Unintentionally Blank

I have been working on a plugin for WordPress recently that involves the use of custom fields to store data on events and output them on your blog in the hCalendar microformat. I am a big fan of microformats, I look forward to being able to use a program to retrieve contact details, event details or other bits of information solely from a well marked up web page and that is why I wanted to contribute with a plugin that helps people use them.

I am also a big fan of accessibility on the Internet too, so try to imagine my surprise when I came across Bruce Lawson and James Craig’s article on the Web Standards Project about hCalendar’s inaccessible dates. Two movements on the web are now working against each other? Are we pushing in opposite directions and still trying to achieve the same result? Here’s my opinion.

Continue reading “Aren’t Microformats Supposed To Be Accessible?” »

Yesterday I found out that IBM were taking matters of accessibility to a new level by developing a browser that helps the blind and partially sighted deal with mutlimedia content. Today I discover that Amazon is going to collaborate with the National Federation of the Blind in order to “make more improvements for both our sighted customers and those customers who use screen access software to browse and shop the Internet.”

Continue reading “Accessibility Matters To Amazon” »

According to the BBC, IBM are set to release a web browser specifically for blind and partially sighted users. The aim of the Accessibility Browser is to give access to and control over multimedia content embedded in websites to those who can’t use a mouse for browsing.

Screen readers and self-talking browsers are not able to deal with video and animation, some of which starts playing as soon as a page is loaded.

This often interferes with the synthesised speech output from the screen-reader software.

Using the A-Browser, a vision-impaired person can control media content by using predefined shortcut keys, rather than having to look for the control buttons using a mouse.

Continue reading “Accessibility Browser From IBM - Helps Blind “See” Web Video” »

Congratulations to Tony Blair, the owner of one of the 3 websites to reach the minimum accessibility standards of the WACG in the recent accessibility review by Nomensa commissioned by the UN as part of its International Day of Disabled Persons.

Continue reading “Quicklink: “Most Websites Failing Disabled”” »

The Mobile Data Association has recently shown the steady rise in the usage of mobile phones to access the internet. Opera have celebrated more than 5 million active users of Opera Mini and over 1 billion page views by the mobile phone based browser (Source).

What Does This Mean For You?

This isn’t a problem for you if your website is validly and semantically marked up to the standards of our friends the W3C. In fact, it is a bonus, the use of mobile phones to browse the internet means people have more opportunity to find your site and become regular readers. However, if your site is hiding dodgy code, it may not be displaying well at all on these miniature screens. And if your page isn’t marked up and laid out well then you could be turning off your potential mobile viewers.

Continue reading “The Mobile Web Users Cometh, Are You Ready?” »