April 17th, 2009, posted in Computers, Flash, Graphic Design, Standards, Web Design
Why You Need to be Aware
While at this time the federal government has not made it mandatory or criminal if you do not, the larger your company is the more likely it could face a civil trial. Target Corporation has been through a suit filed by the American Council of the Blind in which the ACB won $6 million dollars and forced Target to accommodate the blind and visually impaired on their website. The ACB isn’t suing everyone, but they are pushing to make Section 508 a civil rights law rather than a government regulation.
Section 508 subsection 1194.22 of the ADA is the portion of the law that addresses accessibility for things from computers to software to the internet. According to the law the only people required to implement Section 508 are those providing services or product to or on behalf of the government (federal, state and local). If your company provides a product or service to a private company that is contracting with the government and that product or service will be the contracted interface representing the government, then you are obligated to adhere by Section 508 as well.
If you are not in one of these situations, but have a consumer facing web site that MIGHT be used by someone with a disability you should be following the law.
So without further ado…
Do…
- Provide at least one font size larger than your default. Users can increase size with their browser, but if you provide a link you can do it without breaking design which increases usability.
- Provide a high contrast mode. If that majority of your text and links aren’t black or dark blue text on white, give the user this option. You can do white text on black, but limit this to menus or highlight areas as it is harder to read long text.
- Provide alternate, title, or long description text for all non-text elements with a message. This includes images conveying a message (not spacer or decoration), multimedia, and form fields. If the alternate text (alt) is longer than 50 characters, use the long description (longdesc).
- Use tables for displaying tabular data only. This means if you think the presentation is best in a spreadsheet, use a table.
- Provide a summary for all tables using the “summary” attribute.
- Better than alternate text, use labels on all form elements. Do this by adding the “for” attribute to the label with the value equaling the id of the field it ties to. If the label doesn’t work, put the title on the field.
- Provide a link at the top to skip repeat navigation for the keyboard navigators.
- Provide a link at the bottom to take the user to the top.
- Instead of using a drop down for multiple select items, use check boxes (have you tried multi-selecting a drop down using a keyboard to navigate?)
- Any emphasis made using color, should also be understood without color. Bold it, underline it, box it, but just add something other than color alone.
- Provide accessible text versions of multimedia presentations that sync with the presentation.
- Make your pages so that they make sense when no style sheet is applied. This means navigation at the top, followed by content. Use headers to separate your content like a outline.
- Provide redundant links if you use a server side image map. Better yet, use a client side image map or none at all.
- Provide a header row and header column to all tables. Make sure that all the data cells and header cells relate appropriately if there are two or more logical levels of headers.
- Title all frames so that they can be identified and navigated easily.
- Make sure that if your page flickers, that it is between 2Hz and 55Hz.
- Make sure that any items relying on scripting to display can also be accessed when scripting is turned off.
- Provide a method to reset or extend time limits if a timed response is required.
- Provide a link to any plug-ins or applets needed to view the content you provide. These should also be hosted on compliant pages and be compliant themselves.
- Provide a text only version of the site if no other accessible alternate is available.
- Test your project in prototype form before implementing it.
- Use sans-serif fonts for long sections of text. These read better than serif fonts like Times New Roman when on a screen.
Don’t…
- Know if something is accessible? Try using it with a screen reader like JAWS and you will know. Close your eyes and forget the mouse to see how you do.
- Put blue or red text on black or black on blue or red.
- Make a Flash only site. Provide a text based version.
Resources
September 19th, 2008, posted in Computers, Prose
The Death of an iPod
Just over eighteen months ago I purchased my second iPod, this one with video. It was to replace my ailing iPod Mini that only held a 5 hour charge, had a faulty click wheel and had trouble syncing. The Mini lasted 30 months before reaching this state. Shortly after buying my iPod with video, I started noticing skipping in the middle of my songs. Sometimes it would skip places in the song, but more often it would jump to another song. The tracks played fine in iTunes so I returned to the Apple Store and the Geniuses there look at it. Apple promptly replaced it and claimed it was a hard drive about to fail that was causing the issues. I continued to have periodic issues with the new iPod but mostly on tracks that had skipped previous to the replacement.
July 30th, 2008, posted in Computers, Downloads, iPhone
Apple’s update of their .Mac online presence and syncing software has received numerous critiques since it’s launch earlier this month. People have struggled with the service being up and lost mail. I struggled with getting it to work for a few days until I stumbled across a solution in the forums that even the Apple techs didn’t have me try. Since then things have been pretty smooth with the exception of calendars.
July 29th, 2008, posted in Computers, Enlightenment, Prose, iPhone
Sunday my phone needed a charge. When this happens I plug my iPhone into the computer and put on my headset so I can walk around my house and still talk. The headset was bugging me that day so I put it in my shirt pocket. I proceeded to eat lunch and naturally spilled on my shirt. Since Sunday is a laundry day in my house, I dropped the shirt into the washing machine with the next load.
July 29th, 2008, posted in Web Design, iPhone
I have been a fan of Apple for a while. I don’t consider myself a fan boy as while I do get wrapped up when Steve Jobs is pitching new wares, I easily see through the RDF after his presentations. But one of the reasons I like Apple so much is that when something goes wrong they are ready and willing to help fix it. I haven’t had any major calamities requiring losing a computer for weeks to a repair facility, but I have had a number of issues requiring Genius Bar attention and it has been easy to deal with.
July 7th, 2008, posted in Computers
Many probably don’t consider this, but I had to this weekend. Over the holiday weekend, my phone performed as needed until Sunday when I went to call my tennis loving mother about the epic battle between Nadal and Federer at Wimbeldon. My call appeared to go through as I could see the little timer counting my time connected, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. Upon further examination, I didn’t hear any of the little clicks either. It rang, but that was the only audio coming out. I thought for sure my phone was dying.
June 19th, 2008, posted in Computers, Downloads, Standards, Web Design
If you haven’t been paying attention to the interwebs lately, this has been a big week for the browser wars. Opera 9.5 launched as well as Firefox 3. I have been a fan of Firefox for a long time and recently have become a huge fan of the extension Firebug for it.
In my current work environment we are building Java web applications and while I can and do run them locally, it can take a while to put the build up, take it down, modify it and put it back up. Since most of my work is front end focused I spend a lot of time in Firebug testing things before taking the build down to update.
When Firefox 3 launched on Tuesday, I diligently downloaded and installed it. I played around with it a little and saw that Firebug wasn’t updated for it yet. So I packed it away and pulled out Firefox 2 and got back to work. Then I started having tabbing issues. I have had to restart my PC three times because my tab button on my keyboard stops working in Firefox 2. Additionally, if I am in Firebug’s CSS live editing window and highlight a property it automatically deletes the property when I tab out. Becoming increasingly frustrated I dug around and saw they now have Firebug updated for Firefox 3 but in a beta format (although is it beta 3). so like a good little boy, I installed the new extension and booted Firefox 2 back up.
One of the beautiful things about Firebug is the ability to turn on and off various properties. However in the new beta on Firefox 3 this is causing the entire browser to crash. So here I come Firefox 2, wait what is this…the new beta is incompatible with Firefox 2 BUT deletes the old version on install. Come on guys, if you are going to not be functional, you can at least not touch my previous install.
By the way, what is with Firefox 3 not importing all my bookmarks from Firefox 2 on install? It captured my IE and Opera ones, but ignored the ones I actually use.
April 29th, 2008, posted in Computers, Downloads, Landscape, Photography, Portfolio, Web Design
I just received a notification from Schmap.com saying they want to use my Cleveland National Forest image for an upcoming edition of the application. The terms look ok even though there is no pay. They do link to my Flickr account and only use a thumbnail, so I will use the publicity.
April 22nd, 2008, posted in Buddhism, Computers, Enlightenment, Parenting, Philosophy, Politics
Happy Earth Day! I thought I would take a few moments to detail those things that I have been working hard on this year to do in order to contribute to a greener world. I am not going to preach on global warming as I think we are only beginning to understand what is happening.
This past year I have been conscious of everything that I do and its effect on my surroundings. As such I have take the following actions and I encourage you to take similar ones for yourself.
March 10th, 2008, posted in Computers, Downloads, Project Management
Last week I wrote about how Google had released a tool to sync your Outlook and Google calendars. I had some concerns:
- It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
- It only syncs the primary Google calendar.
Well it looks like issue number one no longer exists. I am not really clear if this an update or just a case of poor documentation, but looking around today I found out how to make this work. Item number two on this page explains it in detail but the short is this:
- You must first associate your Outlook email address (this is my corporate address) with your Google account.
- When setting up the syncing program on your Windows machine, enter this address as the one to sync AND NOT your Google Gmail address as you would think.
- Run sync. This will add all of your Outlook appointments that you either organized or are a guest on to your Google Calendar. It will also pull down all your appointments on your Google Calendar primary calendar and place them in your Outlook calendar.
While still lacking in the ability to sync multiple calendars from Google to Outlook or to add to Google those meetings set up on a distribution group, this is much closer to the holy grail and accomplishes what I was trying to do. I now have the ability to automatically sync my work calendar (in Outlook) to Google which I then use the iCal subscription URL to import to my Mac’s calendar and sync to my iPhone. Now I have my complete calendar (with a few minor exceptions) on my phone (my true goal) and accessible via the web if I don’t have my phone (Google Calendar).
