Archive for October, 2006

Oh Yeah, I Forgot to Mention UIE 11

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

I can’t tell you how excited I am that we are only a week away from the start of the User Interface 11 Conference. There’ll be more than 400 attendees from all over the world. There are folks coming from Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America.

Strangely enough, I failed to mention this before now – maybe it’s because I don’t have enough work to do.

That aside, I thought I’d fill you in on where I’ll be when I get there.

Conference Session Choices: (Complete Adgenda)

One session I will sadly miss is:

Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design
Luke Wroblewski, Yahoo!

Get practical insights and strategies for boosting your site’s visual appeal and delighting your users.

I would love to go to this, but instead I’m planning on reading his book and have been keeping up on his usability blog – Functioning Form. Hopefully I’ll be fortunate enough to share a few ideas with him if I can catch him.

This will be the first time attending this conference and I have huge aspirations to network and absorb as much as possible during the short stay. Then the fun begins when I get to apply all the knowledge into development.

Accessibility is Making Ripples that Everyone Can See

Monday, October 2nd, 2006

I’m sure most news oriented people are up to date on the latest accessibility news concerning Target. Well, it appears that the ripple of this case has encouraged the W3C to begin making an “Accessibility for Dummies” of sorts to help everyone out.

From my latest W3C Weekly News email today:

WAI-ARIA to Address Access to Dynamic Web Content
The Protocols and Formats Working Group has released First Public Working Drafts of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). The “Roadmap” describes accessibility of dynamic Web content built with technologies such as AJAX and DHTML. “Roles” provides mappings for user interface controls and navigation APIs. “States and Properties” associates behaviors with document-level markup. Read the press release and visit the Web Accessibility Initiative home page.

For any business that builds websites, this case with Target is clear reason to shift your development model. On the plus side of that (as people groan), it looks like the by-product will be that everyone will now be in on the grand secret: that producing an accessible website naturally leads to cleanly marked up, standards compliant and highly search engine friendly webpages. I guess there’s no competition like good competition.

Let me know your thoughts and experiences on this one.