Buzz Archives for March 2004
Opera, IBM voice
ZDNet this week, offers up news where Standards meets Accessibility and Emerging technology with “Opera's browser finds its voice,” by Matt Loney and Paul Festa. Opera is adding voice control to its browser, enabling users to browse the Web and fill in voice-enabled Web forms by talking to their PC. ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Accessibility, Browsers, HTML/XHTML, Web Standards (general)
- Are you X7.45 compliant?
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The folks at no-http.org would like to see the ubiquitous 'http:' removed from the beginning of all our URLs. So instead of linking to "http://example.com/" in your pages, you would link to just "//example.com/". This is actually quite legal. RFC 1808 specifies that URLs beginning with '//' should just inherit ...
By Anders Pearson | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- What’s the point… an over-emphasis on technique?
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Jason Fried of 37Signals suggests gingerly that too much attention is being paid to the minute details of Web site implementation, and in doing so he rang an alarm bell loudly enough to distract me from severe personal distress. He explained, as part of a SXSW Interactive recap: “I’d like ...
By Ben Henick | Filed in Usability
- A Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev
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Read it, read it again. Save it. Print it. Highlight key points. (there are many) The End-All Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev by Heidi Pollock (webmonkey, 5 Mar 2004)It takes one gigantabig tutorial to teach you how to build sites for all those itty, bitty devices.One of the better pieces (I have encountered) that ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Design, Mobile, Usability, Web Standards (general)
- Code As I Say, Not As I Do
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The World Wide Web Conference is entering its thirteenth year, preparing for yet another round of action-packed W3-related developer events and presentations. Funny thing, though: their site's woefully invalid, inaccessible, and well nigh unusable. Littered with alt-bereft images and deprecated HTML, one wonders just how such a self-described prestigious series ...
By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in Accessibility, HTML/XHTML, Usability, Validation
- Optimizing, Accessibility
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A new feature at Digital Web Magazine, Optimizing Your Chances with Accessibility, by Brandon Olejniczak, explains how following the recommendations and guidelines for accessible web authoring will increase traffic and web site page rank on search engines. Brandon writes:A second important but often neglected benefit of accessible Web sites ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Accessibility
- Amaya 8.3 Ready and Waiting
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The W3C's Amaya browser and authoring tool version 8.3 has just been released. It's available as binary downloads for a variety of platforms, and the source code is available. New features include improved CSS support and support for MathML.
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Authoring Tools
- It’s Over for Eolas
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In what hopefully will be the last time we ever have to hear the name, Eolas is in the news again. The US Patent Office has heeded the call of the W3C and invalidated the patent. Eolas has 60 days to appeal, but we'll keep our fingers crossed that they ...
- A Denmark Standards Survey
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Soren Johannessen of Denmark undertook the task of surveying how many governmental, national, municipal authorities follow the W3C Standards for HTML/XHTML markup in Denmark. Gathering the list of 2033 sites from an alphabetical listing at the Danish Ministry for Science, Technology and Innovation (online list), Soren began testing ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- WYSIWYG CSS Editors Coming of Age?
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The good folks at westciv have released a new version of their style editor, Style Master 3.5. I took some time to work with it today and was rather impressed. There are some super cool features such as a browser support watcher, multiple ways of viewing and applying properties and ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Authoring Tools, CSS, Design
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
WCAG 2.0 is a W3C Recommendation
By Matt May | December 11th, 2008
After 9.5 years of work, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 have reached W3C Recommendation status. On behalf of the WaSP Accessibility Task Force, I’d like to welcome WCAG 2 officially into the pantheon of Web standards.
I think this tweet by caledoniaman sums up the level of anticipation:
WCAG 2.0 and a new Guns ‘n’ Roses album in the same year. What’s the world coming to.
Interesting comparison. They’ve each had about as many pre-releases. In any case, I can say, having spent over 8 years with it, that WCAG 2 is not as entertaining as Chinese Democracy. But I do think that it’s better equipped to stand the test of time.
If I had to pick one thing I’m most happy about, I’d say it’s that the HTML- and text-centrism in WCAG 1 is largely gone. In its place is a much more flexible (dare I say robust?) concept of accessibility-supported technology. So when newer technologies can show themselves to be directly accessible, they too can be used in WCAG 2-conformant content.
Over the years, many people have conflated “WCAG-conformant” with “accessible,” and that’s led to people making statements like: “Don’t use JavaScript–it’s inaccessible.” That’s bad for everyone, from users with disabilities who actually can work with JavaScript (which is to say, the vast majority), to Web designers and developers, to policymakers, to those developing new technologies.
With WCAG 2, “Don’t use x” is no longer valid. (Was it ever?) It is now up to you, the developer, to work on the direct accessibility of your content, no matter what technology you choose. I believe we’re about to experience a new wave of accessible design techniques, as a result.
But first, we need to flush “Don’t use x” out of our system. Some are accustomed to saying it about anything they’re not comfortable with. That’s only holding accessible design back. It’s time to learn what’s out there, today, and use it in everyday Web design. It’s time to make everyone’s Web more accessible. Have a look at the WCAG 2.0 Recommendation, and its supporting material. Then, start thinking about what a more accessible Web could be. We still have a lot of work to do.
Filed in Accessibility, Accessibility TF, W3C/Standards Documentation, Web Standards (general) | Comments (8)