One thing I keep getting asked ever since I published my JavaScript book is to compare the book, my scripts or even myself to other publications and people. This is not only people asking me whether it is worthwhile to buy the book or if they are the right audience for it, it happens in all kind of situations. Here is why I consider this a waste of your and my time. (more…)

I am back in the U.S. for a week staying in San Francisco and working in Santa Clara. So much more warmer here than London. I’ll be at the Accessibility Dinner on Thursday and generally trying to get to know as many people as possible while I am here.

So if there is a bit of slack in posting here, sorry about that.

If some of you have wondered what happened to the outspoken accessibility guru Joe Clark in the last few months, he has been busy. What Joe is trying to do is raise money to finish his open and closed project, which is a research project on the things Joe has been very much keen on advertising the last few years:

The Open & Closed Project is a research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We’ll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we’ll carry it out ourselves.
We’ll test the finished standards for a year in the real world and publish them. (You’ll be able to download them for free or buy them in several formats.) Then we’ll develop training and certification programs for practitioners. It will finally be possible to become a certified captioner (or audio describer or subtitler or dubbing artist).
We’ll also develop and test improved fonts for captioning and subtitling (already underway). We’ll develop a universal file format.

Now, all of this costs money, and Joe assumes he’ll need 7 million Canadian Dollars to get this thing going for a year. To make matters even worse, he cannot really find the time to bug possible capital givers to get to these 7mill. That is why he set up a micropatronage page at http://joeclark.org/micro/ and wants you, and me and everybody to help him get together 7,777 Canadian Dollars to get a whole month off to search for wealthier supporters in earnest.

So, if you can spare some money, go and donate a small amount to get him on the way.

[tags]joeclark,accessibility,captioning,openandclosed,charity[/tags]

I just created a presentation for a Tech Talk later on with the topic “Accessibility and You, a non-tech approach to web accessibility” and during the collection of material I realized that a lot of real world inventions were based on the needs of disabled people and are now benefitting everybody.

• Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell invented the loudspeaker and subsequently the telephone to help Edison overcome his hearing problems, now we all use loudspeakers (sometimes to turn us into someone who is hard-of-hearing)
• Subtitling and captioning of movies and TV programmes helps deaf users, but also those who are not firm in a foreign language and still want to see the movies as they were intended (I learned a lot by watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus with subtitles)
• Talking VCRs and universally accessible doors make it a lot easier for both people with disabilities and those without to use them.
• The University of Manchester is working on some software to make mobile web surfing a lot easier by automatically stripping unnecessary content from web sites. The algorithms and logic of the software is based on research with blind users and screen readers.
• IBM is working on an alert service for deaf people to get informed when there is a public announcement on stations and airports. When there is an announcement their mobile phones get a message or vibrate, which is something that any visitor could profit from (how many times did you have a delayed flight, went for a coffee and had to neck it because you felt uneasy about not seeing the notice board?)
• The curb cut, those dips in sidewalks created for people using wheelchairs makes it easier for people with prams, cyclists and others, too.
• OCR scanning was invented to allow a blind person to hear a text that was previously printed and became a massive success in data entry processes.

These are just some examples, and I’ll be happy to add more (comment please) were a disability became the spark that started a new invention.

However, when you look at any web design list or forum these days, all you hear is “I need to add skip links” or “I need to make this accessible” or “how can I make this work with screen readers?”. Where is the spark there? How come not many people see accessibility as a chance to improve a current product or use it as a test phase to give the product a trial by fire before considering it worthy of publication?

During a summit last month in Germany Markus Erle talked about accessibility testing as an incubator to make products more stable, mature and ready for the real world and not as a means to create a habitat for handicapped users.

This inclusive approach is not new, in fact Wendy Chisholm’s article Innovative Design Inspired by Accessibility on Digital Web covered it already in 2005, but I don’t see it being followed or getting as much time in the limelight as the old “so what do we have to do to accommodate disabled users”?

Thanks to Tomas Caspers and Mike Davies

[tags]Accessibility,Usability,Web Design,Design,Access[/tags]

After almost four years my free hosting service finally didn’t work out any longer and I was annoyed about the outages and the other clients on the shared box annoyed about the traffic I caused.

So I bit the bullet and got myself a new server for all my sites. I looked around a bit, dropped some mails on thelist and with other bloggers and I decided to go for the grid server offer of media temple in the USA.

I dreaded the move, as over the years I have acccumulated a lot of data connected to 6 different domains. All the more I was very much surprised to see that I was able to get and connect a new domain, shift my data over and reconnect my old domains (onlinetools.org is still on the old server) to the gridserver within less than two hours!

The admin interface of the grid server allows you to define which domains to use, set up the mail servers and webmail interfaces and lets you define whether to use PHP4 or 5 on a per-domain basis.

You can add extra PHP components by altering an add-on to the php.ini and you have MySQLAdmin by default. Urchin is also included, but I haven’t set that up yet, and you have preconfigured WordPress, ZenCart and Drupal in case you want it. I tweaked this WordPress too much to go all fresh and new, but maybe I will at a later stage.

I now also have a proper spam filter and can play with Ruby, which is pre-installed, too. All in all, I am very happy so far and the price of $20 per month seems not to be too high for what your are getting.

[tags]Hosting,Webhosting,media temple,ruby,php,wordpress[/tags]