Lo and behold, what the Web Standards Project has to say in their latest press release:

In an effort to boost the quality of scripting on the world wide web, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) today announced the formation of the WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force

Lead by Jeremy Keith and Dori Smith, the task force will be evangelising the benefits of well-written, usable JavaScript and lead by example publishing articles and tutorials that illustrate best practices. These will be published on the DOM Scripting Task Force website and elsewhere.

Right now, the Task Force website is a humble, bare-bones affair (cobbled together by yours truly in half an hour) but the design and the content will be expanded before too long. For now though, there’s a blog where the Task Force members will be posting snippets and titbits of JavaScript-related news. Subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date with the activity.

Eric Meyer’s S5 standards based presentation slides system is used quite a lot by webstandardismos for their presentations.

However, some of its functionality is great for presenters but can be quite hard to follow for web surfers who just want to see what someone has presented.

My personal challenge was to come up with something that is as cool as Eric’s system, but much easier to use and more lightweight when it comes to creating your own slides.

The outcome is called DOMSlides and is licensed under Creative Commons for you to use, change and copy.

Any feedback, testing on Macs and own style sheets to bundle with the script are welcome.

I gave a presentation in a workshop this morning on the topic of “HTML tables best practices”. The catch: I didn’t get time to prepare properly and the audience was predominantly designers and non-technical types.

I cobbled the thing together in half an hour during the first presentation of a colleague and the result is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but might be helpful to you aswell:

Best practise on HTML tables for the non-techie audience

Yes, I couldn’t resist creating my own slideshow JavaScript thingy…

European Digital Rights and Privacy International have sent an urgent letter yesterday to the UK Presidency and the European Commissioners for Justice and Media to show restraint in today’s extraordinary JHA Council. EDRI expects the UK Presidency to table a new urgent procedure for the proposal on telecommunication data retention, bypassing the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Full news and downloadable PDF on the EDRI site

• www.edri.org
• http://www.privacyinternational.org

I just went through some sites for an accessibility audit and keep bumping into the same issue: Alternative text for the sake of alternative text. If I surf some pages with a text browser, IBM Homepage Reader or Jaws and it takes me 10 minutes more to find my way around, I start wondering where the common sense was when the site was created or who was the main target for these alternative texts. Take this gem taken from a noscript block:

We use javascript to write a “breadcrumb” here. If you want to view it you need to enable scripting in your browser. If this is not an option for you, you can navigate easily and in an equivalent way, by modifying the address of the page that you are viewing. For example: if the address shown is http://www.example.com/section1/a_and_b/c_and_d.html – you can change this to http://www.example.com/section1/a_and_b.html to navigate to the previous page in the hierachy or to http://www.example.com/section1.html to navigate to the top page in the hierachy.

They forgot to mention that I can also go to their competitors site, who didn’t bother using JavaScript to generate breadcrumbs, and offers me three easily understandable links.

Another issue is that a lot of developers rely on title attributes to deliver crucial information, like “PDF Document” or “opens in new window”, and not all who use assistive technology do have title reading enabled. Some even get rid of it by default, and who could blame them when you get titles like “Click to skip to content (skips navigation)” for a “Skip to content” link and a “click to visit the xyz page” for links stating “xyz”?

Generally, there are some sins I try to avoid:

• Alternative text that is dependent on the image/effect
• Alternative text that is overly elaborate – think of explaining something over the phone, not read out a manual
• Needless repetition of text. A link is a link, no need to repeat that (My favourite was “link to www.example.com – click to activate – opens in new window” as a title).

The sites with the best usability are the ones that helped us reach our visit goal without realising how the site helped us. As soon as you need elaborate explanations it is a sign that you either broke a convention or your interaction steps to reach the goal are simply too complex.