the 'and' operator didn't work. However, there is another solution.

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 gallery example as published, showing the 6 example pictures.

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.

Font-based layouts becoming fashionable?

Layouts are becoming an issue again. The (browser) landscape is changing, as are the fashion in layouts, but not really in unison. I can understand giving a greater weight towards design aspects, and maintaining the grid, however, I find the timing curious, as these changes seem likely to be obsolete soon.

CSS – the antithesis of frameworks

There has been a little buzz about some CSS libaries, such as Blueprint, although YUI's grids & other parts have been around for a while. I've kept an eye on these, but they have never seemed suited to CSS for one reason.

Usability enhancements with JavaScript

There are some things that are nice to add to a site that you don't actually want to put in the content. They should be automatically added, so that you can change them systematically across the whole site. You can use JavaScript to add useful things like highlights for external links and to make quotes clickable. Not new things, but a collection of some robust enhancements.

Responsibility for accessible content

A simple rule for good web sites: content is golden. In an accessibility context, structured content is golden. It a core responsibility of the site owner to ensure this is followed (not just the developer). When you examine this issue, you can then understand why few organisations will ever produce accessible PDFs.

XHTML disrupted by Mobile access

Screen shot of the XML error, lots of code.

I'm not sure whether to put this down to an issue with my (mobile) ISP, or whether it should count against using XHTML sent as application/xhtml+xml? I've recently found that even a well authored site using valid XHTML can display as an XML error in browsers that support XML mime types.