Things that made me happy this morning

• OmniDazzle is a tool for Mac that allows you to show a visual clue where your mouse pointer is. Great for live presentations of systems.
• Opera released JavaScript best practices my final article for the Opera Web Standards curriculum JavaScript section
• Seth Godin explains the two elements of a great presenter, respect from the audience and love for the audience
• The Guardian newspaper in the UK has some cool data to mash-up available for us
• The Mime on twitter – well if you haven’t got anything to say…
• Dasher is an interesting concept of an interface to quickly enter text without using a keyboard:

Dasher is an information-efficient text-entry interface, driven by natural continuous pointing gestures. Dasher is a competitive text-entry system wherever a full-size keyboard cannot be used – for example, when operating a computer one-handed, by joystick, touchscreen, trackball, or mouse; when operating a computer with zero hands (i.e., by head-mouse or by eyetracker); on a palmtop computer; on a wearable computer.
The eyetracking version of Dasher allows an experienced user to write text as fast as normal handwriting – 29 words per minute; using a mouse, experienced users can write at 39 words per minute.
Dasher can be used to write efficiently in any language.

One thing that drives me up the wall is the inertia that happens in the accessibility world. We do our best to keep the web development world aware of accessibility concerns but in the other direction I just don’t see much drive to even understand the basic principles of web design.

My favourite example is the question that crops up almost every 3 weeks on different communication channels:

The WCAG guidelines state that every image needs alternative text but we are using CSS background images a lot [Ed: sometimes this question is also about CSS sprites] – how do you define alternative text for background images?

OK, here is the scoop, people:

CSS background images which are by definition only of aesthetic value – not visual content of the document itself. If you need to put an image in the page that has meaning then use an IMG element and give it an alternative text in the alt attribute. You can also add a title attribute to add extra information that will be displayed to every user as a tooltip. If your image has a lot of content (for example a graph) then consider using the longdesc attribute to link to a textual representation of the same data or display the same data for example as a data table in the same document.

That is it – images in CSS are only visual extras, not page content, hence they never need alternative text. “Rounded corner” or “blue-yellow gradient” does not help anybody as alternative text – on the contrary, it annoys the end users.

It is not rocket science, really!

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Christopher Blizzard of Mozilla showing off a motion tracking example in pure JavaScript – just imagine the opportunities for interfaces. Move forward and backward in a playlist or carousel by moving your hand in front of the screen!
• A good roundup of Firebug tricks and use cases
• Marco’s article ‘The death of web development’ as an answer to my recent article on Thinkvitamin
• Teacher Xpress is a great example how amazingly clever AI technology can produce interfaces that totally overwhelm HI and make us go “what?”
• Some nice and cheeky ads
• Moo.com opening a US office – I love them cows!
• Stephanie Troeth merging the old MACCAWS content and my Wiki on the business reasons for web standards
• Dustin Wilson going apeshitgetting annoyed with new Safari features being heralded as innovation but really being used in Opera for quite a while – first come is not always best delivered or reaching the right people.

Things that made me happy this morning

• Arriving in Denver in time to deliver my talk at WDN - only 7 hours in the lounge made it possible
• New York Lego bricks I love the pepper mill
• Accessify offers an easy youtube caption creator and asks for feedback
• The Opera Web Standards Curriculum now has a JavaScript section – yeah I’ll finish the missing article soon
• An interesting blog post on how to blog when you got nothing to talk about

Things that made me happy this morning (already adjusting my time to India, where I am flying tomorrow):

• PacMan the text adventure
• Apparently TweetEffect is now a startup – time to get some VC people in?
• Being a missionary in space is impossible according to NASA research. This is interesting as all the things produced by NASA are public domain aren’t they? I always thought of sex with effects as creative commons as the derivative works are normally attributed back to the original developers (“she has your father’s eyes”)
• Smashing Magazine give 10 tips to protect your WordPress admin area
• Of all the people AOL is running an accessibility developer contest but damnit I am too late:

We’re looking for ideas for applications to assist computer and Internet users with disabilities – and we’re going to build them through the competitions of the 2009 TopCoder Open.
Now, we’ve extended the Sensations Developer Challenge Idea Generation contest for two more days, and we’ve thrown some bonus prizes into the mix!
In case three trips to the TCO in Las Vegas and $7,500 in prizes wasn’t enough, AOL will be giving an iPod Touch to five submitters to this contest, selected at random after the new deadline Tuesday, January 27th at 2pm ET.