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.

I attend my first Microsoft (MS) oriented user group meeting yesterday, the SharePoint User Group on search and accessibility. Unfortunately our developers werre either too busy or on holiday, so I got volunteered.

I’ve been meaning to sit down and take apart Tantek’s polygons for a while, partly because it looks impossible, and partly because it might be useful. Five years later and today was the day, although it turns out that the usefulness has some limits.

This post is far too late, I really should have said this earlier, but the terms being used for various layout types are confusing. The top articles for “Elastic Design” on Google refer to elastic as being a a font-based layout. I think elastic is the wrong term for what the layouts achieve. Also, there is an assumption that these layouts are good for accessibility.

Now that the web standards ‘battle’ is being won, and web developers are taking more care with their markup, a regular question is “should I use the address tag?”. This questions comes in various guises, but the fundamental problem is that the address element doesn’t have the meaning that people think it does.

Having cut down what authors can use, they can just about edit regular text articles. However, I haven’t met many clients who would be happy with just that! There are certain things that require the addition of code, this is how to do it.

Each of the editors I’ve been looking at allows the addition of tables, but none of them allow the easy insertion & manipulation of a data table, i.e. one with headings. I deal with data tables quite a lot for windsurfing results, and the only program I’ve found for decent table editing is Dreamweaver.

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.

Adding images in an easy and accessible way is a vital part of a modern WYSIWYG editor, and one of the things the almost all of the implementations I’ve come across get wrong. There are several levels of implementation, from adding images from other locations, to creating and choosing from a library of images and other assets.

The Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) outlines the technologies to map controls, AJAX live regions, and events to accessibility APIs, including custom controls used for Rich Internet Applications. This post just draws attention to things I (and Iperhaps other people) could do with some further explanation on.