UPDATE: I’ve created a Chrome extension called NoCoffee that implements simulations for a number of vision problems. I’ve been searching for something to simulate surfing with blurry vision. While blur is not a scientific representation of most visual disabilities, it does help us get an idea. Simulating vision loss while designing pages is highly useful […]| Access Garage
Making dynamic web content accessible is a huge challenge. WAI-ARIA is the best available solution today. It’s supported in all major browsers and enables almost any dynamic content to be made accessible — that’s great. Accessibility is really important. But man oh man, understanding WAI-ARIA is not easy for developers, who aren’t always born as […]| Access Garage
Over the past few years, I’ve been working on and off on a children’s book about Firefox. The project started when my kids wanted to understand what I did at work every day. The story is a sketch about the evolution of Netscape into Firefox and the power of being open. In terms of historical […]| Access Garage
DotSpots is launching today. A dot is a “distributed object of thought”, which is like a mini blog post containing rich media, which can be connected to any paragraph in the news. Dots can be authored on the dotspots.com website or via the Firefox extension. They can also developed and polished by teams of collaborators. […]| Access Garage
My colleague Matt Mastracci from DotSpots has just released support for the HTML 5 <video>tag across browsers. Legacy browsers are also supported. Please see Matt’s post HTML 5 <video> support for older browsers. Kudos both to Matt and to our employer DotSpots for supporting web standards.| Access Garage
Frank Hecker has recently blogged about two new Mozilla accessibility projects. Great to hear! Also, I really need one of the new Firefox 3.5 tag cloud t-shirts. Imagine a cloud of colorful words describing Firefox 3.5, like “open”, “friendly” and “standards” arranged to fit together. Some words are vertical, some horizontal, it’s quite interesting looking. […]| Access Garage
This morning on the way to market in Esslingen, Germany, I discovered a new family of swans, living in a canal that leads through the center of town. The mother and father swans were there with their 3 cygnets, looking something about like this. The ones I saw looked a bit older and larger than […]| Access Garage
The mission? Build a rich text editor widget using contenteditable. Mark Pilgrim described this contenteditable use case as “alive and well on the web” with the warning that it is still “evolving”. Nevertheless, because of various problems we had using an <iframe> our group decided to switch from using designMode to contenteditable. Note: this article […]| Access Garage
It’s time to take a moment to thank and congratulate Frank Hecker, winner of the 2009 Catalyst Award, for his work to improve the lives of people with disabilities. The Catalyst award page de…| Access Garage
Vision problems are more pervasive than most of us realize. Upwards of 285 million people worldwide are visually impaired. Many more have low or moderate visual difficulties. The number in the U.S.…| Access Garage