Your must read post for this week
This goes out to all my readers who are web developers, or who work with web developers closely enough to hand this to them.
Started a 30 days with Android experiment
After I revisited the results of my Switching to Android experiment, and finding most (like 99.5%) items in order now, I decided on Tuesday to conduct a serious 30 days with Android endeavor. I have handed in my iPhone to my wife, and she’s keeping (confiscating) it for me.
Revisiting the "Switch to Android full-time" experiment
Just over a year ago, I conducted an experiment to see whether it would be possible for me to switch to an Android device full-time for my productive smartphone needs. The conclusion back then was that there were still too many things missing for me to productively switch to Android without losing key parts of my day to day usage.
Accessibility in Google Apps - an overview
I recently said that I would write a blog series about Google apps accessibility, providing some hints and caveats when it comes to using Google products such as GMail, Docs, and Drive in a web browser.
WAI-ARIA for screen reader users: An overview of things you can find in some mainstream web apps today
After my recent post about WAI-ARIA, which was mostly geared towards web developers, I was approached by more than one person on Twitter and elsewhere suggesting I’d do a blog post on what it means for screen reader users.
Improvements to the handling of the aria-pressed attribute
On Monday this week, Heydon Pickering brought to my attention that Firefox has a problem with the way it handles the aria-pressed attribute in some circumstances. aria-pressed is used on buttons (or elements that have a WAI-ARIA role of “button”) to turn it into a toggle button which can be either pressed or not. Think of the Bold, Italic, etc. toolbar buttons in your favorite word processor as an example.
What is WAI-ARIA, what does it do for me, and what not?
On March 20, 2014, the W3C finally published the WAI-ARIA standard version 1.0. After many years of development, refinement and testing, it is now a web standard.
Easy ARIA Tip #7: Use "listbox" and "option" roles when constructing AutoComplete lists
One question that comes up quite frequently is the one of which roles to use for an auto-complete widget, or more precisely, for the container and the individual auto-complete items. Here’s my take on it: Let’s assume the following rough scenario (note that the auto-complete you have developed may or may not work in the same, but a similar way):
Why screen reader detection on the web is a bad thing
On February 26, 2014, the webAIM project published the results of their 5th screen reader user survey. Two questions were new in this survey that pertain to a recently growing desire of some web developers to know whether they’re dealing with assistive technologies on the other end or not. The results were rather shocking to me as a representative of a browser vendor and experienced assistive technology user:
WAI-ARIA showcase: TinyMCE 4.17
Today, on February 26, the TinyMCE team released version 4.17 of the JavaScript/HTML editor for the web. In the release notes, the first item mentioned is much improved accessibility support. For those of you not familiar with TinyMCE: It is the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), AKA visual or rich editor used in many popular content management systems such as the WordPress blogging software.