RAMsey

Texas A&M Web Accessibility Showcase

pat — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:36:02 +0000

Big kudos to Matt Herzberger and the rest of the team at Texas A&M for putting on a Web Accessibility Showcase this week. If you’re not able to be there this week, it’s streaming on ustream.tv. I’ll be presenting there tomorrow at 1330, Central US time.

Save the Accessibility Institute

pat — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:36:59 +0000

Help Knowbility and others fight the University of Texas’s decision to close the Accessibility Institute by signing the petition.

It’s late tonight, it must be Bad

pat — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:28:11 +0000

U2 performing “Bad” from the music film, “Rattle and Hum.”

Star Wars Episode 4 Original Intro Footage

pat — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:40:26 +0000

I remember still images from the scenes with Luke and Biggs on Tatooine that were cut out from the finished film. If you had a copy of the Star Wars paperback book, you might remember these scenes as they were in the book. Fan Justin Lensen has taken these lost scenes and edited them together with music from the film to give us a glimpse into what these may have looked liked as a finished scene from the film.

Grape Creek Cuvée Blanc

pat — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:47:26 +0000

Kat & I celebrated our 5th anniversary this past weekend. We spent the weekend in the Hill Country town of Fredericksburg and at surrounding wineries and vineyards. Except for buying many many bottles of outstanding wine, we had a relatively low-budget and very enjoyable weekend.

This is the 2006 Cuvée Blanc we enjoyed on the patio at Grape Creek Vineyards. That bottle, along with a nice Camembert and some crackers made for a pleasant and relaxing afternoon.

When Accessibility runs amok

pat — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:36:39 +0000

I work with accessibility in technology. I do it because I believe it is the right thing to do. I am also one who believes all ideas can be taken too far and the proposals being made in the city of Austin for mandated accessible homes are examples of an idea being taken too far.

Bettie Dunkerley is behind these proposed changes to the building codes and she’s putting them to the council for a vote on her last night on the council, which is tonight, the 18th. A pdf of the proposals is available at Austin Contrarian’s site.

I’m opposed to these ideas on the grounds that what is being mandated is being mandated for all, regardless of need, as opposed to being available for those who have a specific need. This isn’t the same as making a public building accessible. These are private dwellings.

Firefox 3 Interface Issues

pat — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:39:18 +0000

I downloaded Firefox 3.0 this afternoon and ran into something that’s a wee bit annoying. Firefox’s interface includes a smooth, single-toned grey top to all its windows. Here’s the Preferences window (cropped for size issues; click on the image to see the full-size):

Looking at this, you would think that anywhere in the dark grey area you could click and drag around the window. Such is the case for just about every Mac OS X application, Cyberduck, Safari, iTunes, etc. The areas of the window in dark grey are draggable areas. (Apple Human Interface Guidelines) Apps that don’t use the large expanses of grey, TextWrangler, Neo Office, for example, use a thinner dark grey bar at the top of the window reminiscent of older Mac interfaces and their window bar. Still, the dark grey area is a draggable interface.

But in Firefox 3, while the look of a native Mac app is there, it’s misleading. Only the top 20 or so pixels of the window tops is draggable. You click anywhere below that invisible 20-pixel line and you can’t click & drag. In addition, Firefox 3 uses the dark grey color at the bottom of browser windows. This area is also not draggable.

Good design serves a purpose and is invisible to the user. The look, while right, in this instance it’s a hindrance.

**Some more Googling and I found a comment left at Alex Faaborg’s blog back in May that mentioned this same thing in one of the beta releases.

Eddie Izzard on Computers

pat — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:44:49 +0000

WCAG 2 Ready for Test Drive

pat — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:34:43 +0000

If you are interested in Accessible Technology, then you should know there’s been another step made in implementing WCAG 2.0. This is snipped from an email I got this afternoon:

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group is excited to announce the publication of WCAG 2.0 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation on 30 April. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities, and many elderly users.

Candidate Recommendation (CR) is a major step in the W3C standards development process; it signals that there is broad consensus in the Working Group and among public reviewers on the technical content of WCAG 2.0. The W3C Process stages are described in:

How WAI Develops Accessibility Guidelines through the W3C Process

The primary purpose of this CR stage is for developers and designers to “test drive” WCAG 2.0 to demonstrate that it can be implemented in Web sites. For information on submitting your implementations, see: WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation Implementation Information

If you plan to provide implementations, please let us know your intentions by *23 May 2008*.

Actual implementations are due by *30 June 2008*.

Ready? Go!

Minimizing CSS and Javascript

pat — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:28:47 +0000

I’m working on one of the larger coding projects I’ve ever done and as such, it’s a great time to think about minimizing code wherever possible. The single stylesheet is growing large, and we’re using quite a bit of javascript code. These two things equal performance hit, especially on older computers. One great way to reduce this effect is code minimization. I first heard this mentioned by Molly Holzschlag at An Event Apart Austin. I made a mental sticky of it but since it wasn’t part of my daily goings-on, I didn’t give it much thought at the time.

The current project got underway a few months back and I started to realize that this is what she was talking about. Cool. Applied Geekness.

Put simply, for those who are new to this, code minimization is doing more with less in order to save your users time and resources.

Max Kiesler wrote an extensive article on this idea last Novemember and I recommend checking it out. Through Max’s links he lists in his article, and some Googling, I found three tools that work for my needs:

JSLint - A handy tool for verifying the integrity of your javascript prior to optimizing it.
JS Minifier - A web-based tool for minimizing your javascript code. Make sure you verify your code prior to packing it down.
Packed.it - Andrea Giammarchi’s wonderful tool for compressing CSS and Javascript code. I used this to reduce my stylesheet.

In one form or another, each of these tools can be built and run locally, if you’re not comfy with using someone’s website.

How did it all work? My CSS file went from 88KB to 64KB. My primary Javascript file went from 20KB to 16KB. Roughly a 20% reduction. How can I improve this? I’ve got some more abstraction to do in a few Javascript routines and I’m sure I can improve on my CSS.

Try it out. In an iPhone world, you don’t want to deliver excess, unnecessary code. Minimization and optimization is crucial.