PhotoshopDesign

How does red affect you? Does it stir up pleasant emotions filled with energy and strength? Does it remind you of love and the holiday that celebrates it, Valentine's Day? Does it make you hungry? Well, red conjures up many emotions, which is understandable being that it is a very bold color. For me, it brightens up my mood, and when I wear the color red it helps add a touch of confidence. When added to a home it can help do the same, so when you need that added boost, think about some items that you may like in the color red.

coral, pillow, rug, wall rack, bouquet, bowl, pepper mill, planter

One of the many great things about using a Mac as your development machine is VoiceOver, the screen reader that ships with every copy of Mac OS X. Testing your work in a screen reader is only a small part of building accessible websites, but it helps you understand the need for many accessibility guidelines.

To test your sites in VoiceOver you obviously need to know how to use it to navigate the Web. There are many, many keyboard shortcuts that can be used to control VoiceOver â€" way too many for me to learn them all by heart. So I’ve looked through Apple’s VoiceOver Getting Started guide and VoiceOver key-command chart (PDF file) and picked the commands I find most useful.

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Posted in Accessibility, Apple, Mac.

Being a pretty big fan of many winter sports I have spent most evenings of the past two weeks in front of the TV, watching the action from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

With excellent live TV coverage from the games I had no reason to visit either the Vancouver2010.com or the CTVOlympics.ca website to find more info about the games. But one person who has visited and taken a closer look at those sites is Joe Clark. What he found is that the Vancouver Olympics Web sites are inaccessible to disabled people.

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Posted in Accessibility, Web Standards.

In New W3C website launched I mentioned that the W3C’s new site uses a bit of invalid CSS. A couple of readers have told me that the errors caused by vendor-specific extensions aren’t really errors, and that the CSS validator is wrong to report such property names as errors.

I wasn’t completely sure about whether or not this was true, so I did a bit of research. And, to the best of my understanding, vendor-specific extensions are invalid.

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Posted in CSS, Web Standards.

I bought Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on the day it was released, but didn't gather enough courage to go ahead and install it until a week ago. Yep, it's been collecting dust on my shelf for over six months.

Upgrading between major revisions of Mac OS X has bitten me several times in the past, mostly because I use my Mac as a web development machine. I need Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl, Ruby and a whole bunch of Ruby gems in working order, and it seems like major OS X updates almost always mess with those in one way or another.

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Posted in Mac, Movable Type, PHP.

The color combination of orange and brown brings to mind the 70's as well as fast food places, in particular Roy Rogers which I use to love as a little girl (but it no longer exists in my area). Being that orange and browns are used, or were used, in some restaurants makes sense as it is suppose to stimulate appetite.

Some love the two shades combined and some do not. If you are one who does not find this marriage of hues pleasing then maybe the cute items chosen may help to change that.

what are your feeling on the selected colors?

pillow, bowl, pendant, armchair, bowl, duffle bag, spheres w/ bowl, candle

From December 2008 to January 2009, WebAIM conducted an online survey to find out about the preferences of screen reader users. The results of the survey provide useful information to web designers and developers, helping us better understand how screen reader users use the Web.

Until the end of October 2009, WebAIM are running a follow-up screen reader user survey with new and updated questions. Hopefully this survey will produce another set of useful data that can help us make informed decisions when developing accessible websites.

If you ever use a screen reader, even if it is only for testing or evaluation, you are welcome to participate in the Screen Reader User Survey.

Posted in Accessibility.

All screen readers that I know of have keyboard shortcuts that allow the user to navigate within a web page by jumping from heading to heading. This can really speed things up when you want to skip to a particular section of a page.

Being able to navigate by headings would also be very useful to sighted people who do not use a mouse, but unfortunately very few web browsers offer this functionality. The only graphical web browser I know of that has such functionality built in is Opera, while Firefox can get it by way of an extension.

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Posted in Accessibility, Browsers, Usability.

Back in January I asked for opinions on Headings, heading hierarchy, and document outlines, hoping for a discussion that could lead to a conclusive recommendation.

Unfortunately it seems very difficult to reach consensus on this topic. However, with input from the discussion in the comments on that post, along with private discussions via email and face-to-face, I see two options:

1. Use headings for both document and site structure.
2. Use headings only for the structure of the actual content, and use WAI-ARIA landmark roles for anything outside the content area.

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Posted in (X)HTML, Accessibility.