Yahoo just released their idea of modern browser support entitled Graded Browser Support . I have been advocating this in my company for a while, although it sometimes is tricky as it is also dependent on the client and their visitors (I had this wonderful degrading CSS-layout with awesome DOM Scripting effects just to realise that the main user group is IE5 and – god forbid – Netscape Communicator).

I was also pretty chuffed to see them linking to my unobtrusive JavaScript course :-)

Yes I know, both Molly and Derek have reported on it already, but after pointing out in my 10 reasons why clients don’t care about accessibility article that one reason is that nobody has been sued properly yet, it seems we are one step in that direction.

Target is being sued for inaccessibility. From the webaim list:

This is to bring to your attention that a web accessibility lawsuit has been filed against the retail store Target. For further information, please see the disability rights advocates site . There are two links about NFB v. Target at the bottom of the page – one is a factsheet and the other is the actual complaint filed February 7, 2006. The International Center on Disability has also posted the information on their homepage at http://www.icdri.org. Filed in California State court, the complaint alleges violations of the California Unruh Civil Rights Act and the California Disabled Persons Act. Relief requested includes statutory damages which may include treble damages under the Unruh Civil Rights Act. California law incorporates the Americans with Disabilities Act provisions in the Unruh Civil Rights Act and provides for relief beyond that available at the federal level.

The very interesting part is that target seem to be only a whitelabeled site using the Amazon API, once again proof that the backend can be good but you still can make a pig’s ear out of it.

Google have released some statistics on web pages they have analysed:

In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results we found are available below. We hope this is of use!

I would very much say so, so have a read about Google code webstats

Another Firefox extension I hadn’t known of earlier is Firebug which put together the best of JS console and the DOM inspector and even shows you your XMLhttpRequest data!

We all knew that the success of the million dollar homepage will spin off lots of imitations and plagiates. One of the more funnier ones is Buy it off where you can buy parts of a female body to be revealed and link to your site. Visitors can also solve puzzles in these parts of the body and win money – which means that there will be more people visiting that site.

Now, good marketing and an almost unique idea, but the technical implementation is really bad, you’ll need MSIE to see the lady undress – if that many people can be bothered, as last time I heard there are naked ladies somewhere on the web for free, should you be interested.

Older and more honest seems to be TinaTina, a German student who tries to finance her studies by revealing more and more in photo series of superb quality and taste. “Better naked than daft” is the motto.

Personally I think I will spare you a dress-off Chris to finance this site, but I might keep it in mind it as a last resort…

I am currently writing up my follow up article for my digital web article 10 reasons why clients don’t care about accessibility aptly named “Seven habits of projects who fail to deliver accessibility”.

In it I’ll be listing mistakes I have encountered and done which caused the final product to become less accessible than it could have been. Examples are taking all the accessibility responsibility away from the client and believing the product description of a CMS without really testing if it delivers what it promises.

What are the snags that you kept encountering in your products?

One I just had to suffer again is a company trying to cut down the amount of incoming emails by looping requests through an FAQ system that fails to help:

Dear Christian,
The following may help in answering your question:
No matches were found.
If this response did not answer your question, you can submit it now

No, it didn’t help me, and a clever system would not even bother showing this message.