My parents argued the Internet was a fad. They may still be right. Media outlets have settled on October 29 as the official birthday of the Internet. It’s the day that Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA sent a message over a two-computer network (the other end being a computer at Stanford…
This year the a11yTO team put together its third conference, adding a day for the built environment (#a11yIRL) and another day for gaming (#a11yTOGaming), bringing the entire conference to four days. The collection of three conferences has been branded #a11yWeekTO. Throughout the conference, attendees were incredibly positive about the venue,…
Since the early days of the web, when images could be floated and text would wrap around them, designers have wanted to bring drop caps onto the web. Then we learned how terrible a pattern like <img alt=”M” align=”left”>atthew is for users, and CSS introduced :first-letter, letting us believe all…
TL;DR: for standard HTML controls and standard ARIA patterns (widgets), you do not need to add instructions for screen readers on how to use them nor what they are. When a screen reader encounters an element on the page that invites interaction beyond reading, it typically provides users with instructions…
At Smashing Conference in New York on Tuesday, October 15, Microsoft is hosting a lunch session as part of its The Web We Want initiative. Developers are pitching their wants. I was invited to pitch my request, but since I will not be at the conference I was asked for…
In 1994 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) formed to help wrangle the web into a standards-based platform. The W3C has persisted and created piles of material for web developers. Pulling from its anniversary post: Some of the Web Consortium’s most important contributions to the Web include: Hundreds of open…