Archive for the 'Browsers' Category

CMS editable Flash

The Defacto-CMS website carousel widget.With all the fuss over AJAX and Flash accessibility you get, I thought it might be worth outlining the process we used to create a Flash/AJAX widget and highlight one of the advantages you get with this method. It also means that the use of Flash has no impact on your Search Engine Optimisation.

Tabindex for keyboard accessibility

Steve Falkner did a good presentation to the WSG last week, outlining how and why AJAX can work with screen readers. One tiny little point I wanted to pick up on was whether it was a waste of time to update AJAX content if you’ve attached an event to an element that isn’t a link or form control.

Closing the gap – User Agent improvements

screen shot from an accessibility extension. Following up on the responsibilities in accessibility, some of the most critical gaps at the moment are on the User Agent (UA) end. This post highlights the things I think would make the most difference to people’s experience of accessibility on the web.

Responsibilities in accessibility

The W3C has defined what to do for accessibility at each ‘end’ (i.e. client side or web site site), but there is quite a lot of overlap, and scant advice on who should be responsible for what. I’m going to try and show who’s responsible now, and where things should go.

Perceptions of page loading speed

It is fairly amusing when people (clients or otherwise) demand that a page load in under x seconds (where ‘x’ varies by which guru article they were reading). This hit home today when David Hyatt (lead developer of Safari) highlighted people’s mis-perceptions.

Firefox 3 accessibility

Firefox logo, a world icon wrapped up in a red fox. I’ve noticed that the Mozilla org has been doing quite a bit on accessibility, from working with IBM on Rich-apps accessibility, to funding people to make Firefox accessible with VoiceOver. Mark Pilgrim reports that Firefox 3 will include the option to block meta-redirects.

Mobile GMail

The GMail mobile client.I’ve recently moved to using GMail as my primary interface, and I noticed a new mobile feature. The mobile access for GMail is much better than the one I installed on my hosting, which frankly was unusable on my phone despite an excellent mobile browser. Then I tried the Symbian GMail client.

Using label for phishing

Generally I delete phishing emails without a second glance, but this one caught my eye for being so realistic, and using a interesting method intended for accessibility to disguise a fraudulent link.

Browser Zoom Comparison

Screen shot of the BBC news site demonstrating the effect of zoom.There are several options available for increasing the apparent size of web pages, from simple increases in text size, to full screen magnification. Focusing on browsers, I’ll examine what options suit different people, and what implications this can have for web development.

Raising the bar of mobile browsing

The Webkit browser showing my homepage, practically perfectly.Mobile browsing has been, frankly, rubbish so far. But now there are two new mobile browsers that confound the generally dire opinion of mobile browsers.