In 2012, I resolve to think more broadly about who visits my websites. One group of users that often gets slighted, even by designers who are otherwise accessibility-conscious, is individuals who have difficulty perceiving or processing dark text on a light background. All major desktop operating systems, and some mobile operating systems, include optional high contrast color schemes that invert colors or remove color altogether. These color schemes apply across all applications on the device, including web browsers.

One would think this wouldn't present any major problems for web designers. If a web page is created with good contrast between foreground and background, there will still be good contrast when colors are reversed.

The problem, however, is background images. When users enable high contrast mode in Windows, CSS background images are no longer displayed. This isn't a problem in Mac OS X, but as far as I know this has always been an issue in Windows. It certainly is true in Windows 7 and Vista. The implications for designers?

Don't use CSS background images to deliver content.

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One of the earliest solutions in all of web accessibility was the "skip to main content" link, a same page link at the top of the page that enables users to skip past navigation links and go straight to the main content of the web page. Despite the fact that these links have been in use since the early 1990's, they actually aren't implemented well at all by browsers. They can be a huge benefit to sighted non-mousers (navigating by keyboard) but they don't work for these users in any browser other than Firefox and Internet Explorer, and they don't even work in IE unless link targets have tabindex="0". This blog post discusses all of this, and ultimately proposes a simple JQuery solution that makes same-page links work beautifully in all browsers.

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That is the question. I actually went several years with full beard. Since then, I've tried repeatedly to grow it back but can never quite get over the hump. This post is my way of motivating myself to stick with it, at least until Christmas so I can pretend to be Santa.

Reasons To Beard

• It's cold outside, and beards are warm.
• Not shaving frees up 5 minutes each day, or 30 hours a year.
• Shaving is unnatural. If it was supposed to be shaved, it wouldn't keep growing back.
• Bearded, I will be helping my home town remain the beardiest city in America
• Many of my intellectual, artistic, and spiritual heroes throughout history were non-shavers (see my Beard Gallery below).
• My 11-year old daughter wants to use my giant beard for art.
• My beard is coming in white. This enhances my credibility in academia.

Reasons Not To Beard

• Beards are itchy (especially during this transition from Non-Bearded to Bearded. Each time I shave it's in an itch-crazed frenzy, desperate for relief).
• Beards attract food.
• My beard is coming in white. This makes me look old.

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I'm doing some final prep today for my sessions at Accessing Higher Ground. One of these sessions will be highly interactive,  and at one point I want to collect ideas from participants as to what they feel constitutes an effective information technology accessibility policy. As they come up with good ideas, I want to record those ideas right on my PowerPoint slide. In the olden days I would have done this using a flip chart. But my handwriting is not great, flip charts are hard to see from the back of the room, they waste paper, and I didn't request a flip chart for my session. If I use PowerPoint to serve the same function, that solves all these problems plus the ideas that were generated in the discussion are preserved in the PowerPoint file and folks will have access to them when I make that file available for download after the session. I've used this trick a few times now, and typically someone asks "How did you do that?" So, here's my answer… Continue reading →

I'm working today on an update to our Web Design and Development I high school course curriculum. One of the lessons asks students to review three versions of the HTML specification (HTML 1.2, HTML 4.01, and HTML5) and discuss their impressions of the specs and how they've evolved over time.

If you create web pages and have never read HTML 1.2, or if you haven't done so in a long time, I highly recommend that you do so now (after you're finished reading this blog post). I think it's healthy for us all to remember our roots.

To my knowledge, HTML 1.2 is the earliest HTML draft that's available on the Web (if anyone knows the whereabouts of 1.0 or 1.1, please share!) The spec was originally drafted by Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel Connolly in June 1993, and has been enhanced significantly in successive versions but most of its core markup is still very much the same. There are a couple of snippets from this early spec that I find to be particularly interesting. Both remind us that accessibility was there from the beginning.

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