Month: October 2005

Terminology Explained

Clearing up a few strange terms related to accessibility.

A user agent is the client application used with a particular network protocol.
Device independent means a user can perceive and interact with the Web through any type of apparatus (mobile phones, PDAs, interactive television systems, etc.). Device independent on Wikipedia
Assistive Technology (AT) is a generic term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices and the process used in selecting, locating, and using them.
A deprecated element or attribute is one that has been outdated by newer constructs.

Abbreviation and Acronym Issue

Post author By Dennis
Post date October 3, 2005
6 Comments on Abbreviation and Acronym Issue

Using the ABBR and ACRONYM tags is a great technique that is simple and works very well—with standards-compliant browsers, that is. Until IE complies to world web standards, coders must hack the functionality in. I despise hacking for IE and try to avoid it. But, we have to admit that around 85% of users are still on IE and we should try to go out of our way sometimes to gratify them. If this is you, please try a standards-compliant browser such as Firefox or Netscape.

The ABBR and ACRONYM tags give the user the full text for an abbreviation and acronym. For example, ID would have “identification” associated with it. Example:

ID

But this won’t work in IE due to its lack of standards-compliancy. The method I’ve used the for word “ID” above so that it works in IE also is as follows: (the CSS would be in a global stylesheet, of course):

ID

Is this the best method for now? Should we coders be using these methods at all?

alt code image podcast text web

ALT, Long Description, D-Link

Post author By Dennis
Post date October 1, 2005
7 Comments on ALT, Long Description, D-Link

Good and bad examples of the ALT parameter. Long descriptions and D-links: what are they and how do you code one?

Download Web Axe Episode 5

W3C on text equivalents

Code samples:

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