A new article describes how to create dynamic galleries with DOM and CSS. Read the devarticles.com version, or if you dislike ads, the local copy.

With all my accessibility studies and teachings at work, I thought it’ll be a good idea to do something for charity, and what better than to sponsor a puppy to become a guide dog?

I filled out the forms and here he is:

Varley, my very own soon to be guide dog. I hope when he is out of school, he’ll be very helpful to somebody who needs him.

A lot of people cherish the pure CSS popups technique published by Eric Meyer in the long long ago.

The only problem with these is that they are not accessible. While screen readers and browsers without CSS happily display the texts, users without a mouse have no chance to get to the content of the spans embedded in the links.

What we can do though is use Javascript to check if a mouse is available, and make our CSS dependent on a class set to the body if that is the case:

CSS:

body.mouseenabled a span{
position:absolute;
left:-999em;
}

body.mouseenabled a:hover{
color:#fff;
}

body.mouseenabled a:hover span{
position:relative;
left:0;
}

Javascript

window.onload=function()
{

if(!document.getElementById || !document.createElement){return;}
document.body.onmousemove=function()
{

if(!/bmouseenabledb/.test(document.body.className))
{

this.className+=this.className?' mouseenabled':'mousenabled';
}

}
}

See it in action here.

Benefits:

• Keyboard accessible

Drawbacks:

• The popups are visible until the user moves the mouse.
• Visitors need Javascript enabled to see the effect.

Boing Boing: Jailed for using a nonstandard browser

Three cheers for that admin.

Got an email with videos of two odd contraptions. I have no idea what these things are, but I want one.