1. I worked really hard at my job and learnt a whole lot more about web design on some great new projects.
2. A big decision was taken – We moved house in June saying our goodbyes to Brighton after 5 good years and heading back home to Kendal, in the fantastic (and much wetter!) Lake District.
3. A massive change in my life happened – I became a Dad. My wife gave birth to our beautiful daughter in July and our life’s immediately changed forever. Fatherhood is/has been great so far and I’m enjoying the delicate balancing act of (limited) sleeping, working and precious family time with the little one.

So as I’m sitting here at the end of a weeks break from work where to next…

1. Probably a lot more hard work making websites
2. Lots more family time
3. More church involvement
4. Definitely more guitar playing
5. Maybe even a (little bit) more blogging

When you bookmark a page in this way the icon used for this home page is simply a thumbnail screenshot of the webpage page unless that website has added a ‘touch icon’ graphic for the site. These work a bit like favicons for apple devices.

The problem is that so far not many sites have these so the icon instead defaults to a screenshot of the webpage instead (ie. not actually that useful when bookmarking multiple sites).

Drew McLellan has written on his blog about an excellent way of hacking around this to add your own icons for any site. This uses a JavaScript bookmarklet that can be added to Safari /synced to your iPod/iPhone. I actually found this a bit fiddley to use but later found a another post that had adapted this script slightly to point to images on their own server.

So finally, I’ve adapted this for myself so I can host my own icons here on Hollidazed, mainly for my own reference but also so I can create icons for my own choice of bookmarks. Hopefully I’ll add a gallery/reference for these in the next few days if anyone else wants to use them.

The Hollidazed Set Touch Icon Bookmarklet.

Only this week I have to admit that in order to produce email templates for three different UK charities I have had to use a mixture of table based layout and badly implemented inline CSS to produce anything close to a design that works across most major email clients.

I always feel very uneasy about working this way but ever since the problems forced upon us with Outlook 2007 I really haven’t had a choice… but hopefully this will now begin to change.

The Email Standards Project have compiled an overview of CSS support in all major browsers as well as an acid test for CSS support… hopefully this will now begin to improve standard support until web standards in email are as well supported as they are in the browser.

This was the first conference they had held with a fully fledged stream of seminars about web analytics (in particular Google Analytics) so it was good to see the focus of this conference very much on the opportunities within new media.

Highlights included presentations by Bertie Bosredon from Breast Cancer Care and Dorothea Arndt from the British Red Cross. Bertie talked about using web stats to understand your audience and define your content before finishing with a strong focus on his desire to produce personalised content driven by analytics.
Dorothea spoke about how the British Red Cross are developing their web goals through analytics to try to engage with new supporters of a wholly different kind to their traditional core audience.

The Institute of Fundraising have put together a nice little video of the day with comments from both attendees and speakers which gives a good insight to the various topics being discussed.

It’s available on YouTube, and while I didn’t contribute to the video directly you can spot me making the most of the food at lunchtime (at about 3:55 on the video to be precise!).

I did however make time to read Cameron Moll’s new Mobile Web Design book. It was a nice short read while on holiday but what it lacked in length it certainly made up for in quality. It’s great to have a book on the Mobile Web that takes a web standards approach and offers some great real world solutions for offering mobile web content.

The day after finishing Mobile Web Design, Apple announced their new range of iPod’s including the new ‘touch’ model - fully equipped with WiFi and Safari. Although the iPhone looks and sounds fantastic (and will hopefully arrive in the UK eventually) I think that it will generally only be taken up by a small group of users in the short term… on the other hand the iPod touch is something that everybody will want and will probably be this years Christmas top seller. Surely this now means that there will be a mass market created of mobile web users equipped with a standards based browser (Safari). This to me is a really exciting development for the web and will open up mobile development. So having been inspired by the book I’m ready to get into it and start looking at the possibilities …back to work then!

Anyone that reads this blog knows by now I’m not a particularly regular blogger but the changing face of how an individual can create web content is making this less of a problem. If I consider that my original aim in having this blog was to document work, research, design and web development thoughts, than actually what better way to keep the blog fresh than to be able to pull in the latest things I’ve bookmarked as ‘of interest’ in del.icio.us and my latest musings on Twitter (twitter badge added a few months ago!).

Anyway, I’m not quite sure that I’m ready to hit you with a full lifestream just yet but it keeps things ticking over.

Right, off to pack for a well earned week way in Cornwall (well away from all computers) - starting tomorrow.

An Introduction

First off, Kath Moonan of AbilityNet gave an introduction to Rich Media… she explained about the benefits of Rich Media for web users with a learning difficulty and I would definitely agree with her that visual content can often actually be easier to understand for many web users.

Kath made the point that with the way the web is now moving the users missing out the most are the hearing impaired… this led the focus of this session into being largely about transcription and captioning for web video and audio.

Text Transcripts

Transcripts are an alternative text version of Rich Media and do not have to be exact accounts of spoken word versions. You can make a transcript as accessible as you want and add extra information. It seems that transcripts of video or audio are best provided as HTML (semantically marked-up) or as a .txt file.

Text Captioning

There are basically two types of captioning: ‘Closed Captioning’ – like the TV teletext style and ‘Open Captioning’ where the captions are embedded in the actual video file.

It seems that the best method to use on the web is ‘Closed Captioning’. A free software tool called Magpie was demonstarted as a way of captioning Windows Media Player files… it was also covered later in the day that Magpie could also be used to create captioning with Flash video files.

One important point I picked up at the training is that when dealing with Rich Media as a website owner you will have to offer different versions of content. Currently 90% of users have the Flash plug-in but you should also probably offer video content in Windows Media Player and Apple Quicktime Formats.

The importance of explaining Rich Media properly on websites came out as a theme in this session and it is clearly important that we explain to users about any plug-in’s they might need to be able to view Flash/WMP/Quicktime files and how they can easily set this up within their browser. A simple thing like a missing plug-in could provide a real block to some users trying to access Rich Media content. Kath gave a really good example of how in In Windows Media Player you actually have to turn accessibility features on so users need to be shown somewhere how to do this.

The logical solution is surely that it would be good for all websites to actually include information about accessing Rich Media as part of the sites accessibility statement/page as a minimum requirement.

Audio Captioning

The ideal scenario when producing video for your website seems to be to provide captioning and a written transcript. You only have to provide a separate audio transcript if you feel it is necessary to your users.

Flash Accessibility

In the next session Jon Gooday from AbilityNet looked at Flash accessibility… this continued on in a second Flash session in the afternoon.

I should say first of all that I don’t work with Flash and am not a massive fan of Flash based sites. That said, I would have to agree that Flash sites can actually be good for people with some disabilities. Unfortunately this has always been balanced with the fact that Flash has traditionally proved very hard work for those with visual impairments to access.

One very good example of good use of Flash we looked at that I would recommend checking out is British Sign Language website.

The one area that still worried me about Flash was when John looked at the built in accessibility features. I think the fact that they only work in Windows is still really disappointing and will prove a real problem if your producing Flash only sites.

As I’m not a Flash user I won’t go into more detail about the Flash sessions here other than to say that the recommended starting point for Flash and Accessibility is Adobe’s ‘Best Practices for Accessible Flash Design‘.

Ajax and Accessibility

Mike Isofarro from Yahoo arrived to speak at this session which was the highlight of the day for me. Ajax is a current area of interest for me and I’ve just finished reading ‘Bulletproof Ajax‘ by Jeremy Keith so this tied in nicely.

I intend to blog about Bulletproof Ajax sometime soon but Mike looked at some very similar ideas in this session with the key point being that the way to build Ajax functionality on your website is to use progressive enhancement. This means that if users don’t have Javascript enabled the site will degrade gracefully and still be fully functional.

When testing an Ajax enabled site you should test the whole site without CSS and Javascript enabled.

Dealing with no page reload

Mike looked at ways of dealing with the lack of page reload and mentioned the yellow fade technique and looked at how this would only work for visual users. He mentioned a technique to deal with screen readers by updating the screen readers virtual buffer which can work with Jaws 7.1 onwards – more information on this can be found on Jez Lemon’s website.

This technique along with many others still comes with some problems and won’t work with every browser combination/screen reader. Because of this I would agree with one of Jeremy Keith’s suggestion’s that you could add a hidden link to your site for Screen Readers at the top of your home page that enables users to turn off Ajax funtionality. If the Ajax functionality has been built as progressive enhancement on top of an existing working functional site the website will degrade gracefully and Screen reader users should have no problems.

Screen Reader Testing

One interesting point Mike made was that if you get a screen reader user to test your site don’t employ a ‘power user’. You actually want normal level users not people who test sites with screen readers for a living as they will actually manage to get around problems on your site that more basic users would get stuck with straight away. I’d actually never thought of this before and it makes a lot of sense.

For more details on Mike’s session and two really good case studies of accessible Ajax in the real world see his notes from this session that he has kindly posted up on his blog.

PDF Accessibility

This was another session from John Gooday at AbilityNet and I was surprised to learn that the RNIB are currently reporting that they are currently receiving more complaints about PDF accessibility than web accessibility .

Briefly, I learned in this session that the user needs to actively use the accessibility functions with Acrobat Reader which, as I discussed earlier, could provide a stumbling block for some users and you should really be explaining how to access PDF’s somewhere on your website.

It seems to be a lot more difficult to convert existing PDF’s into accessible PDF’s than creating new PDF’s and also seemed to be more difficult and involved than making HTML accessible.

Again, this is not an area I really work with regularly but like any website good structure is the key… a poorly structured document will basically equal a poorly structured PDF. If your using a tool like Microsoft Word to put together a document make sure that use the available semantic mark-up like H1, H2, H3 etc for your page structure/document styling.

Final Thoughts

This was a useful day out the office and had some really good information for me to get hold of… for the record AbilityNet training is of a very good standard and I would especially recommend some of their courses aimed at covering Accessibility issues and WCAG for Website Administrators and Managers.

Making Flash websites accessible still seems to me to be a difficult area to get involved with while using flash video on your website seems like a logical first step to try and get right.

All websites should be providing multi format video (Quicktime/Flash/WMP) as well as captioning and transcription services for users where appropriate while the production of transcripts alongside podcasts should also be considered.

The Ajax session was great and focused on progressive enhancement, something I want to blog about in more detail soon when I try to get together my own thoughts on Bulletproof Ajax.

The Speaker was Shawn Henry from the W3C Web Initiative and having read Joe Clarke’s well documented A List Apart article ‘To Hell with WCAG 2‘ last year I was interested to hear first hand about the now much revised version.

Having not had chance yet to look at the revised version I have been getting the impression that people in the web industry are coming around to WCAG 2 with this new release.

The first public working draft for WCAG 2 was posted on January 25, 2001 - over 6 years ago, so it’s fair to say the current standards we officially work to as web designers need updating sooner rather than later… lets face it things have moved on a little on the web in that time!

The important point that Shawn Henry made about WCAG 2 is that it is being developed to apply broadly to different web technologies now and in the future.

The examples she gave were now supported by a quick reference guide that has been developed by the W3C. This can be customised to the technologies that you are using within a project. Looking through the examples, guidelines about things like colour contrast do seem to be a lot clearer now.

The point was made that although the new guidelines are very substantial in size, this is actually an advantage in terms of giving us proper detailed reference material to work from.

There were a lot of good questions asked with some mild debate amongst the audience and I think there are definitely some areas to be ironed out through the ongoing feedback process.

WCAG 2.0 is still a working draft and from what I could gather from this session we won’t be seeing the finished article this year. That said, Shawn was keen to encourage people to start using parts of the guidelines in their work as soon as possible.

The issue of authoring tools and giving people ways of creating accessible content came out as a theme towards the end of the sesson as did the example of teaching people how to get the most out of their web content… the example of the BBC’s My Web/My Way was given. I really like the idea of showing people how to change styles/text sizes from within their own browsers rather than giving them built-in tools that may vary from site-to-site. In the long term this will benefit everyone.

So, overall this was a good session and I now feel more confident of finding useful information in WCAG 2.0… or as someone asked 2.1? …it has changed considerably enough to surely be 2.1 but as it’s still in development/draft it’s still just version 2.0… but then again 2.0 suggests web 2.0 = cool?

Shawn Henry’s book, Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design is available to be read online if anyone wants to look further into her accessibility work.

For information about the RNIB and web accessibility visit their Web Access Centre Blog.

The last 6 months have been very busy for me and there are some exciting times ahead and I’m about to start a new job next month that I really think will give me the motivation to write more about my experiences on the web and what inspires me in art, design, music and life in general.
More about the job to follow, but I need to get stuck into things for a while before talking about this much more… I will say that I have been offered a really good opportunity to work for a growing web solutions company on what will hopefully turn out to be some really interesting projects for interesting people.

In terms of my music, I will be spending more time at home rather than commuting to an office every day so the extra time and a bit more flexibility will hopefully allow me to pick up my guitar more often than I’ve been able to recently. Watch this space.

The book is both a good read and gives a good indepth overview of HTML (including XHTML and XML) as well as having a really good emphasis on semantics including a useful section on Microformats.

The individual chapters on both tables and forms in HTML were worth buying the book for alone and although aspects of these chapters are covered in other books I’ve read, like ‘CSS Mastery’ by Andy Budd, this book definitely gives the most comprehensive overview.

Like the other Friends of Ed books, HTML Mastery seems to be written with designers rather than developers in mind and therefore sits really well alongside the previously mentioned ‘CSS Mastery’ and also DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. Combined together these books give a great overview of the skills needed when working in standards based web design (CSS, DOM Scripting/Javascript, and (X)HTML).