There were quite a few updates to the VoiceOver screen reader on OSX Leopard, not least of which was the new, very smooth voice “Alex”. What will be of interest to developers is the new commands to help people navigate HTML.

A few respected bloggers have come out against including comments on blogs. Partly due to their popularity, they have suffered from a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish. So far I’ve been pretty happy with the quality of comments here, but I’d like to maintain that.

A recent post by a local authority web officer was fairly frustrating for me, as it perpetuates several myths in usability, as well as calling into question my motives. The last part is about usability advice (from me) published on the localdirect.gov.uk site.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I try not to ‘test’ the system if I can help it. But when a friend drops you in it (possibly), you don’t have much choice. If I’m not heard of again, this is why.

There has been a little buzz about some CSS libaries, such as Blueprint, although YUI’s grids & other parts have been around for a while. I’ve kept an eye on these, but they have never seemed suited to CSS for one reason.

There are some things that are nice to add to a site that you don’t actually want to put in the content. They should be automatically added, so that you can change them systematically across the whole site. You can use JavaScript to add useful things like highlights for external links and to make quotes clickable. Not new things, but a collection of some robust enhancements.

After my initial disappointment with the Office 2007 pluggin for creating PDFs, I’ve had some discussion with the Microsoft team, and a chance to do a bit more testing. This post compares the conversion of a simple Word 2007 document with the Office pluggin, Acrobat 8.1, and OpenOffice.

A friend & colleague of mine has just released the beta version of a new tool. Although everyone (who cares) has probably heard of colour contrast analysers, this does the opposite, and helps you choose accessible colour combinations.
Enter the Colour Contrast Visualiser.

Finally there could be a little light at the end of the tunnel for accessibility and Sharepoint: Microsoft has formed "an agreement" with HiSoftware to create an accessibility kit.

I had previously heard that Office 2007 (or 12 back then) was going to have built in PDF support, with tagging (i.e. accessible output). Not too long ago I installed Vista and Office 2007 on my work machine, but there was no sign of it. Then I found the Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS Add-in for 2007 Microsoft Office.