Nearly three years ago I converted all the markup on this site from strict HTML 4 to strict XHTML 1. Fairly soon after this, I discovered that, to be kosher, I had serve this with the MIME format set to “application/xhtml-xml.” For a long time I ignored this, noting that I could get away with [...]
Professor Dragovich wrote to me: “I don’t think web sites have to be ADA compliant. Do publishers have to publish books that are ADA compliant? Digital versus analog information. Why one and not the other.” Actually all major book publishers now have to comply with several laws, both national and international, concerning accessibility, including the [...]
I just read that an appeals court has ruled that the ADA does not apply to websites. This is amazingly stupid and the judges who made this decision should turn in their robes. The whole point of the ADA and Section 508 was to be an anticipatory set of laws to apply broadly in an [...]
As a webmaster, I’d been using Mozilla since version 0.7 and Opera since version 3 to design and test with. I’d build for Mozilla first and then tweak things so they worked in Internet Explorer vesion 5, which at the time most people had. This has been my pattern until the present day: design in [...]
Over at Digital Web Magazine, there is an article about merging CSS with content managment applications. The article is short on technical detail but does describe various different interfaces and goals to be reached. Opera, Mozilla and Firefox (And for all I know Konqueror and Safari can too.) can all zoom web content better than [...]
I’ve been a serious web technician since 1997 and an unserious one since 1996. So why is it that my CSS designs still appears so bland to me? It’s not the fault of CSS. If anything, as will be made plain, I’m not using cascading stylesheets enough. I think the fault lies in two things: [...]
Chris Phillips over at Curb Cut Learning has a rant, which I agree with, that HTML is better than PDF for accessibility. In fact, I go further than he does, HTML is already good enough for most people. Maybe professional printing houses still need PDF or MSWord but John Public, who merely wants to print [...]
So my news aggregator captured an essay from Juicy Studios about how people with learning and cognitive disabilities got shortchanged by the WAI. After reading it, I have to say that Mr. Leitch is a little too confrontational. It is true that for some people with illiteracy, dyslexia or other learning disabilities, the Web is [...]
It’s gratifying to see web designers getting organized about accessibility–gives me a sense of vindication. I discovered accessible web design when a friend hired me to do the Microsoft Accessibility Site back in 1997. In 1998, I discovered the work of Zeldman and the WaSP. At that point, browser support for W3C standards was poor, [...]
It still has a few bugs and I may decide to remove it if spam starts linking to my site, but I’ve installed Movable Type’s trackback module to supplement my Greymatter installation. In theory this means I’ve joined the hip kids but we’ll see. Mostly I did it to see what I can do with [...]