I’ve recently been struck by a parallel: the differences between usability and accessibility are very similar to the differences between writing the HTML5 spec and covering accessibility requirements. Perhaps that can help explain the friction, and why WAI-ARIA is needed.

The “UK Accessibility Roundtable for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010″, a HiSoftware event at Microsoft’s offices in London Victoria. The day revolved around several demos of SharePoint 2010 and Compliance Sheriff, and was fleshed it out with some quite good accessibility information. These are my notes on the event, with a lot of interspersed commentary.

I.e. Accessible Rich Internet Applications with Flash, Flex & Air. This presentation by Andrew Kirkpatrick took us through some of the technologies available, with a special eye on the accessibility possibilities and things you need to watch out for.

I’m putting up my notes from the talks I saw at Techshare 2009, and Richard Schwerdtfeger‘s was the first.

Mike Paciello recently pointed to an article that says Section 508 inefficient for CMS and web development tools. This matches what I would expect, however, I discovered the article has it the opposite way round.

A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the first seminiar on usability in Bulgaria. A great thanks to the people at .net and Lucrat in Bulgaria, it was a great event with great hosts. It was also great to see & meet Peter Merholz,…

I was pleased (and rather surprised) to be nominated for “standards champion” in the .net awards. The thing is, the competition is, um, quite fierce! I’m up against the W3C, Mozilla, and some of the best known names in the business (like Zeldman). So I’m not picking out a…

The new iPod nanos (4th generation) now have speech-enabled menus, so you don’t have to be able to see the screen to operate it. This is obviously a boon for the visualy impaired, but with my old iPod I quite often used it from my pocket, or whilst driving. Could…

I was writing a little accessibility article for .net magazine about text-replacement techniques, including sIFR. I was blithely saying that “yea, don’t worry, it’s fine” with a couple of caveats. But, rather than rely on memory I did a quick test, and discovered something strange.

I’d been meaning to post on the microformat-accessibility issue, but Patrick Lauke just posted a great sumary. As a sort of +1, I’d just like to share what I would prefer as an accessibility aware developer.