I finally got around to buying me a Mac to test my stuff on and surf without the need of a bullet proof firewall and virus scanners slowing down the machine. As nobody was gratious enough to buy me one I got this older mini mac from a friend in Germany for £280 and added the keyboard/mouse for £15 via ebay and the monitor for £180 including VAT and P&P. No more begging for Mac checks from me :-)
It might be time for a new monitor. I promise anyone who buys me that one a nice 9000 pixel wide web site.
Over at access matters James Edwards, Mike Stenhouse, Derek Featherstone and Ben Easton finally took on the task to test various JavaScript event handlers with different assistive technology. The results, albeit not displaying correctly in my Firefox, are very interesting indeed:
It is pretty easy to preach web standards as a contractor or a freelancer with 10 page web sites as projects. It is also pretty easy to keep our blogs clean and advertise best practise web design and information architecture with them.
It is pretty darn impossible to get the same ideas implemented in huge projects, and the more people involved, the more will be cut on best practice ideas. Many a time I delivered clean, valid and flexible templates to see months later down the line that they have been butchered.
Robert Nyman wonders about this issue in his post Why do we have to fight and in the best manner of remote commenting some good ideas have been expressed about it over at Roger Johansson’s.
Off to yet another round in the ring…
Developers of free accessibility testing tools have joined forces in the Web Accessibility Tool Consortium. Being a user of a lot of these tools, I welcome this as it means that instead of working against each other we can have a nice, integrated approach and brain-picking from a pool of good people.
The consortium includes some well-known accessibility players from all over the globe, as Gez Lemon put it:
WAT-C is a collaboration of some of the world’s leading accessibility practitioners. These developers of free web accessibility testing software & services include:
The consortium will promote and pursue software development goals including:
Now, if only screen reader development companies would catch that drift and come up with a developer edition that does not time out after 30 minutes or has other limitations…