#22327
Developers put a lot of effort into ensuring their sites can be viewed in outdated browsers, but all too often ignore newer browsers, or worse still, a whole range of visitors. Accessibility means access to information for all. Information to all, regardless of the device used to view the document, or abilities of the visitor. You're extremely proud of your latest masterpiece. The choice of colours is striking, the layout fits perfectly on your screen, but how does it look on a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)? How does it look to a colour-blind visitor? Does it read correctly using assistive technologies, such as screen reading software? Can a visitor navigate the site without the use of a mouse? Is the site usable when JavaScript and images are switched off in the browser?
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio. Design>Web Design>Accessibility>JavaScript
#22328
Active Server Page (ASP) Tutorial
Introduced in 1996, Active Server Pages (ASP) are just like normal x/html pages except they are processed on the server before being sent to the client's machine. ASP itself is not a programming language, but a platform on which any scripting language that your web-server understands can run. The most popular languages used with ASP are VBScript (a subset of Visual Basic), JScript (Microsoft's version of JavaScript) and Perl Script. This tutorial only covers VBScript.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio. Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes>ASP
#25691
Those familiar with Apache will be used to the luxury of being able to specify redirects on the fly, without having to write programs to catch errors, and ensure they return the correct HTTP status codes. Being new to Apache, I was amazed at just how easy it is. The following provides an overview of the Apache Redirect directive.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2005). Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes
#30471
Charles L. Chen and T. V Raman have developed a common JavaScript framework to enhance the accessibility of AJAX-based applications. The framework is called AxsJAX, pronounced, 'Access JAX.'
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2007). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Ajax
#22336
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Tutorial 
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium to help determine the layout of an HTML document. Removing the formatting from the HTML document allows you to quickly apply a style to a whole site, rather than going through each document and changing the tags that represent the style. It also means that the content of the HTML document isn't bloated by extra information about how data is to be presented. The current specification for using style sheets, Cascading Style Sheets, level 2, may be found at the World Wide Web Consortium's site. Cascading Style Sheets, level 3 is currently available in its draft version.
#25690
More and more web documents are appearing that consist of nothing more than a collection of div elements. In most cases, better use of CSS selectors could be used to avoid overusing the div element.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS
#27417
This article investigates a method of providing client-side form validation through the DOM, and ensures that it works as expected with screen readers. Modern screen readers work relatively well with scripting, but it's the extra steps required to inform screen reader users that the content has changed that needs addressing.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Assessment
#30473
E-Shop Accessibility: From Theory to Reality
This article will explain how it is possible to apply WCAG 1.0 (and also how to comply with the future WCAG 2.0 and ISO 9241-151) to create an accessible e-shop shopping-cart and backend management system, analyzing the problems and the proposed solutions.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>E Commerce
#22334
The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) Tutorial 
The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is intended to be a replacement for HTML. XHTML has a stricter syntax than HTML and is the official recommendation. of the W3C. XHTML was required due to the poor standard of some HTML documents due to the forgiving nature of browsers. This tutorial discusses the issues in making your documents XHTML compliant.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2009). Design>Web Design>XHTML
#22335
Extensible Markup Language (XML) Tutorial
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of the Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML), the standard for creating markup documents. Unlike HTML, another markup language based on SGML, XML allows you to describe data and its structure rather than display it. XML is not a replacement for HTML, but compliments it by allowing the author to describe their own tags. XML is extensible as the author can create an unlimited number of tags. There are no predefined tags in XML.
#30475
Fieldsets, Legends and Screen Readers
The grouping and labelling of thematically related controls within a form is an important aspect of providing semantic information so users can understand and complete a form successfully. Differences in quality and implementation of support across user agents can hamper some users' ability to benefit from this information. This must not be taken as disincentive to developers, as the benefits of using these elements outweighs the negatives. But it is clear that some assistive technology vendors need to improve implementation of HTML features that enhance accessibility, so their users can gain the most benefit.
Lemon, Gez. Paciello Group, The (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Semantic
#27418
Two relatively common usability problems with web forms are textareas that are too small, and dropdown lists being clumsy to use for some people. This Greasemonkey user script automatically assigns links above each textarea so that it can be resized, and automatically expands dropdown lists. The script is easily configurable, so you can choose not to expand dropdown lists, or determine the maximum number of items you want displayed in a dropdown list, or have graphic or text links for resizing textarea form controls.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Forms>Help
#30470
One of the great things about the current HTML 5 draft is that they give plenty of examples of how to specify alternate text for images, although a few of them are misguided. Alternate text should be concise, and a longer description provided with a longdesc attribute if necessary.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2007). Design>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
#22329
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) Tutorial
The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standard language for developing documents on the World Wide Web. This tutorial concentrates on HTML 4.01, the latest version of HTML as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). See the Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) tutorial for guidelines on making the pages XHTML compliant. An HTML document consists of elements (sometimes referred to as tags), that are handled by a user agent (such as a browser) to render the document.
#28515
Improving Ajax Applications for JAWS users
Popular screen readers use a virtual buffer to allow users to interact with web content, whereby the virtual buffer provides a mechanism for screen reader users to interact with web content. This article uncovers undocumented behaviour in JAWS 7.1 and later, which allows web developers to build Ajax applications that update the virtual buffer without any interaction from the user.
Lemon, Gez and Steve Faulkner. Juicy Studio (2007). Resources>Accessibility>Ajax
#22331
Java may be used to develop stand-alone applications, servlets (an application that runs on the server), or applets (an application that runs inside a Java-capable browser). Applets appear in web-pages in the same way as an image, but because they are essentially embedded applications, are dynamic and interactive.
#27670
Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers
The accessibility community is understandably concerned about the accessibility of client-side scripting, in particular using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) to produce Rich Internet Applications. Steve Faulkner of Vision Australia and founder member of the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C) and myself on behalf of The Paciello Group (TPG) have collaborated in an effort to come up with techniques to make Ajax and other client-side scripting techniques accessible to assistive technology.
Lemon, Gez and Steve Faulkner. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Ajax
#22330
Released in January 1998, MySQL is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS). It's based around the Structured Query Language (SQL), and is best for managing the content of the database as opposed to transactions, as MySQL does not support COMMIT or ROLLBACK. One of the biggest drawbacks of MySQL is it's lack of support for referential integrity, no stored procedures, no triggers, and no sub-queries. MySQL is free, and may be downloaded from download section at MySQL.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio. Articles>Information Design>Databases>SQL
#27419
Photosensitive epilepsy is a form of epilepsy that is triggered by visual stimuli, such as flickering or high contrast oscillating patterns, and it's believed that around 3% to 5% of people with epilepsy are susceptible to photosensitive material. Photosensitive epilepsy is usually triggered where the flicker rate is between 16Hz to 25Hz, although it's not uncommon for seizures to be triggered by flicker rates between 3Hz to 60Hz. The condition most commonly effects children, and is usually developed between the ages of 9 and 15 years, and most prevalent in females.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Cognitive Psychology
#22332
PHP Server-Side Scripting Tutorial
PHP is a server-side scripting language and interpreter that is available on a wide range of platforms, including some versions of Apache, and Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). The PHP script is embedded in the Web page, and interpreted on the server before being sent to the client who requested the page.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio. Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes>PHP
#30474
Providing Context for Ambiguous Link Phrases
This article demonstrates a technique that allows ambiguous link phrases to be rendered visually in a page, whilst making sense to screen readers, and other non-graphical devices, that might render the links out of context.
Lemon, Gez. Paciello Group, The (2007). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Hypertext
#27421
Required Elements, and Required Tags
The difference between required elements and required tags has received a fair amount of attention recently, but the difference between the two is rarely (if ever) explained in detail.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Standards>HTML
#30472
Screen Readers and 'display:none'
When an element is hidden with display: none, the browser doesn't generate a box for the element; the element is not visible on the screen, and the layout of the page isn't effected by the element. As screen readers are supposed to read the screen, it makes sense that they do not announce content that is hidden with display: none.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>CSS
#27420
Access keys are a contentious area of accessibility, as they can sometimes clash with the shortcut keys used by user agents. One method to get around this problem is to allow users to define their own access keys. This post suggests a PHP class that allows users to define their own access keys.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
#27423
In order to encourage vendors of non-W3C technologies to include accessibility features in their technologies, and in recognition of emerging technologies that are beneficial for the Web, WCAG 2.0 is technology neutral. Rather than list each technology that the guidelines cover, WCAG 2.0 introduces the concept of a baseline. This post attempts to explain what is meant by this baseline concept.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
