Accessibility

Cool little tip - change buttons to look like linkbuttons

Blog Author — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 01:18:00 GMT

From the ‘don’t comprimise design for accessibility’ stable comes this little tip – how to make a submit button look like a link button:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">


<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
    <head>
        
        
        <style type="text/css">
input[type="submit"] { border: 0px inset;
background-color: transparent;
color: blue;
text-decoration: none;
cursor: pointer; }
input[type="submit"]:hover {
color: red;}
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <form ID="Form1">
            <input type="submit" value="My Link Button" ID="Submit1" NAME="Submit1" />
        </form>
    </body>
</html>

OK, not that simple, this also uses the excellent IE7 stuff from Dean Edwards to enable IE 6 to support CSS properly…for stuff like :hover and CSS selectors (input[type="submit"]).

Reason for this? LinkButtons use Javascript and are not usable from Text Readers…

Fantastic popup windows technique

Blog Author — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 17:05:00 GMT

Just been reading on Matt Bethers blog on a technique by Már Örlygsson on a great way of doing popups (disclaimer: I know, popups are evil...fall of civilization...STDs etc....), which if you *really* have to use them is just the best way I've seen - especially as it would *seem* to be more accessible than other methods. Oh, and there's some great comments on that post which cover all sorts of other issues.

Serious thought - on XHTML and CSS

Blog Author — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 06:56:00 GMT

During this current break I've been doing my usual 'read shed-loads' routine, read the entire Ender series by Orson Scott Card (well, the last 4 books), Code Complete 2 (US), Neurolinguistic Programming for Dummies and last but not least, Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman (US). All of these books were excellent and I'd recommend them all. I'd like to concentrate however on the Web Standards one.
This is a really though-provoking book for one such as myself (i.e., aging web coder who remembers the bad old days of NCSA Mosaic); I have been pretty lacking in my HTML markup skills and this book 1. makes that obvious and 2. provides some really interesting solutions. Essentially the approach this book espouses is that taken (not surprisingly because it's Zeldman's) by AListApart, which is the use of XHTML to define the structure of a page and CSS only to define the layout / presentational aspects. This is one of these things which I've always been aware of and tried to adopt in sites I've worked on but, to be honest, I really didn't assign it a great deal of importance in the past; I will now! The whole approach finally gelled when I came to understand the XHTML / XML / object type approach, since it's possible to completely separate content from presentation things can become a lot more streamlined when developing the server side elements to generate the content since with this approach the designer can really worry entirely about the CSS / Images (the presentation layer remember!) and the web coder just has to bung content in the appropriate container on-page (the XHTML). To be honest this is one of these moments where I finally *got it* - which I love (almost as good as sending a new web-site live for the first time oh, and sex ). So there you have it I have had an epiphany about web standards.
This is not however a perfect book - this guy is obviously not a hardcore coder and his view of server-side languages is pretty rudimentary (and PHP biased) - as a result he seemed to miss the point I got from his own stuff, the separation of presentation from content and the benefits that can lead to for systems architecture; instead concentrating on stuff like Bandwidth eduction as one of the major benefits of this approach. Anyway, good book and certainly worth getting...now I just have to get my head around Unit Testing and I shall be an all powerful mega-god (or vaguely competent...whatever)

ASP.NET 1.1 Accessibility - great article by Scott Mitchell

Blog Author — Fri, 28 May 2004 02:47:00 GMT

Just noticed this link in a post on Kent Sharkeys blog. The article by Scott Mitchell covers various methods of making ASP.NET 1.1 based sites conform to WAI accessibility guidelines (or US Section 508 if you prefer :-)).
It is still stunningly annoying (and frankly unbelievable) that the ASP.NET Hotfix Rollup is still not easily downloadable - almost a year since it was released, neither have I seen it on the MSDN subscribers download site (although apparently a few CMS 2002 updates actually include it!).

Really interesting new (?) site focussing on ASP.NET and Web Standards

Blog Author — Mon, 24 May 2004 07:08:00 GMT

I found some really interesting articles on the new ASPNETResources.com site, including stuff on Doctypes which was pretty good and tips on getting CSS2 Intellisense support in VS.NET - worth keeping an eye on how this site develops methinks! Also a particularly interesting blog on the site covering similar subjects...

UPDATE: Poking around some more, just noticed they have a really great article on XHTML support using Response Filters in ASP.NET - excellent coverage!