June 23, 2008
Is a question I seem to be asked every couple of months at work, here’s a response I wrote to a colleague recently…
PDF’s fail the WCAG 1.0 guidelines in a two areas
Level 1. Single-A. 6.3
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-scripts
Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported. If this is not possible, provide equivalent information on an alternative accessible page
In its strictest sense can be taken to include plugins such as pdf readers.
…and…
Level 2. Double-A. 11.1
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-latest-w3c-specs
Use W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a task and use the latest versions when supported.
Again, in its strictest sense, you should use HTML or an equivalent for structured documents as they are available and appropriate. The latest versions supported would be XHTML 1.1 or HTML 4.01
Even if there is a case for using pdf’s (such as it being prohibitively costly to convert them all to HTML) they must be created as accessible “tagged” pdf’s - which are only accessible to some users of assistive technologies, as not all disabled people use the same screen reader or browser and not all screen readers can read accessible pdf’s - even using adobe pdf reader, which not everybody does!
The only safe solution IMO is to mark-up structured documents as valid, semantically clean, HTML.
Tags:
Work
November 9, 2007
Opinions on sitemorse may vary but this makes very interesting reading
Survey
Especially if .Gov make good on their threat promise to close sites that fail AA…
Tags:
Design,
Work
May 25, 2007
For work I’m working on re-ordering the WCAG2.0 Draft Guidelines Quick Reference into A, AA and AAA order - like WCAG 1.0 was… - you can see them here…
http://www.jimbarter.co.uk/a-aaa.html
feel free to use ‘em if you want, but bare in mind they are a WIP and are based on the w3c’s *DRAFT* guidelines.
Tags:
Geek,
Work
March 15, 2007
A client* came up-to me today and said…
(removed cos it broke the layout!)
…*Not really, it was Billy Connolly, but you get the idea…
Tags:
Media,
Work
October 20, 2006
…well, more of a feature - but it’s going to annoy the hell out of some folk.
You can set accesskeys for webpages so that if an IE6 (and other browser…) user holds down ‘ALT’ + any other key, then presses enter - the browser will navigate to a pre-defined page.
Well in IE7 if you hold down ‘ALT’ + any other key then press enter, the browser enters console (full screen) mode.
What you are supposed to do now is let go of the ‘ALT’ and ‘otherkey’ before you press enter - a simple change, but it is going to confuse a lot of people…
…you may be able to change this behavior in the option settings, but I’m so disgusted that I can’t be bothered to look at the minute…
Tags:
Geek,
Rant,
Work
October 19, 2006
We’ve got a site in development that uses lists for navigation bars across the page, code very similar to this…
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xml:lang="en-gb" lang="en-gb" dir="ltr" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>IE 7 Bug</title>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
ul li {display: inline}
a {background: #ccc; margin: 0 1em 0 1em; padding: 2px; }
a:hover {background: #aaa}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body>
<ul>
<li><a href="#">Some Link Text</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Another Link</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Yet another Link</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Guess what?</a></li>
<li><a href="#">A box of frogs</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Some Link Text</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Another Link</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Yet another Link</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Guess what?</a></li>
<li><a href="#">A box of frogs</a></li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
In IE7 beta2 and RC1 when using IE’s new ‘page zoom’ feature - if ugly it at least still worked…
…tried it in IE7 Final…
…guess what - they’ve changed the way page zoom works, and now when zoomed, the ‘hit area’ of the links is not in the same place as the link text…
Screenies…
~@!*%@!rs…
Tags:
Geek,
Rant,
Work
October 11, 2006
One of our IT guys asked me about the upcoming release of IE7 and when I thought it might become the prevalent version.
So I did some stat scanning from www.thecounter.com and put this together.
IE6 was released in August 2001 (5 years ago!)
At that point IE5 had 80% of the browser market, IE6 was off the bottom of the scale
By December 2001 IE6 was 19%, IE5 was 68%
By October 2002 they were roughly equal - IE6-45%, IE5-46%
In November 2002 IE6 finally overtook IE5
It took until December 2004 (2 more years!) for IE5 to become less than 10%
However, I’m guessing things will go somewhat faster this time due to more folk being clued up and automatic updates…
…but then there are more ‘lusers’ around too… 
Tags:
Geek,
Work
October 4, 2006
I now have successfully walked my employers through ISO9000, ISO14001 & yesterday did the triple, ISO27001
This means we are accredited as using industry best practices for Quality, Environment and Security.
Woo Yay to me!
They’ll never read this, but big thanks to Ian, Gary, Martin S, Tony, Lee, Helen W, Duncan & Saul and all the rest of the staff at TechnoPhobia who answered the auditors questions correctly and showed a great belief and understanding of the principles of a secure IT management system.
Woo Yay to them!
Incidently, my new job title will either be Security, Environment and Quality systems Manager, or Environment, Quality and Security systems Manager. I just can’t decide which is funnier… (SEQs or EQSs Manager)
Tags:
Work
