Why am I so harsh?

Well, I instinctively put in my site. One of the “potential problems” reported is the following”

Tabular information may be missing table markup.

Well I am sorry to say, nothing on the page in question has a table, nor data of any kind that makes it look like a table. So if you try this checker, I wouldn’t take the results to heart quite yet.

With that being said, it has some hopes. The information is quite complete, with samples of valid code. I would however make the code in question highlighted somehow (color, a border, background color) within the code block. Currently it gives a full source code sample, which is a bit tedious to skim through if you don’t know what exactly is wrong.

One way I can tell is the default notification on where you are at if via keyboard navigation, is gone. I personally rely on this quite heavily. If I know I need to hit Tab 10 times to get somewhere, I am forced to count now, versus watching visually. Another thing is since I have the wp.com stat plugin activated, the cursor is by default is placed in the login box for that. While it is cool that I can login with just hitting enter, since that password is saved, but my focus is now halfway down the page. Where will I be located after a few tabs? Who really knows.

The sad thing about this is, I was asked my opinion if WordPress would be a good option for a blind user. At the time, I was still running 2.6.* and said it’s ok, not the best thing to use. I added that if the said user was considered a power user, they could make it work. I don’t think this will be the case anymore. Like I said, this is sad, so many people are using WordPress not only for bloggin but things like a CMS! It is shame that the dev team doesn’t adhere to standards. Going off that, it says they have no interest is accessibility. You can stretch that out to include usability even.

I logged into Gmail for the first time since about noon Wednesday, I saw that there was something new. THEMES! I am not sure how I feel about them really, I know that there are a few things I would like to see happen prior to these. However, most people like to make things pretty before they are fully functional yet. I know my sister is certainly that way, she is constantly changing her MySpace display picture.

Anyway, I looked at a handful of the themes, and I was undecided. The ones I looked at pretty much got a thumbs down. The one that would bring out the inner geek, Terminal, was disappointing. I could not tell which e-mails were new versus which were read due to the very slight change in greens. The others had similar issues, not enough contrast. This especially came out with the links into e-mails. The color was just too light, I cannot tell if it just was that it matched the background too closely or what. I have it on cold shower right now, but I will see howthe planets theme looks later today when it will be lighter. Planets is the theme of my personal Google page, so hopefully the theme will look decent around 10/11 am.

By the way, hello. I was on a long hiatus from blogging, I don’t have any real excuse why I didn’t this summer, I have been quite busy with school since the end of September. I have been working on a post about the election, hopefully I can get that done in the next few days.

[edit]: While I was little bummed to see that the planets theme did not change, it gets a thumbs down. Google or whoever made the theme, did not apply a new color to the active arrow. So a black arrow on a black (or dark navy) background, doesn’t work too well.

Technorati Tags: blogging, google, gmail, themes

I originally didn’t want to update, because it seemed as though widgets were required to use. A while back, I did a post on how widgets effected my blog. I figured out that if you empty the widget sidebar, it will read the hand coded version. Thank god!

One thing I do not like is the new way you preview your post. Which is, instead of just hitting save, scrolling to the bottom of the page, and see the preview, you now have to hit save then click on the preview link just under the title block. Well, I am mainly a keyboard user, meaning that I hardly touch the mouse when I use a computer, whether that’s for looking at a website, or general usage. The preview link is not accessible via any conventional ways. The only way you can access it, via the keyboard, is use Firefox’s find feature.

It will be interested to see what will be included, both in version 2.2.x and 2.3.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, wordpress

Technorati Tags: accessibility, blog, blogging

The lab has the following sentence above the text area field:

Please describe your needs as specifically as you can in the space below. There is no limit on length for this section of our form, but please remember to press the return key before your text starts to scroll beyond the right boundary of the field. Otherwise, we will not receive your request properly.

Just a heads up, this site is for accessible technology. On top of that, this lab covers accessible web design. So saying hit the return key if the form begins to scroll is merely impossible if you are blind. However that request (to hit return) makes no sense because textareas automatically wrap unless you don’t use spaces. Also if you use long(er) words near the edge of the textarea they may not break. Again if you are blind, you cannot know this, unless you know how many characters wide the textarea is, and you track the character count in your head.

Technorati Tags: accessible, accessibility, access technology, web design

Facebook has started to put structure into their site. What I mean is using the various heading tags. Well, they did put a <h1> tag, but it is empty. That is completely useless, and bad coding for putting in empty tags that do nothing. Considering how big Facebook is now, they cannot make such errors. My only guess is they put it in to improve accessibility? If so, it just shows how little they actually know about accessibility. Header/heading tags DO NOT work like anchor tags, they are contextual!

Background on Headers

Think of headers as chapters in your average math or science book. You have Chapter 1, then part 1.1, and sometimes section 1.1.1 or 1.1.a, well “Chapter 1″ would receive an <h1> tag. “Part 1.1″, “Part 1.2″, etc would receive an <h2> tag. Sections, such as 1.1.1, would receive an <h3> tag. There are six heading tags in all, but unless you are doing something in the legal or scientific realm, I don’t think many people would have, for example, “Section 1.1.1.1.1.1″, but I may be wrong.

The way this has ties to the accessibility realm is mainly with individuals who use screen readers, such as JAWS. JAWS is a very popular screen reader for Windows. (Macs are stuck with the built-in screen reader.)

Next, they redesigned the sidebar menu. Once again, bad coding practice. Instead of making a simple unsorted list (without bullets), they did it all with divs. The genius who coded this named the class for each div list-item. On top of that each, link in the menu needs two divs to get it to look that way. Ok, this could be done dramatically easier and cleaner with a simple list!

I haven’t looked at the accessibility at all really, but seeing that they cannot design the simple elements, why on earth should I think they even consider accessibility. I wish there was a way to get these issues up with Facebook.

Technorati Tags: facebook, design, web design, standards

One of the pages I waited to update was our page that shows people how to make a Macintosh accessible. We provide cheat sheets for the various accessible programs that we support. But Macs only have the programs that are built in. So I had to hop on a Mac to do a write up for the system that is currently running in the main lab. At first I was like ok, I am going to loose my mind. But after having to use it for a few days, I began to like Macintoshes again. Back in November, the bookstore had a raffle for a brand new 15″ Macbook. That was quite an interesting raffle, and since then I thought it would be fun to have a Mac to dink around with.

Technorati Tags: macintosh, webdesign