Author: Dennis

Categories
application socialmedia twitter

Easy Chirp 2 soft beta launched!

Web Axe author Dennis Lembree has announced the soft release of Easy Chirp 2 beta! Easy Chirp, originally named Accessible Twitter, is a web-based Twitter application which is developed to be easy to use, robust (even works without JavaScript), and of course accessible. The service was down for a few months during a complete re-build mostly due to the closure of Twitter’s original API.

The soft launch is on the dot org domain; the service will be available on the dot com domain during the official release. Currently on the dot com domain, you can sign up for an announcement when the official launch occurs.

For more information, check out this blog about the Easy Chirp 2 beta by Laura Legendary (@Accessible_Info) on her Accessible Insights blog.

You can follow Easy Chirp on Twitter at @EasyChirp.

EasyChirp2 logo beta

Categories
firefox html5 longdesc

Longdesc Links, History, Future

Recently I Twittered daily about longdesc, the classic unsung HTML attribute which supports long descriptions of images. Here’s a summary of the tweets/links:

Some History

To make a long story short (pun intended), longdesc was made obsolete in HTML5 but then returned. I applaud @JohnFoliot, @Laura_Carlson, and @Chaals in their dedicated efforts to return longdesc. I agree it should remain as there is no sufficient ARIA replacement.

Here are more great links on the topic on long description over the last few years.

The Future

Check out the ARIA 1.1 spec for aria-describedat ARIA 1.1 spec for aria-describedat! The aria-describedby attribute is like a combination of longdesc and aria-describedby. I’m pretty excited about this as it seems to provide a method for long description that we can all agree on.

Categories
apple jobs

Accessibility Jobs, September 2013

Wow, great opportunities!

Categories
design fun youtube

Fun Web Accessibility Videos

Follow Harold in his quest to make an accessible website for his company Jiffy Brothers! This is an entertaining two-part video series about a fictional company and its website. It’s produced by The Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) of Ontario, Canada. Watch out for Boris!

Part 1 “Auditing Your Website for Accessibility”

Part 2 “Developing an Accessible Website”

You can find more information and videos from HRPA on the HRPA YouTube channel.

Categories
event mobile video

Accessibility Summit Quick Review

The Accessibility Summit, an online conference on accessibility, took place earlier this week. The event is presented by the good folks at Environments for Humans (@e4h). The event was one day in the past few years but was extended to two days this year! If you attended or not, take a look at the great information in the Twitter stream using the hash tag #a11ySummit.

Web Axe author Dennis Lembree spoke on usability and accessibility CSS gotchas. He will give a similar talk this fall at Accessing Higher Ground and CSS Developer Conference.

slide projected on wall
The sentence slide by Matt May.

Here are several great presentations which were given at the Accessibility Summit:

TalkBack & Magnification Accessibility in Android 4.3+ by Paul Adam (@PaulJAdam).

Keyboard and Interaction Accessibility Techniques (Slideshare) by Jared Smith (@jared_w_smith).

CHANGE is not a four-letter word (PDF) by Kimberly Blessing (@obiwanKimberly).

Accessible Video in The Enterprise (Slideshare) by John Foliot (@JohnFoliot).

A Web for Everyone: Accessibility as a design problem (Slideshare) by Whitney Quesenbery (@whitneyq)