This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. Anil Dash posted a story called Life…
Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D. wanted to write an article about why it’s harder to read text set in all-caps than text set as mixed case. The argument for this has centered around how people read words — recognizing a word shape from its letters, whereas an all-caps word has no unique…
Nine years ago I had become fed up with trying to explain to clients, users, friends, co-workers, and strangers that screen resolution, browser chrome, and browser size combine to create some unique viewport sizes. What this meant was that whether a user had a display at 640×480 or at 1,024×768…
Back in October I commented how the list of URL shorteners has gotten even shorter (or shortener, as I liked to call it). As bit.ly rose to the top thanks to Twitter, Tr.im and Cli.gs called it quits. Things have changed a bit since then.Recap and UpdatesTr.imTr.im took back its…
If you have spent time as a solo web jockey or your job has you interacting directly with clients, you’ve probably been faced with the client who asks for something you feel is wrong. If you’re new to this, it may seem like a dangerous situation to be in, when…
There is an article over at Practical Ecommerce titled Accessibility: How Many Disabled Web Users Are There? by Joe Dolson. It is refreshing to see more traditional sites dealing with accessibility, especially when it can so significantly affect their bottom line. As an indication that the author gets it: I…
There is an interesting article over at the WebAIM blog titled JAWS Ate My Tables.The article describes how JAWS (version 10 in this case), a screen reader, decides whether an HTML table is used for layout purposes or as a data table. It turns out that JAWS does not lean…
Trenton Moss over at Webcredible has posted an article, Accessible online video for keyboard-only users. The concepts within are very simple, but require developers to take an extra step or two, which may account for why we see so few sites with these features implemented.One key issue is that developers…
Paul Irish has gone ahead and created a block of CSS that we can reliably embed into our pages that will import .eot and .ttf/.otf font files. In his article Bulletproof @font-face syntax, he breaks down the various options and their support, providing arguments for and against each. In the…
Having stumbled across the article “10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit, I can see that the suggestions are pretty obvious, and the number 10 is probably more arbitrary than based on some natural break in severity. However, there are some things in the article I have been repeating for…
If you were paying attention any of the last few years, you may have noticed that the 24 Ways web site is set up to run as an annual advent calendar for web geeks. Each day the site posts a new article dealing with some aspect of the web, ideally…
A lot can be said about the value of social media, with arguments for real business value or ways to stay connected with friends and family or even that most of it is just egocentric drivel. As one of the purveyors of egocentric drivel in my Twitter stream, I can…