WAI-ARIA showcase: Microsoft Office web apps
Prompted by the recent Microsoft and GW Micro partnership announcement, I took a long overdue look at Microsoft’s Office 365 product offerings. The Home Premium edition not only gives you five installations of full Office Professional versions in your household, Windows and Mac combined, but also the apps for iOS and Android on up to five mobile devices, extra SkyDrive cloud storage space, and access to the Office in the browser offerings. Considering the cost of shelf Office products, the subscription prices are an amazing end user benefit!
What got me into programming
On Nov 20, 1983, Borland released Turbo Pascal 1.0. At a price of revolutionary 50 us$, developers received the world’s first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for the PC. It combined the compiler and code editor, and later also debugger, in a package that ran as a single program and didn’t require developers to go in and out of different applications under MS-DOS constantly, immensely increasing productivity.
Why accessibility APIs matter
This morning, Victor from payPal and I got into an exchange on Twitter regarding the ChromeVox extension. ChromeVox is a Chrome extension which provides screen reading functionality for blind users. Through keyboard commands, the user can navigate page content by different levels like object by object, heading by heading, form control by form control, etc.
Twitter now has a dedicated accessibility team
Ever since I joined Twitter in March of 2008, at my first CSUN under the Mozilla banner, Twitter’s own web presence was always a bit, or even a lot, of a challenge to use for me as a screen reader user. While the initial version was still pretty straight-forward, as time went by and Twitter added more features and turned their web presence into a web app, the interaction became increasingly cumbersome. Fortunately, there are clients on various platforms that allowed me to access the service without having to rely on the web site. Even after the more strict API 1.1 roll-out a year ago, this situation hasn’t really changed for me.
How I came to grudgingly accept aria-hidden
Yes, that’s right, I grudgingly accept the fact that aria-hidden is here, and most probably here to stay. Those of you who know me and have been involved in discussions with me, like poor Victor Tsaran, whom I pestered more than once to give me tangible evidence that aria-hidden solves problems normal visibility techniques don’t, know that I’ve been always a strong opponent to give web developers that much power over the accessibility tree. Unlike role “presentation”, which marks only one particular element as uninteresting for accessibility, aria-hidden does the same for an element and all its child elements.
Advancements in the accessibility of Facebook
In December 2011, I wrote this overview of the accessibility of social network sites and apps, and I had to paint a rather sad picture about most of the accessibility experiences. As time went by, some things improved here and there, others stalled.
Recap of Beyond Tellerrand 2013
On may 27 and 28, I attended the Beyond Tellerrand 2013 conference. Tellerrand is the German word for “edge of a plate”. The conference is targeted primarily at web developers and designers, but provides many tracks that look way beyond the edge of the plate of their daily work. It was my first time attending, and the third incarnation of this conference as a whole.
Easy ARIA Tip #6: Making clickables accessible
It often happens that designers and web developers agree on the fact that they do not like the standard buttons or the styling capabilities of buttons in browsers. To work around this, they then resort to what’s called clickable text. It is in many cases a simple span or div element with some funky styling that makes it look like a button with some fancy twists. A JavaScript click handler then does the magic behind the scenes that happens if the user clicks on that particular styled text with the mouse.
Switching to Android full-time - an experiment
A few weeks ago, I decided to conduct an experiment. I wanted to determine if Android 4.2.2 “Jelly Bean” was finally ready for me to switch to full-time, away from an iPhone.
Sometimes you have to use illegal WAI-ARIA to make stuff work
In this blog post, I’d like to recap an experience I just had while trying to apply some accessibility enhancements to the NoodleApp app.net client.