A Web Design and Development Blog
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
Thanks to everybody who came along to the inaugural Multipack Presents. My slides of ARIA are below.
Thanks to my fellow presenters Bruce and Stuart for entertaining talks on HTML 5 and Javascript! And to Campaign Monitor for the sponsorship (great pizza)!
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
On the 21st of February at the offices of One Black Bear, I’ll be part of Multipack Presents.
Along with Bruce and Stuart, I’ll be talking about emerging standards. In my case it’ll be WAI ARIA, emerging techniques for improving the accessibility of Javascript-based Rich Internet Applications.
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
Over at Opera Developer Network (which is called ODIN, how cool is that?), Bruce reports that Target has settled in the class action brought by the National Federation for the Blind. In essence a good result in that:
Target shall ensure [...] that blind guests using screen-reader software may acquire the same information and engage in the same transactions as are available to sighted guests with substantially equivalent ease of use.
As Bruce points out, it’s visual-impairment specific, so it’s not a win for all kinds of accessibility. Though it does mention Jim Thatcher doing yearly assessments of their accessibility as well, and as far as I can see that looks more general. Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how this shakes things up stateside and if it has a wider impact (Target’s e-commerce is provided by some outfit called Amazon).
In other news, it looks like JAWS 10 will support WAI ARIA Live Regions. Which is a step forward in accessibility for Javascript-based web apps and virtual-buffer issues. Of course it’s the bleeding edge, so it’ll take a while to trickle down to common usage… Another one to keep an eye on though. You can download the public beta and try it out (JAWS 9 license required).
© 2008 Matt Machell