Now, last time I was presented with one of those “prove to me you’re a human, read this squiggly word in a graphic” tests when signing up for something, I have to admit I thought they were quite neat. It wasn’t until I was trying to explain to someone at work that tables were terrible for accessibility (if used as structural design elements, rather than for tabular data) because of the way screen readers tended to see them, that I realised how flawed this human verification method is for the blind. I was interested to notice that the W3C has also criticized the approach and quite pleased that this sort of news was even appearing … there seems to be all too little coverage in mainstream news, tech or no.
This week’s OK/Cancel also focuses on accessibility … whilst the comic focuses on possibly taking things a bit too far, the main article is a treasure trove of resources to investigate in order to make things more accessible. As Simon has long commented, accessibility isn’t that much more work, once you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately this site is probably a terrible example, as Movable Type really doesn’t produce the best markup in the world. And although I’m aware of some of the fundamental things that need to be sorted for various needs (e.g. resizable text, alt tags on images, not using tables for structure, etc, etc) I think I need to dedicate some more time to sorting things out. Possibly even take the plunge and follow Mark Pilgrim’s entire 30 Days to a More Accessible Blog series. But I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you … things are a bit manic at the moment.
Incidentally, there’s some great info on A Whole Lotta Nothing as well as Simon Willison’s Weblog about how to run multiple versions of IE on one Windows installation. I wonder if anyone’s put together a guide to getting all the browsers with any sort of market share set up on one computer (any platform) yet?
Comments (2) Permalink
November 7th, 2003 at 10:00 PM
I’ve not seen a specific guide about it, but as far as I can tell the only way to run all browsers on one platform is to buy a Mac. That way you can run the critical Mac browsers (basically IE 5 and Safari) and use Virtual PC to run the Windows browsers (IE5, 5.5 and 6) from within the Mac operating system. I think Virtual PC is quite expensive though. You’re also limited to the G4 based Macs as the new G5 is incompatible with Virtual PC for various complicated reasons.
November 7th, 2003 at 10:12 PM
To be honest I’m surprised that people haven’t set up services yet to allow you to open a remote window on a machine that runs the various browsers to check that everything looks OK … I mean for most people it’s a sense check once they’ve done design right? So you could rent them space for a day here, a day there … I admit I’m not sure of the tech, perhaps it’s more complicated than I think.
Might grab Martin and Tristan and ask them to explain to me exactly how their remote desktopping and stuff works at some point … could be an interesting opportunity…
I take it this has helped Nat solve her pre-IE5.5 problem that she had?