A computer's attention span is as long as its power cord.
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Joe Clarke Micropatronage Project
Joe Clark is seeking funding through micropatronage whilst he starts up a research project.
Micropatronage is a form of fundraising in which many donors give small amounts of money. People can donate as much or as little as they want to support Joe for a limited period of time (nominally, four months) as he tries to raise about $7 million Canadian for an accessibility research project. The donations won’t fund the project. They’ll fund Joe (i.e allow him to eat) while he tries to raise the money for the project.
What’s the project?
Web Design Humour
Just a bit of fun for a change…
Web Design Humour: continue reading …
Accesskeys: Where Are We Now?
Access keys are a way of defining keyboard shortcuts which, in theory, allow users to jump to, for example, the Search item on the web site navigation menu by selecting ALT+s. Depending on the browser being used, the user may then have to press ENTER to activate the link. The designer can define which keys, in conjunction with ALT (or CTRL on a Mac) relate to which links by means of the accesskey attribute.
However, there are problems associated with defining accesskeys on a site as they can over-ride pre-existing keyboard shortcuts in the user’s software.
Tabindex At Your Peril
Tabindexing allows a designer to specify the order in which links or controls receive focus on a page when using the TAB key to move around.
For example:
<ul>
<li><a href="one.html" tabindex="1">Item 1</a></li>
<li><a href="two.html" tabindex="2">Item 2</a></li>
</ul>
Elements on a page that do not have an associated tabindex will have a ‘natural’ ordering (ie they will follow the order that they appear in the markup). If you mix the two, the elements with a specified tabindex will come first, in their specified order, followed by unindexed elements in their natural (markup) order.
Multiple Skip Links
I’ve just been reading a post on the Web Standards Group from Steve Green of Test Partners.
He mentioned that his testing group had come across a site that had no fewer that six ‘skip to’ links such as ‘skip to main navigation’, ‘skip to sub navigation’, ‘skip to main content’ etc. The end result was so verbose that he felt that the site really needed a ‘skip past all these skip links’ link!
Designing For Dyslexics: Part 2
In the second article of the series on accessites.org, I’ve returned to the issue of color contrast. As you might have gathered, it’s a hot topic of mine. Primarily because it’s an area that I believe WCAG has completely overlooked but also because I think it’s an issue that can be remedied relatively easily.
However, I’m aware that, whenever you reduce a barrier for one group, there’s always the possibility that you have inadvertently created one for another group with opposing needs.