nortypig

The University of Texas has made a decision to close the Accessibility Institute, founded and led with distinction by the late Dr. John Slatin. Sign the petition to save it.

Firefox Throttle is a Firefox plugin (Windows only) that allows you to do a number of things, one of which is to demonstrate exactly how slow 56K modem users will be viewing your websites. It does a bunch of other stuff you might also find useful.

A brilliant screencast on YouTube - Importance fo HTML Headings for Accessibility - demonstrating the importance of marking up your web pages with correct headings and how it affects the accessibility of your site for screen reader users. Demonstration is a good way to get this across to people.

E-Access Blog’s post Life In the Post-Guideline Age relates back to a statement by Joe Clark. As Joe points out in the comments, good developers already know this stuff without tomes of guidelines.

I think of this as a pyramid. Web accessibility is the foundation. Usability by disabled people is the next layer. And both of these underpin the ultimate goal: excellent user experiences by disabled people (and everyone).E-Access Bulletin

The BBC have removed the hCalendar microformat from their site due to accessiblity issues with the ABBR design pattern.

Roberto Baca has some expanded conversation to add to Andy Rutledge’s article titled the Employable Web Designer. The world of the web designer isn’t a specialisation of graphic design at all, its far larger and more complex than designing posters that have buttons. The moment you add human perception, information and interaction (plus an array of technologies and sciences) then we’ve well and truely passed graphic design by the wayside. True, graphic design is a part of what we do but its a bigger, more complex picture.

Hijax: Progressive Enhancement with Ajax is Jeremy Keith’s contribution to the more responsible use of the XMLHttpRequest Object. Personally I’m coming to the conclusion that even Hijax isn’t worth the issues unless its for trivial enhancement only and even then after being dragged over hot coals in my yellow speedos. Back button, bookmarking, notification of updates for disabled and non-disabled users, and simply playing with user’s mental models based around a web history of page refreshes come to mind.

Chris Heilmann’s Easy Flickr interface makes our friend Flickr just a little more accessible.