The first place to look for information is in the section of the manual where you least expect to find it.
You are currently browsing the yearly archives for 2005
XHTML2 Draft backtracks on accesskeys
The ACCESSKEY element within HTML 4 and XHTML 1 has long been the subject of some argument. Intended as a navigational enhancement for keyboard navigators, it became apparent that, at best, it was shunned by users and, at worst, could cause conflicts with keyboard bindings in other user agents.
For those unfamiliar with the background, I strongly recommend a perusal of John Foliot’s articles on the subject.
Ain’t Life Fun?
It may have seemed rather quiet around here lately but there is a reason for that. All hell has been breaking loose behind-the-scenes!
One of my most annoying (recent) problems involves my left wrist. Some time in late June, I developed tenosynovitis – a condition in which a tendon becomes inflamed. Having done the whole “rest, anti-inflammatories and wrist splint” thing, I was eventually offered some treatment which involved having a steroid injection into the painful area with a view to settling the inflammation down and I duly accepted.
So a few weeks ago, my wrist was injected with a local anaesthetic, DMI (the steroid)… and something else. The “something else” was bacterial!
Lists and Screen Readers
Over the past few years, and especially following Mark Newhouse’s article, Taming Lists, on A List Apart, usage of the styled lists within markup seems to have increased dramatically – particularly within the creation of site navigation menus. But do all styled lists offer the same level of accessibility?
AOL’s Bizarre Anti-Spam Approach
It looks like AOL at up to their old tricks again.
I’ve never used AOL (I’m not that stupid) but I understand that their default email client includes a “This Is Spam” button which their users are encouraged to hit every time they receive what appears to be junk email. The application then sends out an auto-generated spam report to AOL.
In-page links and IE6
If you are already aware of accessibility issues, it is highly likely that you may also be sensitive to the problems that long pages can create for keyboard navigators. In an effort to increase accessibility, you may well be providing in-page links on long, or complex, pages that are intended to allow keyboard navigators to jump quickly from one section of the page to another without having to press the TAB key repeatedly.
If this sounds like you, then you need to visit Jim Thatcher’s site now!
“Switch To Firefox”
Switching to Firefox from another open application, using Dragon, can be extremely difficult as, normally, the Firefox window defaults to the title of the web page currently loaded.
Not only does this mean that you have to do try and dictate something like:
switch to web-page-with-incredibly-long-name
but, 9 times out of 10, you can’t even see the full name when Firefox has been minimised to the taskbar. So you end up either making wild guesses or trying to navigate labouriously using keyboard shortcuts.