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sIFR default CSS hides content from at least one screen reader

Roger Johansson — 2010-02-08T19:30:09+01:00

Just a heads-up to anyone using sIFR to render text: the default CSS that comes with sIFR hides the replaced text from the VoiceOver screen reader. I don’t know if any others are affected – VoiceOver is the only screen reader I have been able to verify this problem in.

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Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Typography.

Forgotten CSS selectors

Roger Johansson — 2010-02-04T20:39:33+01:00

Anyone who has been using CSS for any length of time has probably been frustrated by the lack of selector support in Internet Explorer 6. There are quite a lot of cases where a CSS 2.1 selector will let you target elements in all other relevant browsers, but where you, if you want it to work in IE 6, have to add a class or id attribute to the HTML.

Well, the market share of IE 6 is now finally at a level where we as developers can say that a site “supporting” IE 6 does not mean “looking pixel perfect”. Fortunately more and more clients understand this as well. IE 7 has been out for well over three years and IE 9 is on the horizon, so I think it’s time to revive those CSS selectors that you never got to use just because IE 6 doesn’t understand them.

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Posted in CSS.

Beware of “Web Page, complete” when saving HTML pages with your browser

Roger Johansson — 2010-02-01T19:47:10+01:00

Every now and then I need to ask a client or another developer to save a copy of a web page and email it to me. Mostly it is because they are viewing a page that is behind a firewall and I need to see the markup. Something that happens a lot is that they send me HTML that is more or less mangled.

This HTML mangling happens when you choose “Web Page, complete” or a similarly named option in your web browser. With this option selected, browsers don’t save just the HTML source of the page – they also save any associated images, stylesheets, javascript files and other resources and change all references to those files to make them point to the locally saved copy.

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Posted in Browsers, Quick Tips.

XHTML Media Types Working Group Note updated

Roger Johansson — 2010-01-29T18:38:02+01:00

The W3C Working Group Note XHTML Media Types - Second Edition contains updated guidelines for the use of different media types with XHTML documents – text/html vs. application/xhtml+xml. The note is about a year old now, so this will be old news to some readers. Better late than never, I suppose.

The document is now more focused on the text/html vs. application/xhtml+xml media types and includes Compatibility Guidelines for ensuring that documents can work with either media type.

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Posted in (X)HTML.

Unobtrusive JavaScript is not necessarily accessible JavaScript

Roger Johansson — 2010-01-26T20:15:27+01:00

Plenty of JavaScript demos and tutorials that you come across on the Web note that they are implemented using unobtrusive JavaScript. While that is great and should always be encouraged, some people seem to believe that unobtrusive JavaScript equals accessible JavaScript. That is not always the case.

Unobtrusive JavaScript is normally mentioned to emphasise that a script uses progressive enhancement to cater for people who use a browser without JavaScript support. But that does not mean that a script is accessible, since two key accessibility issues tend to be overlooked – keyboard navigation and screen readers.

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Posted in Accessibility, JavaScript.

Embedding video files without JavaScript

Roger Johansson — 2010-01-25T18:38:34+01:00

Nowadays, it is more or less the norm to use JavaScript to insert video content embedded in Flash into web pages. While it does work in the majority of cases, there are a couple of problems: it requires JavaScript and it requires Flash.

Some people block JavaScript, some block Flash, some block both, and some use platforms or user agents that do not support JavaScript and/or Flash. Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, for example. So to reach the largest possible number of people with your videos, you may want to look into the method described by Kroc Camen in Video for Everybody!.

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Posted in (X)HTML, HTML 5.

A call for consistent display of alt text across browsers

Roger Johansson — 2010-01-20T19:50:04+01:00

A while ago I posted Safari, WebKit and alt text for missing images, in which I note that most WebKit-based browsers do not always display alt text when images are missing. In alt and title content display in popular browsers, Steve Faulkner presents his results from taking a closer look at this in the browsers that are currently most widely used.

In addition to checking what browsers do with an image’s alt text, Steve also checked if they do something with the title text, if any. Interestingly it turns out that Chrome and Safari display the contents of the title attribute if the image has no alt attribute. This situation shouldn’t occur in well-authored HTML documents, but I’m guessing WebKit displays the title text as error-recovery in the case of missing alt text, since in most cases it’s probably much better than displaying the file name.

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Posted in Accessibility, Browsers, Usability, Web Standards.

Is SVG support coming to Internet Explorer?

Roger Johansson — 2010-01-18T20:38:29+01:00

In a post to the IEBlog, Patrick Dengler, Senior Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Team, announced that Microsoft Joins W3C SVG Working Group.

He goes on to say that We’re excited to take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users.

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Posted in Browsers, Web Standards.

Telling organisations that their websites are inaccessible

Roger Johansson — 2010-01-13T20:57:45+01:00

When you encounter a website that has accessibility problems, it can be a good idea to contact the organisation behind the website to let them know about the problem and encourage them to fix it. To help make this a little easier, the W3C WAI has published a draft document called Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites.

The document contains tips, discusses different approaches, and includes a few sample e-mails to show you what a message describing an accessibility problem can look like. Shawn Lawton Henry talks about the initiative a bit more in Take a few minutes to encourage web accessibility. You can make a difference. on the W3C Blog.

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Posted in Accessibility.

W3C HTML Accessibility Task Force

Roger Johansson — 2010-01-12T21:09:34+01:00

As a number of people have stated, there are some accessibility issues in HTML 5. Hopefully the HTML Accessibility Task Force will help straighten those out:

The objective of HTML Accessibility Task Force is to help ensure that HTML 5 provides features to enable Web content to be accessible to people with disabilities. This includes review of existing features for potential accessibility problems, and proposal of new features where needed.

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Posted in Accessibility, HTML 5.