Looking to learn more about developing for the Mobile Web? How about giving W3C’s online course Introduction to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices a shot?
This course is an updated version of a course that’s been run several times over the past years – three times last year actually. Read more about why you should attend the course and browse the details of the course on W3C’s site.
Posted in Mobile Web.
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The latest set of improved and new features to the WebKit Web Inspector are really great. I mean really great as in “I’m not so sure how much I’ll be using Firebug anymore.”
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Whenever I hold workshops or lectures on web development, I talk a lot about Progressive enhancement. To me it is the obvious and only sensible way of building websites and web applications.
With that said, you can bet I was very pleased to learn that Designing with Progressive Enhancement was being worked on. A whole book covering the subject was very promising, and the previews and code examples on the Designing with Progressive Enhancement book site raised my expectations.
Posted in Accessibility, Reviews, Web Standards.
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It is a rare day at work when I don’t do anything related to forms. Be it creating forms from scratch, modifying existing forms, handling user interaction with them, whatever. I work with forms a lot. So that’s why one of the things in HTML5 I’m looking forward to the most is the overhaul of the elements and attributes used to create forms.
Among other form-related things, HTML5 adds a whole bunch of new values for the input element’s type attribute:
searchtelurlemaildatetimedatemonthweektimedatetime-localnumberrangecolorPosted in HTML 5.
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I recently came across an interview with Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, where he among other things talks about why you can’t really get a lot of work done at work:
The modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimised for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work, they are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about – it’s interruptions.
He’s very right, unfortunately. Noise and interruptions are what most offices are filled with these days. We’re all (well, most of us) part of it, but I’m not sure what to do about it.
Posted in Productivity.
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About a year ago I posted a Quick Tip titled Specify each HTML document’s main natural language. The reason is that software like screen readers can use this info to adjust the way they speak text.
But do they really do that? Well, it depends. You need to use a screen reader that supports language switching and can speak the natural languages of the document you’re viewing. One example of when it works as expected is VoiceOver for the iPhone and for the iPod touch.
Posted in (X)HTML, Accessibility.
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Probably one of the most common accessibility oversights is neglecting to apply CSS to the :focus state of links whenever you style the :hover state. How much of a problem this oversight leads to for non-mouse users depends on what CSS is applied to the :hover state.
Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Quick Tips.
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One of the many great things about using a Mac as your development machine is VoiceOver, the screen reader that ships with every copy of Mac OS X. Testing your work in a screen reader is only a small part of building accessible websites, but it helps you understand the need for many accessibility guidelines.
To test your sites in VoiceOver you obviously need to know how to use it to navigate the Web. There are many, many keyboard shortcuts that can be used to control VoiceOver – way too many for me to learn them all by heart. So I’ve looked through Apple’s VoiceOver Getting Started guide and VoiceOver key-command chart (PDF file) and picked the commands I find most useful.
Posted in Accessibility, Apple, Mac.
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I bought Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on the day it was released, but didn’t gather enough courage to go ahead and install it until a week ago. Yep, it’s been collecting dust on my shelf for over six months.
Upgrading between major revisions of Mac OS X has bitten me several times in the past, mostly because I use my Mac as a web development machine. I need Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl, Ruby and a whole bunch of Ruby gems in working order, and it seems like major OS X updates almost always mess with those in one way or another.
Posted in Mac, Movable Type, PHP.
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All screen readers that I know of have keyboard shortcuts that allow the user to navigate within a web page by jumping from heading to heading. This can really speed things up when you want to skip to a particular section of a page.
Being able to navigate by headings would also be very useful to sighted people who do not use a mouse, but unfortunately very few web browsers offer this functionality. The only graphical web browser I know of that has such functionality built in is Opera, while Firefox can get it by way of an extension.
Posted in Accessibility, Browsers, Usability.
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