Christian Heilmann

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Archive for January, 2005

My very own guidedog!

Monday, January 31st, 2005

With all my accessibility studies and teachings at work, I thought it’ll be a good idea to do something for charity, and what better than to sponsor a puppy to become a guide dog?

I filled out the forms and here he is:

Varley, my guide dog

Varley, my very own soon to be guide dog. I hope when he is out of school, he’ll be very helpful to somebody who needs him.

On with the OS war

Monday, January 31st, 2005

The mini mac is scarcely out to the public, and already people try to turn it into a PC.

Pure mouse independent CSS popups?

Monday, January 31st, 2005

A lot of people cherish the pure CSS popups technique published by Eric Meyer in the long long ago.

The only problem with these is that they are not accessible. While screen readers and browsers without CSS happily display the texts, users without a mouse have no chance to get to the content of the spans embedded in the links.

What we can do though is use Javascript to check if a mouse is available, and make our CSS dependent on a class set to the body if that is the case:

CSS:

body.mouseenabled a span{
position:absolute;
left:-999em;
}

body.mouseenabled a:hover{
color:#fff;
}

body.mouseenabled a:hover span{
position:relative;
left:0;
}


Javascript

window.onload=function()
{

if(!document.getElementById || !document.createElement){return;}
document.body.onmousemove=function()
{

if(!/bmouseenabledb/.test(document.body.className))
{

this.className+=this.className?' mouseenabled':'mousenabled';
}

}
}

See it in action here.

Benefits:

  • Keyboard accessible

Drawbacks:

  • The popups are visible until the user moves the mouse.
  • Visitors need Javascript enabled to see the effect.

Blogging gene discovered

Friday, January 28th, 2005

Or is it?.

“Webloggers are born not made,” he said. “And shouldn’t be persecuted.” The activity could be a positive, group-bonding social function such as grooming, or simply a harmless way of passing the time, such as masturbation.

Lynx users are hackers!

Friday, January 28th, 2005

Boing Boing: Jailed for using a nonstandard browser

Three cheers for that admin.