Archive for category Web Accessibility

My Thing About the Thing That Thing Wrote About Thing

Posted by John in HTML5, Rants, Web Accessibility on November 15, 2011

Late last week, Divya Manian wrote an article entitled Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value, where, after sort of getting things half-right, half-wrong she concludes with the following:

There is no harm using div elements; you can continue using them instead of section and article. I think we should use the new elements to make your mark-up readable, not for any inherent semantic advantage.

Divya is quite confused about web accessibility. I examine everything she says in a detailed, semi-sarcastic, no-holds barred manner. Conclusion: Semantics matter – a lot.

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Not The Blog Post I Was Going To Write Today

Posted by John in Rants, Web Accessibility on November 5, 2011

Death to CAPTCHAs – do your part. The user-pain inflicted by CAPTCHAs on persons with disabilities are well known and documented. Not only are CAPTCHAs impossible to decipher for non-visual users (the entire premise of CAPTCHAS is that you can see something that a computer cannot), but they also are difficult-to-impossible for users with cognitive disabilities, low-vision users, your Mom, my Dad and very often you and me.

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WYSIWYG support for @longdesc today

Posted by John in HTML5, Web Accessibility on May 8, 2011

The @longdesc “discussion” just won’t go away. Over on the W3C mailing list, Tantek Çelik said something that I wanted to drill into a bit further…

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My March Madness

Posted by John in HTML5, Personal, Web Accessibility on March 22, 2011

I am home from an intense 10 days of SxSW, CSUN and W3C Face-to-Face meetings. I am happy if tired. While my head is still crammed with all that transpired, these are my early notes.

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The current problem with the @poster attribute of the <video> element.

Posted by John in HTML5, Web Accessibility on January 26, 2011

The image presented to the end user, whether it is the actual first frame of the video asset, or an image created and selected by the author, will likely have properties as well – often simple/simplistic, but also potentially complex and complicated. The question then becomes, how important is it to convey those properties to the end user?

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<video>, Accessibility and HTML5 Today

Posted by John in HTML5, Web Accessibility on December 23, 2010

Back in July of 2009, I wrote a blog post spurred on by a dinner conversation with my friend Bruce Lawson. A lot has changed however since I wrote that piece, and I’ve been meaning to update that information for some time now.

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Thinking through Accessibility

Posted by John in HTML5, Web Accessibility on December 14, 2010

It’s a question I hear frequently – not every day, but often enough that it sticks with me: Why do drive-through ATMs have Braille keyboards? The people who ask this question are generally decent folk; they are hardly what I would consider insensitive, and they truly care about the concepts of respect and inclusion.

5 Comments