Thursday, 13 June, 2002
The home page of this site is now laid out entirely with CSS. Aside from the calendar, no tables have been used, that I know about anyway. I've only tested it in IE/Mac and Mozilla/Mac so I'll have to wait for a chance to check from Windows to see how badly IE6 botches the CSS. 11:13:01 PM
I'm in the midst of some scary redesign. If the site looks weird, that's why. 10:39:08 PM
I learned about this weblog via scripting.com today. Looks very interesting. Lately my job has taken me back into the realm of instructional design. Not in the actual-doing-ID world but in managing a project in which we are building technology to deliver learning. This dovetails quite nicely with the papers I wrote (and am still editing) on accessible online learning (trust me, I'll have a pointer when I have something to point to) and my recent work with the ADLCo-Lab on a variety of SCORM projects. This is actually quite an exciting time and I'm thrilled to be using my graduate degree for something. So, finding this weblog was great timing. 4:02:13 PM
This is really amazing. They're getting closer and closer to being able to find planets like Earth. 3:00:50 PM
In his latest DaveNet, Dave Winer gets accessibility. He says that the disabled don't want accessibility, they want to use the web. Exactly right. Accessibility is not anything different from usability but rather a critical part of it. True accessibility means a website is usable to everyone, not just the 'abled." After a year of mucking about with Section 508 and how the government typically handles it (read: badly) it's great to see that people are starting to understand this.
My favorite example of accessibility gone horribly wrong is the way the government used to implement one of the critical Section 508 websites. Every single graphic, no matter how mundane or useless, was marked up with alt text. Why? Because Section 508 says so. What you had, if you used a screen reader, was something like the following:
A Blue spiral on the upper left corner with a blue line leading into the title of the site. A graphic with the title of the site reading "Section 508 Resources" with a blue line running through the letters and over to another blue spiral on the right side...
It went on like that for a long time. How on Earth is that accessible to anyone?
What I preach is usable accessibility. Design a good UI for the screen reader users as well as the MSIE and Mozilla users. For the Mac people, the PC people, the Braille people, etc. Don't design for one and then retrofit. Design from the ground up keeping in mind all users.
And the secret? Following standards is the key. When I started doing my sites in xhtml and CSS and really following the best practices, it became so much easier to do this. 11:34:34 AM
I got a reply to my problem with radio. By running a script, the internal refrences were fixed and now Radio is behaving itself again. I'll give Userland credit, they're pretty good in responding to help. Turns out, I tripped over a known issue. 10:58:11 AM
What's happening in this picture? I'm using MacOS X 10.1.5 with Silk 1.1. Notice how the text in Internet Explorer gets *thicker* as it moves right? Weird! 10:55:31 AM
Last update: 2002/06/30; 19:04:43 .
