The last few months Chris Mills from Opera was busy gathering a lot of great web development experts around him (with a lot of pimping by yours truly) to assemble probably the most thorough and up-to-date web standards curriculum on the web: The Opera Web Standard Curriculum

Several dozen articles, all licensed with Creative Commons will be available to cover the tasks of web development: from understanding the principles of the web up to Ajax interaction. During the whole course the main focus is on usability, accessibility and writing maintainable code. We deliberately left out browser hacks and backward facing solutions and build on the ideas of progressive enhancement and unobtrusive JavaScript.

I wished this would’ve been out when I started, it’d have saved me a lot of time learning bad practices and un-learning them (which is always a painful process).

So, read it, use it and teach younglings the way of the standards Jedi: The Opera Web Standard Curriculum

Just like last year, Patrick Griffith managed to assemble quite an impressive group of JavaScript experts to talk about all things Ajax and Scripting. This year’s schedule reads very nicely indeed and I am happy to see that all aspects of using JS are covered, including a session by Richard Rutter of clearleft on how to wireframe Ajax interactions.

This is especially welcome to me, as JavaScript is so omnipresent in web development these days that we all need to know about it and bring in our different skills to make great products. JavaScript should not shock Information Architects and Designers, but help them make things easier for the end users.

This also ties in nicely with my session which is, not to anyone’s surprise on using JavaScript to increase the accessibility of products, named Scripting Enabled, the same as the event I am organizing revolving around the same topic:

Scripting Enabled

The relationship of JavaScript and accessibility has never been a good one. A lot of myths circulating around the use and capabilities of assistive technology branded JavaScript as a bad technology and Ajax as a total faux pas. This is changing as a lot of companies now open their systems to developers with APIs that are Ajax and JavaScript driven. This session will explain how some of these can be used to make data available to users with disabilities that were blocked out before. Accessibility is first and foremost about removing barriers for users, regardless of ability. Using JavaScript and Ajax to work around accessibility issues of rich media applications is one way of doing that. It is like creating mash-ups to test out some APIs – only that the benefit is much higher than just proving a point.

I am looking forward to @mediaAjax, having had a great time there last year. I might be a bit knackered though, as I will be at the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam just a few days before :)

I am just sitting at Mashed 08 and just released my hack for the event – an easier interface to SlideShare.

SlideShare is a great place to publish your presentations on the web. Uploaded Powerpoints and PDFs get converted to Flash movies you can embed in your blogs and web sites.

SlideShare also automatically creates a transcript of the presentation in HTML format, which is quite cool, but hidden far down the page and hard to reach in a screen reader. Easy SlideShare retrieves this information and shows it in an easier accessible manner.

As with EasyFlickr and Easy YouTube all you need to do to show a SlideShare presentation in Easy SlideShare is to add the URL at the end of the Easy SlideShare URL:

http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/purple-hack-fodder

http://icant.co.uk/easy-slideshare/?slides=http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/purple-hack-fodder

You can try it out with my mashed08 presentation

Easy SlideShare is Open Source, licensed with BSD, and you can download it here:

• Download Easy SlideShare v1.0
• Read the Easy SlideShare Documentation

As several people asked how I did the easier Flickr interface, I wrote up some step-by-step instructions, analyzing the issues and then taking the API to work around them.

Check out How to create an alternative Flickr interface – step by step.

This is one example where providing a good API can empower developers to remove barriers you might not be aware of for you. I hope to be able to show you more of those in the future.

The code examples are available and are licensed with BSD, so feel free to re-use them.

Following the accessibility hack of YouTube I thought the same could be done for Flickr, and here it is:

Easy Flickr is a very basic interface to look for photos and click through them 20 at a time. It works with and without JavaScript.

Update: It seems there is some confusion as to how this interface works. The main photo is linked to flickr.com (as per API guidelines) and you can navigate up to 20 results by clicking the lower thumbnail to go forward and the upper one to go backward in the results list. This also works with a keyboard and in JAWS but I need to make it more obvious with a hover state and some labels for screen readersand I added some roll-overs and texts for screen readers to make it more obvious..

• Check out Easy Flickr
• Get the source code

If you want to host the interface yourself, you need a server with PHP and cURL, but that’s it. Simply unpack the zip file and change the look and feel by changing the style sheet.