At last, the BSI has seen sense, and will hopefully help clear the muddy waters of website accessibility. I mentioned in my earlier post “Accessibility... for a price” that there were guidelines for website commissioners called “PAS78”, but that the only way to obtain them was to buy them. Now, like some rare bloom that flowers once a decade, sense has blossomed and the guidelines are available to download for free.
So I'm going to sip the sweet nectar. Stick around and I'll let you know how it tastes.
Jason posted this on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 9:50 am.
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I've just had a look on A List Apart, and there is an ace selection of their earlier work relating to accessibility and all that jazz. In my professional life, it was this site and actually some of the articles on this list that first set me out on the standards crusade in 2001. Back then, my pleas were generally falling on deaf ears: "Please don't use Flash for navigation" became "Oh, that's Flash, don't get Jason to do it, he hates Flash". Et cetera.
Well, if you need a little primer on the why of standards and accessibility, you could do a lot worse than reading some of the articles mentioned in The ALA Primer: A Guide for New Readers.
As a secondary little piece of entertainment, if you don't need to read the background articles, then have a look at A Standardista's Alphabet. Might amuse if you're in-the-know. If you're not, then read the articles mentioned in the previous link.
Jason posted this on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 10:51 am.
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What a week, what a week. Well, actually, it's been a pretty easy week for me, me reliving my junior html builder days. In a strictly professional way only, you understand. No late nights for me: perish the thought. An explanation: my client is using an antique server and doesn't want me to melt it by asking it do to... well, anything, really.
So straight static html it is. The only trouble with that, as I'm sure you all know is that common elements such as the navigation have to be repeated over-and-over. Thankfully, I use Dreamweaver MX 2004 for situations like this. Keeping the navigation as a library item means that Dreamweaver automatically updates all pages that use that item whenever that item is edited. Which is nice.
Ordinarily, I'd use a simple server-side include to hold the navigation (if it's pretty simple), but having been precluded from using that method, I used Dreamweaver.
Another thing I was reminded of this week, was my slight optimism when estimating the time taken to build such a site. Whilst as challenging as... eating, the site still takes plenty of donkey-work to manually populate every one of the 50-plus pages, and I am said donkey.
At least I now know where to buy a cheap server. Portobello Road.
Jason posted this on Friday, September 01, 2006 at 8:00 pm.
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