Weblogs: Links

• jQuery Accessible Tabs - How to make tabs REALLY accessible Dirk Ginader dissects the techniques of making genuinely accessible tabs. He delivers a working tabbed widget (with Artur Ortega) that has been extensively tested in screen readers. Other tab widgets solve the robust and operability barriers, and Dirk's also solves the perceivability and understandability barriers.

• The problem with SproutCore Esteemed colleague Steve Webster notes: 'SproutCore doesn't just ignore progressive enhancement — it hacks it into tiny little pieces, urinates all over them and then mails them back to you one by one.'

• Circumventing Hegemony in the HTML WG Steve Faulkner lays out a clear path to raising issues and proposals for the HTML 5 specification, and describes the process for how accessibility issues are dealt with, including an 'escalation' to the Protocols and Formats working group, a group 'consensus seeking' discussion, and finally a vote. This is useful to know, and hopefully this will result in accessibility issues being dealt with more appropriately and with real consideration.

• Social Innovation Camp projects are go! Social Innovation camp takes place in London on April 5 & 6. A list of six ideas has now been published, and developers, designers are invited to come along and build these ideas on that weekend. Come along and be a part of a team that builds useful ideas! (disclaimer: Yahoo! Developer Network is sponsoring the event, I am an employee of Yahoo! Europe)

• Yahoo acknowledges inaccessible content, yet still fails to innovate 'I just find it disgusting that people like the developers who make these products that can be designed with accessibility from the beginning, choose not to even attempt this.'

• User-Experience Design based on Paper-Wheels A fabulous demonstration of a multi-touch screen with a revolutionary user interface pattern. As Mark Pilgrim frequently quips: A lot of effort went into making this look effortless. Indeed the user interaction feels intuitive and effortless, actually fun, playful and engaging. This prototype is on public demonstration for the next week in The Mall Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square, London.

• Making YouTube easier and more accessible Following on from Antonia Hyde's insight into the accessibility barriers hampering people with learning disabilities, Christian has taken the YouTube video player and added in a new JavaScript interface to take these needs into consideration. Its a simplified interface to YouTube video.

• Rebecca MacKinnon's China Earthquake pledge Rebecca MacKinnon pledges another $500 to the Chinese Earthquake fund if 500 people donate at least $20. I've donated, have you?

• Captioning Sucks, by Joe Clark An exposure of what's wrong in the world of program captioning. The excuses of technical issues, the legal loopholes, the politics that prevent deaf people from gaining equivalent access to motion pictures both online and offline. The biggest problem - the lack of a standard. Joe offers a solution.

• Web Accessibility: Making PAS 78 Work Grant Broome, friend and a colleague I worked closely with on Legal & General's accesibility project, has authored a book to help organisations on the path to an accessible website. Looks interesting, particularly for UK companies and local government. I can testify to Grant's extensive and practical knowledge of web accessibility.

• Fun with multiple submit buttons Stuart outlines an approach to multiple submit buttons and dealing with the case when Return is used to trigger a form submission. Couple on interesting techniques in the comments. For Legal & General we opted to have an offscreen submit button as the first form element, but this creates confusion for screen reader users for what use is a form if the first element is a submit button?

• Screen Readers lack emphasis Steve Faulkner tests JAWS and Windows Eyes to see whether they support emphasis, strong emphasis, bold, italics, ins and del. The short answer is that by default, screen readers treat these no different to plain text, as if it just ignores the elements.

• Comparing Tagged PDFs from Office and Acrobat Alastair tests the accessibility of PDFs created by Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat and finds that Word does a better job. But both tools do miles better than Open Office.

• Singed man sought after bungled arson attempt CCTV captures a man trying to firebomb a Manchester nightclub, and end up setting himself and his bike on fire. Story and video. The video is breathtakingly funny.

• Microsoft to World: Do as we say. Shelley Powers has a powerful response to Zeldman's continued defence of Microsoft's version switching. She notes that we are not being told the whole story. This is the problem of working behind Non Disclosure Agreements. It sucks to be Zeldman right now.

• JavaScript, abbr and Internet Explorer As a follow-on to his previous investigation into acronym and abbreviation support in screen readers, Jon Gibbins tests whether the createElement hack actually works on abbr in Internet Explorer. It does!

• Screen readers and abbreviations Jon Gibbins discusses how abbreviations and acronyms are handled by screen readers, and what screen reader support for these features really means. Good all round advice and common sense. More great investigative work from accessibility experts.

• Is Chat Room Addiction Real? You’d Better Believe It! Yahoo Live, a social video chat application, is having a surprising and life-enhancing experience for deaf people. Its probably not a planned use case, but another inspiring example of how a small idea can have such a positive impact on a community.

• alt in HTML5 Required? - to be or not to be Steve Faulkner comments on the formal response from W3C's Protocols and Formats Working Group regarding making the alt attribute optional in HTML 5. They classify this omission as a bug.

• Assistive Technology: a video tour of accessibility Jon Gibbins pulls together a range of videos about assistive technologies and how people with disabilities use the web. This includes co-worker Victor Tsaran's videos for the YUI Theatre, and material from AbilityNet.

• Microsoft: Fish, or Cut Bait Shelley points out that 'Microsoft is asking us to declare our intentions, it's only fair we ask the same of it. If Microsoft won't meet us half-way – if the company releases IE8 without support for the HTML5 DOCTYPE or XHTML, and without at least some guarantee as to when we'll see SVG in IE – then we'll have our answer. It may not be the answer we want, but it will be the answer we need.' I completely agree.

• Keyboard Navigation and Internet Explorer Gez Lemon has an indepth article that describes the keyboard focusing problem in Internet Explorer 7. This has more seriousness now that IE7 is a permanent fixture in Windows.

• Microsoft versioning: accessibility implications Since Microsoft's IE8 meta-tagging means that IE7 is guaranteed to be default rendering engine forever more, the keyboard accessibility problem in IE7 will persist too, which is a severe accessibility barrier.

• Microsoft Koan Mark Pilgrim at his incisive best again. Short and directly to the point as to the flaw in Microsoft's 'Yes I really mean it this time' standards-compliant meta tag.

• Nobody likes E-books but me Mark notes that major publishers have twisted ebooks by removing the benefits of them, and then they wonder why no-one buys them. Mark describes the three ways major publishers have destroyed the value of ebooks. I'm interested in Amazon's soon-to-be-released Kindle - but its a locked in system. Fail.

• PlugLondon A developer meetup, with no PR, at the Skype London offices on the 8th December. Encouraging developers to get together talk, demo and show off the code they've done, as well as talk to developers from web companies about their APIs. And beer.

• RFC 5023: The Atom Publishing Protocol Its here, its official and its a standard. RFC 5023 is the Atom Publishing Protocol. Fantastic work.

• Lawsuit over web site accessibility for the blind becomes class action The National Federation of the Blind's long running campaign against Target is raised another notch - a class action. Considering the NFB's agreement with Amazon (which powers Target.com), I'm surprised this legal challenge is continuing. I wonder if Target has an exit strategy?

• Transcript of Shawn Lawton Henry's talk The RNIB organised a talk by Shawn Lawton Henry back in June 2007 about WCAG where we are and where we are going. The talk was exceptional, covered a number of interesting topics including an eyeopening discussion about what is considered an authoring agent (not just Dreamweaver, but CMS, blogs, and Web applications like Flickr).

• JSON creator slams Ajax, Web Douglas Crockford uses a keynote to rant about the state of Ajax. Excellent points and realistic: '[JavaScript is a] deeply flawed language, with an unpopular programming model. But to its credit, it's working really, really well in an environment where Java failed'

• Investigating the proposed alt attribute recommendations in HTML 5 Steve Faulkner, of the Paciello Group, does some screen reader testing that refutes the HTML 5 Working Group argument that removing the alt attribute from an image will not have an adverse effect on the accessibility of images.

• WebAIM: User Test Cases for HTML 5 Jared Smith has put together a bundle of videos on the various accessibility features of HTML as experienced by a screen reader power-user. This is offered as a way of encouraging the HTML 5 Working Group to better understand the implications of changing or removing accessibility-related HTML attributes and structure.

• Usability myths and professionals Alastair runs into bizarre criticism for the statement: 'no usability guideline is black and white, and the context and users have to be taken into consideration.' Alastair demonstrates a quality that's thin on the ground in web development - a pragmatic skepticism, backed by real research. A piece worth some thinking time.

• Real World Accessibility Dan Champion and friends host an accessibility workshop in London on the 8th of August. Real World Accessibility has talks from experienced web accessibility practitioners: Bruce Lawson, Ann McMeekin, Patrick Lauke, Grant Broome, Ian Lloyd and Dan himself. An excellent line up and good sessions. If you want to learn about accessibility, why not give this workshop a look-in.

• Yahoo!'s Accessibility Improvement petition A petition calling for the accessibility improvement of CAPTCHAs on Yahoo's services. The accessible alternative to the image isn't working well, it seems. If you are having similar problems with our CAPTCHAs please contribute your voice and sign the petition. (Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo, but do not represent them or their views.)

• Yahoo!: Shawn Lawton Henry on WCAG 2.0 Through quick work from Tom Hughes-Croucher, we were lucky enough to bring Shawn Lawton Henry into our London offices after @media 2007 to talk to us about WCAG 2.0. It was an interesting talk about WCAG 2.0 and where it fits into web accessibility. Shawn also allowed us to record the talk for the YUI theatre, and here it is.

• Leaving Yahoo! again Director of News, Sport and Information, Lloyd Shepherd is leaving Yahoo to go freelancing. I've enjoyed working on sites Lloyd directed, he has a lot of energy, insight and deep knowledge about what really works on information-related sites. Hopefully, we haven't seen the last of Lloyd - I look forward to the next opportunity to work with him.

• When accessibility is not your problem The first word of Joe's title is When, this is important. Joe's notes deal with edge cases where writers of content shouldn't have to deal with certain problems that are better handled in the browser or assistive technologies. He covers font-resizing, foreground and background colours, abbreviations and cognitive disabilities. Pragmatic advice all round.

• No Censorship! My friends in Germany are very upset with Flickr's latest move. The German version of Flickr forces only pictures marked as safe to be shown in their interface. This is crazy - its great to see a German language interface to Flickr, but should that be at the loss of content. That content could be seen by English-understanding Germans before this launch. What does Flickr have against non-English-speaking Germans?

• How the Color Deficient Person A practical demonstration of how various forms of colour-blindness affect how colours are seen. Interesting side-by-side analysis to be read in conjunction with Joe Clark's online book Building Accessible Websites

• Isn’t it time to stop the consortium/corporation bashing when talking about web standards? For webstandards speakers bashing large companies seems to be the cool thing to do. This seems to have reached a crescendo in the @media 2007 hot topics panel. Its a great pity that web standards advocates find this way of justifying their own existence. Some people talk, some people do. I'm glad I'm working with people that do.

• WCAG Samurai Errata for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 Joe Clark's secretive WCAG Samurai publish their first (and perhaps only) draft of their errata to WCAG1.0. There's a ton of common sense changes to reflect modern web development. I feel some parts are more forward-looking than a practical assessment as to what works now. But it is a good healthy update to a recommendation that's showing its old age.

• WCAG Samurai Errata Review Alastair Campbell, from Nomensa, has been invited to critique and review the WCAG Samurai Errata, produced by Joe Clark and his secret team. His review is overall positive, with a few concerns, and a good overview of the document.

• Shawn Henry from WAI presents 'What's new, WCAG 2.0, and current issues' Tuesday June 5th, London RNIB hosting a free talk by the W3C's Shawn Lawton Henry about current issues and recent developments in web accessibility, including WCAG 2.0, ARIA, ATAG and UAAG.

• Screenreaders and javascript Looks like in the race between JAWS and Window Eyes, Dolphin's HAL, which is 3x popular in the UK than Window Eyes, is further behind both of them in virtual buffer updating.

• Grande consultation sur l'accessibilité et les sites web publics In 2005 France passed a law that government websites are to be accessible. Now there's a consultancy going on to outline what this means and how it is to be achieved (based on WCAG guidelines). This will come into force in September 2007, and companies found to be in breach have 3 years to get into compliance or perhaps face sanctions.

• Outrageous Mark's story about how he was effectively pressurised against his will into applying for a patent. Mark's unsettled me because its one of my fears of working for a US company with a known patent portfolio, particularly when I've created an idea that could be patentable. I'd almost forgotten about that worry. Software patents stand in the way of real innovation.

• Yahoo! UK Hack Day: 15th-16th June ‘07 Hackday is on 15th and 16th June 2007 in London, UK - organised by Yahoo! and the BBC. I'd love to see a group of Flash developers showing off their skills - showing the AJAX crowd how to really do a mashup. There are still a few places left (out of the original 500).

• I won’t go naked this year! Christian has a well reasoned argument against CSS Naked Day. Sure, it was unique last year, but now there are serious questions about who the target audience is - since they're not paying attention to a bunch of web standards blogs anyway. Get someone like Amazon.com or Google participating, and then there's some penetration. Otherwise it just looks like a misconfigured webserver.

• Amazon.com to enhance its accessibility Bruce Lawson notes that Amazon have announced they are taking steps to make their websites accessible (at the moment its just for blind people). This is directly related to the NFB's legal suit against the Target website, which is powered by Amazon. This is welcome news.

• The Ajax/Flash continuum Jeremy Keith: 'It saddens me to see people take such a knee-jerk anti-Flash stance without first investigating the facts (particularly the accessibility issues).'

• SOCITM: Better Connected 2007 Donna Smilie, from the RNIB Web Access Centre expresses her concern about people who interpret the Better Connected report as saying anything less than Double A (as per WCAG 1.0) is inaccessible. This is the wrong view, since accessibility is a continiumm - based on the abilities of people. Single A is used as a 'pass' threshold for accessibility, with sites encouraged to go as far as they can.

• Progress Shelley Powers (about tech conferences): 'Hasn't anyone noticed a sameness to these events? How many people write after attending one of these that the only reason they go is for the hallway chat?'

• Usability benefits of Web accessibility Joe Clark: 'Why are accessible sites usable to everyone? Presumably because, by and large, only the best-informed and most mature developers work on accessible sites. They are pretty much incapable of producing an unusable site. Plus their HTML is way better.'

• Better Connected & web accessibility Dan Champion: 'The question that I keeping coming back to is this - what does the Better Connected reporting of web accessibility achieve? Last year it painted a fairly depressing picture, and this year that picture is almost identical. If SOCITM wants to be an agent for change it needs to do more than just reporting a problem exists, and start putting its members' best interests first by helping them to address the problem.'

• Browser Lovefest Douglas Crockford moderates a panel of browser vendors talking about how we advance the technology of the web. Apple didn't show up. Douglas notes: 'Apple invented technical evangelism, so it really peculiar that they would reject an opportunity such as this one. I think the company may have lost its way. I tried sending them a map, but it didn't help.'

• Accessibility vs Universality - implications Alastair Campbell: 'I do also work in 'universality' as a daily part of my job in web development and consultancy. But, I don't confuse the two. Any accessibility advice is given in the context of who it would affect (e.g. that type of layout will cause problems for people with screen magnifiers).'

• Joe Clark's WCAG Samurai There's a news update! '2007.02.23: As announced onstage at Web Directions North 2007, WCAG Samurai will publish its errata in time for @media 2007 San Francisco, May 2007.'

• Review: The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition: A Practical Guide to Interactive Web Pages Chris Heilmann reviews a recent 2nd edition of Thau's popular Book of JavaScript, and finds a book that hasn't taken into account the rapid evolution of JavaScript, particularly unobtrusive scripting and progressive enhancement. Its as if the web standards movement never happened, and we're still back to the bad old days of browser-dependent scripting.

• Accessible Flash @ Web Standards Group in London Niqui Merret will be speaking at the London WSG's Accessibility evening talking about accessible Flash. It will be an interesting session for web developers as well as seasoned Flash developers - both groups can learn and share from this particular discussion.

• The essentials of DOM scripting in 10 minutes Chris Heilmann cleverly demonstrates DOM in this screencast, using a piece of markup and showing the effects of various DOM incantations. Its a practical overview, and packs in a lot of detail in 10 minutes.

• WSG London Accessibility Meetup Stuart Colville has organised another free WSG event in London, this time on the topic of accessibility. Its on Wednesday the 28th February 2007. I'm privileged to be speaking alongside Ann McMeekin and Niqui Merret - two well respected accessibility experts. Limited to 200 people.

• Netvibes: A Lesson in How to Build an Insecure Widgets Platform Dare explains some of the insecurities of Netvibes' handling of third party widgets, and how it opens up security holes. Dare offers suggestions on closing those holes. A practical explanation.

• Pipe me up, Scotty Shelley Powers on Yahoo! Pipes: 'The major area of failure with this example is it utilizes a graphical interface when it doesn't require a graphical interface. The ability to create a pipe between applications could be managed using traditional forms or even a text editor. Expanding the interface would enable this application to be open to all people, rather than just those with scripting turned on and working eyes, working arms, fingers to push mouse buttons, and so on. We have to separate the concept from the 'coolness' of the UI: if we marry the two, we're heading down the wrong path.'

• Letter to Tim Berners-Lee: Time to cancel WCAG 2 Joe Clark makes a considered appeal to Tim Berners Lee to cancel the WCAG2.0 project. His points are well founded, and essentially that the W3C - through its corporate bias - has lost touch with the web development community it purports to lead. The culture of web accessibility has grown and thrived despite the W3C's lack of attention.

• Victory Declared in the Battle for Wargames.Com MGM, producers of the 1983 movie Wargames complained to the National Arbitration Forum that Rogers Cadenhead was domain-squatting on wargames.com. Rogers has an ecommerce store set up there selling war related games. The forum, thankfully, rejected MGM's complaint. Well done, Rogers.

• Working Together for a Better Web Fresh from stepping down as the Group Lead from WaSP, Molly Holzschlag is now contracted to Microsoft in teaching and evangelising web standards and interoperability. This is a constructive step forward for Microsoft - and sounds like a challenge Molly will relish. She's a great role model of evangelising web standards - getting stuck in at the cliff-face rather than throwing stones from a safe distance. Good luck Molly!

• The importance of link highlighting Grant Broome talks about why the dotted link focus rectangle is necessary visitors, pushing back on workarounds to hide it. He also raises the issue that the link focus is not as obvious as it could be, and suggests changing background colours on focused links

• Accessibility helping business: the case of Legal & General in United Kingdom Dave Wilton, the Web Manager of Legal & General, and Julie Howell (now with Fortune Cookie) gave a presentation yesterday in the BrailleNet conference in Paris. They talked about the real world benefits and significant improvement in online business as a result of making the website accessible. That's been an incredible chapter in my life, and I'm please to see how much of a success its creating.

• Learning JavaScript Co-worker Tim presents his list of must have JavaScript reference material, covering recent JavaScript books, freely available Douglas Crockford online videos, and reference websites. Its a good overview of the material out there. I've been fortunate to see Douglas' presentations in person - the content is excellent, and really clarified concepts like closures and prototypical inheritance.

• Net Magazine: The Accessibility Test Alastair Campbell writes a regular column in net magazine assessing the accessibility of various websites. Alastair works for Nomensa, one of the top accessibility consultancies in the UK. I've had the pleasure of interesting discussions with him over the last year, and he's definitely one of the passionate experts the web accessibility community need more of.

• DTI website: response from National Audit Office Bruce Lawson approaches the National Audit Office over whether the DTI have been properly careful with our public money (pertaining to the accessibility fiasco of their website redesign). The answer coming back from the NAO is a clear and definitive no. So yes, the DTI did piss our money down a drain, and conceeded the fact that the project was unsuccessfully managed by themselves.

• Improving Ajax applications for JAWS users Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner engineer a practical and pragmatic way of getting Ajax based applications playing nicely with JAWS 7.1. One of the advantages Gez and Steve have is access to experienced screen-reader users for testing purposes - that assures their findings are accurate and relevant in the real world. Awesome work guys!

• Ajax Debugging with Firebug Joe Hewitt, in this Dr Dobbs article talks about using the Firebug extensions to inspect and debug Ajax applications (or any browser-based JavaScript application). It also has CSS inspecting capabilities, editing JavaScript on the fly, inspecting HTTP request and responses, logging, breakpoint debugging and profiling. A useful howto.

• Event-Driven Web Application Design Christian Heilmann outlines a core technique for building web applications - designing it around the use of events. This allows the code to be more modular and more maintainable. Chris bridges the divide between web standards based approach to development, and the framework-based approach to development. Its a key concept to building complex interactions in web applications.

• Dear JavaScript Library Developers Its cool these days to write your own JavaScript library, but don't forget about the developers that want to use your library. This is Chris' wishlist to lessen the painful barrier of adopting or switching libraries. The key is good documentation and a dose of realism.

• AOL Ability: Joe Clark - An Interview Steve Faulkner interviews Joe Clark about his Open & Closed project, a project that's well worth supporting - creating a standard that covers captioning, subtitling, audio description and dubbing. Joe also talks about WCAG 2 and the need for it to be abandoned.

• Judge rules paper money unfair to blind I'm surprised that US currencies don't have different sized notes for each denominations like other countries. The solution is relatively straightforward: 'The American Council for the Blind has submitted several alternatives, including embossing, holes punched in the paper or using different-sized bills for different denominations.' (via Chris Heilmann)

• What's new in JAWS 8.0 Steve Faulkner reports on some new features in Jaws 8.0, and highlights his favourite, as he explains 'Better support for dynamic changes in web pages! In JAWS 8.0, the position of the Virtual Cursor is retained when the page is updated, so that you no longer have to move back to the text you were reading. This useful feature means that Web pages with frequently updated content are more accessible to JAWS users and less frustrating to read. For me, this means an important step towards accessible AJAX applications.'

• Getting Data | The REST Dialogues An interesting 'discussion' showing the benefits of a REST architecture over SOAP, including how a URL space allows for scaling. An interesting notion is that 'the REST-aware community is to constantly look out for opportunities to conform and to standardise schemas and interactions' which gets away from the WSDL and XML Schema hell. That resonates strongly with the principles of Microformats.

• Are you as good as Dean, Stuart, Jeremy or better than Dan and Peter-Paul? Rubuffing the one-dimensional characterisations of web developers, Christian has a thoughtful post about what makes an great developer. Passion, pragmatism and intelligent laziness still matter. Encouraging others to exceed is an interesting characteristic. IMO, truely great developers inspire others (not just encourage).

• JSON Douglas Crockford reminisces about how JSON came about, and the history of its naming. Now its a globally recognised standards, displacing XML in a number of web services applications.

• CSS: Browser testing order Andy talks about his Browser testing coverage. Starting with Firefox, then Safari, IE7 (using conditional comments to work around bugs), latest version of Opera (I read that as version 9), and if requested IE6 on Windows. Andy deliberately hides stylesheets from Mac IE5.x.

• Needs of the disabled spark inventions - why not in web design? Christian digs around and finds some good examples of assistive / adaptive technologies that found their way into general use by the world. Examples include the work of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, the talking VCR, technology leaps in mobile phones, and the ubiquitous OCR scanning.

• Wikipedia: Thomas Edison 'Partially deaf since adolescence, he became a telegraph operator after he saved Jimmie Mackenzie from being struck by a runaway train. Jimmie's father, station agent J.U. Mackenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan, was so grateful that he took Edison under his wing and trained him as a telegraph operator. Edison's deafness aided him as it blocked out noises and prevented Edison from hearing the telegrapher sitting next to him.'

• Web 2.0: A step backwards for accessibility? 'But there are other important commercial advantages. For example, Legal & General experienced a 95 percent increase in online sales following its revamp, which cost a comparatively meagre ¥200,000. This revenue boost, combined with reduced maintenance fees, meant that the financial services giant achieved a return on investment in only five months compared with the 12 months it had expected.'

• JK Rowling Flash website - Case study - Web Access Centre The RNIB's case study into JK Rowlings' use of accessible Flash. It covers some of the accessibility features on offer, including disabling background sounds, magnifying text, labelled resources, keyboard navigation, and inbuilt adaptions for when a screenreader is detected.

• Designing a more accessible web Leonie Watson says: 'Flash is a very interesting topic in terms of web accessibility. It's actually capable of being very accessible indeed. It has means for building in captioning for people who are hearing impaired; it allows soundtracks to be imported very easily so that audio description can be provided for people with visual impairments; it has a lot of very easy ways to build in accessibility, providing the developer sets out to do that from the beginning.' (via dotjay)

• Joe Clark: How not to fix HTML An excellent, and typically incisive look at Tim Berners Lee's decision to create a new HTML working group. Joe covers practical and relevant corrections and additions that add richer semantics particularly to newspaper type structures, and of course web accessibility. He also voices a concern that I share, surely WCAG2 Working Group is in a much worse position than the HTML Working Group - why is that being overlooked?

• Reinventing HTML Tim Berners Lee announces a new HTML working group, based on the WHAT WG efforts. Recognising that HTML has to evolve, there is also a Forms working group that will work to make HTML forms (the form elements that make up the HTML set of elements) a subset of XForms, and to do that by updating XForms. The HTML working group will focus on HTML, and the work on XHTML 2.0 will now be overseen by a different, perhaps new, Working Group. This is a bold move, one that web developers have been crying out for for quite some time.

• Bonzai menu Christian Heilmann does a tree menu without using loops. It demonstrates the flexibility and power of Event delegation - catching events at a higher level in the document. It drastically cuts down on the number of events you need to add to a document. One event handler per menu, rather than one per link in the menu.

• XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet Comprehensive list of Cross site scripting attack vectors. Some interesting techniques.

• Chess Vault - a mine of chess information Last century I was an active tournament chess player. But it took too much work to keep my playing strength up. These days I run a chess blog covering the top tournaments, which includes analysis of interesting games. I'm about halfway through my coverage of the recent Kramnik - Topalov World Championship. The passion for chess is still there.

• Kramnik is world chess champion The 13 year schism in the World Championship title looks to be healed. Vladimir Kramnik now holds both titles. He beat his opponent, the #1 player Veselin Topalov over the board at both classical and rapid play, and he is the moral victor due to Topalov's Toiletgate accusations and off the board antics (and the contraversial game 5 forfeit). Its a good day for chess that the good guy won.

• Trying to Define Web Accessibility Its posts like this that give me hope that there is a future for web accessibility - a thoughtful, reflective post that cements understanding, empathy and pragmatism.

• Mozilla Accessibility Summit 2006 Mark Pilgrim's notes which covers topics like XUL accessibility guidelines (based on WCAG 2.0), Firefox integration with Apple's VoiceOver, and the much talked about DHTML accessibility. An interesting insight to the direction accessibility is going.

• Wired: Flash News Flash: It's Accessible A story written way back in 2002 around the time of Flash MX: 'To make the site accessible to deaf children, he invented a groundbreaking Flash captioning tool that has subsequently been purchased by Macromedia. Soon, the whole Flash community will be able to use the tool, because Macromedia plans to release it as a free downloadable extension on the Flash exchange within a month.'

• Creating an Accessible Flash Game for the RNIB A multimedia look at building an interactive and accessible Blind Date game in Flash. Looks at the background, the decisions, the results as well as a demonstration of the game in JAWS. Also a discussion on the accessibility improvements of Flash. An interesting collaboration between the RNIB and Nomensa.

• WebAIM: Creating Accessible Macromedia Flash Content Flash offers accessibility above and beyond HTML and CSS, for example: Multiple ways of presentation, scalability, keyboard accessibility, engaging, self-voicing. It puts the multi into multimedia.

• Color Palette Generator Takes an image and returns a colour palette of what looks to be web-safe colours. Good for people with colour-matching deficiencies, like me.

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