December 2008 Archives

Over at the mighty WebAIM blog, there's an invitation to screen reader users to complete a survey about their preferences for how web sites are set up. There are several questions in the survey which I find particularly interesting from a blogging perspective:

The question "How difficult are different links with the same text repeated multiple times on the same page?" covers quite a few cases in blogging. The words comment, comments, permalink, more, and others are often used with each post, meaning up to 15 or 20 instances on the main page of a blog. For people who are familiar with the blog format, do these still cause trouble?

"How difficult are pop-up windows to you?" makes me think of Haloscan comments on blogger blogs. Do they cause problems for people using screen readers?

The question about how often users "navigate by headings" is relevant to the next section of the Guide to Making Your Blog Accessible that I'm working on - how do you break up a long post (or even sidebar) into sections that help your readers navigate?

If you're a screen reader user, take the survey when you get a chance, and spread the word.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a collection of ubergeeks who develop web standards that help all of our software play nicely together. Today, they announced the finalization of the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), meant to ensure that the web remains accessible to people with disabilities even as technology evolves.

If you're a geeky coder type, by all means dig in. The WCAG documents are written for people who are building websites, not people who are adding content to blogs using software that does the "building" for them. That's one of the reasons I started All Access Blogging (though I have not been able to give it the attention it deserves so far): to translate the world of accessibility guidelines intended for software developers into plain language that would help bloggers know what to focus on when making choices about how their blogs are set up and adding content.

So this is another "to do" for my 2009 - bring all my blogs up to date themselves, update the content here to reflect the new guidelines, and keep moving forward!

I recently started using Google's browser Chrome since I was having some some issues with Firefox. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it.

For a few days, though, I was convinced that one of the sites I read regularly was completely broken, because it looked HORRIBLE all of a sudden. I knew the blogger had been planning a redesign, so I assumed she was just in the middle of rearranging. Then I looked at her blog again in Firefox, and it was still just fine. Oops!

It reminded me that I'd bookmarked Workin' it on all browsers from the Official Google Webmaster Central blog a couple of months ago, so I dug it up and read it.

Their first tip for webmasters is "Ensure browser compatibility by focusing on accessibility." I perked up a bit - do they mean what I think they mean? Sadly, no. When they say accessibility, they mean using simpler HTML instead of "fancy features like AJAX."

Their second tip, though, is key both for cross-browser compatibility and for accessibility as we discuss it on this blog: Consider validating your code to ensure it conforms with web standards. The more that websites and blogs are built in accordance with web standards, the easier it is on your visitors who are using assistive technology - and the more likely that your blog will work properly in all modern browsers.

So validating my code is definitely one of my New Year's resolutions for all my blogs. Now if only there were a web standard creating an extra two hours a day in 2009 for all webmasters...