Strange sIFR / screen-reader bug

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.

Dr Horrible’s sing along blog

Capture from the first act of the musical.In a break from our irregular schedule, I feel compelled to point out that Joss Whedon is doing a sort of Radiohead. For a few days only, there is a three part “supervillain musical” free online. During the writers strike Joss and a few friends got together to do something fun and silly, and experiment whilst they were at it.

ABBR pattern accessibility

microformats logo.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.

Nested conditional comments

In a recent test with Internet Explorer’s conditional comments, some of the more complex operators didn’t seem to work. For example, trying to target IE 6 and 7 defensively, the ‘and’ operator didn’t work. However, there is another solution.

Where SEO and accessibility collide

Recently a link to a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) cheat sheet came across my radar, and I was curious what sort advice is given for SEO these days. I’m not an SEO expert, but I thought a short analysis of how SEO and accessibility overlap or conflict would be useful.

Adobe open Flash

The Open Screen Project from Adobe will remove restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specs, and removing the licensing fees. What could the consequences be?

Why I don’t buy DRM (music) products

iTunes Plus, Play, Amazon (when it gets to the UK), fine. But with DRMed content, even from a popular service like iTunes, you never know what’s around the corner. Your music could just disappear.

Galleries in WordPress 2.5

The gallery example as published, showing the 6 example pictures.The recent (and quite significant) overhaul of Wordpress’ admin area is very good, streamlining your blogging and making previously diffiicult things quite simple. One of the new features is the ability to automatically create a gallery within a post of all the picture uploaded to that post. I wasn’t very happy with the code output for galleries, so I took it apart and tried to improve it.

WCAG Samurai release errata

Joe Clark has released the final WCAG Samurai’s errata, an update to the (almost) 9 year old Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 guidelines.

Font-based layouts becoming fashionable?

Layouts are becoming an issue again. The (browser) landscape is changing, as are the fashion in layouts, but not really in unison. I can understand giving a greater weight towards design aspects, and maintaining the grid, however, I find the timing curious, as these changes seem likely to be obsolete soon.