Aarron Walter

It’s Christmas time, and you are probably compiling your lengthy wish list of stuff you want from Amazon.com, or other popular web sites. The problem is when you try to share links with your family/friends to the must have things on your list the URLs are usually a cumbersomely long length, and not very convenient for sharing. There’s a simple solution, and it’s called Tiny URL. This handy little utility will convert the massive URL you paste into it to a short URL that is easier to work with. They even have a bookmarklet you can add to your browser’s bookmark tool bar to make converting URLs fast and easy.

Recently I’ve been talking a bit with my students about the role of accessibility in their internships/jobs in the web world, and many have said that their employers don’t see a lot of value in it for their site. I found that a bit surprising as so many evangelists have been actively promoting the benefits (a broader audience, search engine optimization, increased support for PDAs/phone display, usability conveniences for all) and ease of writing accessible code. As a teacher of Interactive Design, I have some power to change this thinking by teaching my students the value of accessibility and how to build it into their projects. Below is a bit of an accessibility round up of a few useful tools, articles, sites, and informative podcasts about the topic that may help inform/convince you about the importance of accessibility.

• Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance, a great book from the Friends of Ed with a host of authors who are authoritative on the subject of accessibility. This book has everything you need to know to get started on accessible web design.
• Zeldman on Accessibility: Zeldman does a great job of presenting and counter arguing the major complaints you’ll hear when you bring up the topic of accessibility with you boss. My favorite quote from this presentation: “Google is the biggest blind user on the web”
• Accessify.com tools and wizards for building accessible forms, tables, popup windows, and more. These tools are awesome!!
• Ajax and Screen Readers: When Can it Work? Although web standards are being rapidly adopted by modern browsers today, many screen reader manufacturers have yet to jump on the band wagon. Subsequently, there are no solid solutions for how linearized pages in a screen reader can inform a user when the page has been updated by Ajax. If the reader has passed the area where Ajax will post a response, the browser will never notify the reader of the new content. James Edwards exposes the real issues with Ajax and accessibility in this article.
• Patrick H. Lauke of the Web Standards Project interviewed on Web Axe podcast. Lauke is a brilliant guy who is championing the cause to get screen reader manufacturers on board with web standards. He has some great observations in this podcast including how Flash can actually fill some accessibility needs! You may also want to check out the main Web Axe site and podcast.
• Paul Boag of Boagworld.com has a number of podcasts on the topic of accessibility: Understanding Accessibility Guidelines, Pragmatic Accessibility, Web Accessibility
• It’s no surprise that A List Apart has a host of wonderful articles that explore the big picture and intimate details of accessible web design
• Adobe has a resource center with articles, templates, and other stuff to help you develop accessible content using Flash, Dreamweaver and the rest of their software.
• Dive Into Accessibility is a wonderful site with clear explanations of what accessibility is, what it can do for you and your users, and how to build accessible content.
• Now that you are on board with accessibility, how the hell do you “sell” it to your clients or boss?
• Validate your pages against accessibility guidelines at Bobby Watchfire or Cynthia Says. You can validate against WCAG or Section 508 receiving a priority 1, 2, or 3 seal of approval.
• Joe Clark, a member of the Web Standards Project, is one of the top evangelists of web accessibility, and his site has some great information on the subject. You may also be interested in what he has to say about the WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

Adobe has recently introduced Labs.Adobe.com where they introduce valuable tools and get feedback from users about their initial releases of some of their products. I recently wrote about their handy Spry Framework, which looks like the easiest to learn JavaScript framework on the market. They have also released one of the best color palette generation utilities I have seen to date entitled kuler. Kuler takes cues from many other popular color palette utilities, and in many ways ups the ante. It emulates the community sharing of palettes seen at Colour Lovers (by the way, they have a new site), offers all of the palette options for analogous, monochromatic, complimentary, and triadic systems seen on Color Scheme Generator 2, and allows you to mix and copy RGB, Hex and CMYK values like Color Mixers. Kuler displays swatches in large areas on a dark background allowing you to see them much better than its competitors. It’s a beautiful system, and a great asset to any designer operating in any medium.

As a bonus, they also offer some useful links to color theory resources in the links section.

Now that you are getting interested in implementing Microformats on your sites, you may find a cheat sheet of all major Microformats for fast reference a handy tool. Brian Suda, the author of this useful cheat sheet also wrote a book on Microformats, published by O’reilly. Think Vitamin reviewed the 45 page PDF book favorably.

The Web Standards Project has assembled a Dreamweaver task force to try to lobby Adobe to better implement web standards in their software (although Dreamweaver has come a long way in this respect already). One useful outcome of their efforts is an extension for Dreamweaver that simplifies the implementation of Microformats. Microformats is one of the hottest buzzwords as of late, and for good reason. It’s goal is to standardize the way in which we use XHTML to markup information such as calendar events, contact information, etc. so we can build scripts and applications that can see the meaning in this content and do something useful with it. An example might be a community calendar application that could gather all events from sites that list events in a certain area. A program could not make any sense out of this content unless it had a standardized way of identifying each piece. To learn more, visit Microformats.org.

The Microformats extensions allows you to quickly markup contact info, events, references to friends/colleagues sites, and site licensing in this standardized format. Learning to do this on your own is also pretty easy, as Microformats uses XHTML tags you already know, but names classes for these tags according to the data it encloses. Once you install the extension, look at your Insert palette in Dreamweaver where you will find the Microformats menu item added.