I was recently asked about my flash skills. Oh, I have flash experience: I morphed a ball into a box back in the flash 4 days. Supposedly, things have come along way since then.. I decided to take a look for myself and see what I could pick up on my own, so I’ll be browsing the “adobe flash cs3 classroom in a book” and working my way through it, charting my progress as I go along (nothing like a little public pressure as motivation). Now I wish I had paid some attention to the discussions about accessible flash at access u….

The other day Scott mentioned An Event Apart at work. Last year, 4 of our developers took a bit of a road trip up to Chicago, and I did enjoy it, if I felt a bit out of place with a Windows Laptop instead of a mac…

Just now, rather than working, I found myself dreaming again. This year the event is extended to two days, and I’m impressed by the lineup. Yes, I saw Eric, Jeffrey, Jim Coudal and Jason Santa Maria last year, and Dan Cederholm and Jeremy Keith were at @Media. But I have what I believe Glenda Sims would refer to as a “geek crush” on Jeremy Keith, and I loved some of Dan Cederholm’s candid responses in his session last year. I’ve been talking to Derek Featherstone about perhaps doing some training here in the midwest, but this may be that outlet.

As time goes by, I am becoming more interesting in information architecture, and there seems to be a smattering of that, which is great. Still, I don’t want to register too quickly on the offchance something else may come up.. but it’s definitely something to consider…

Just came across Eric Meyer’s Formal Weirdness, which reminded me of some other thoughts I’ve had as of late with regards to forms.

The styling of form elements is challenging using CSS. I keep stumbling over the fact that name is deprecated in xhtml1.0 strict, yet I can’t submit a form without it. I still tend to use dot notation to access form elements, yet use the DOM to access elements outside forms.

These differences have caused me to start thinking of forms as separate entities than the rest of the page, with different access methods (behaviour) and display properties (presentation). In my response to Eric’s post, I mused if this was a result to how the web has evolved:

stage 1: static pages contained information for people to access
stage 2: forms allowed users to interact with the page.

The fact that the two stages are fundamentally different in terms of purpose is illustrated by the fact that screen readers have different ‘modes’ for the two purposes. Now here’s a thought: why are there different modes for non-sighted users? Is there an assumption that sighted users can differentiate them based on visual clues? Is there a reason why we can’t go all willy-nilly, styling things to our heart’s content? Does Safari really have a good reason for squelching our creative flair?

I wonder if the further modularization of XHTML and the adoption of XFORMS will make it increasingly obvious that the rules are different…

I just keep hearing more and more about South by Southwest (latest on Jeremy Keith’s blog). I really do think I’ll have to make the effort to go next year.. and hopefully have a reunion with the folks I met at access u?

Public announcement: I’m not sure about the audience this blog has, but if anyone has any information or recommendations on how to make java applets accessible? there seem to be many resources on how to make web pages accessible, but this is a bit different..

After the conference several of us descended on a local establishment for beer and conversation. I’ll admit, several of the folks were talking up South by Southwest pretty well! It was a really great chat: Jim Thatcher mentioned his connection with Sarah Swierenga (who used to work where I do, and with whom I’ve been talking with over the past few months). Pat Ramsey (who I’d chatted with at lunch) was talking about his thoughts on how to unite a room full of geeks at a conference, isolated at their individual laptops at a conference about social networking. Debbie (Who Glenda had asked at lunch about me) and I had a great talk about livejournal versus other blogging sites.

Glenda was talking about South by Southwest, and how the real meat of the conference took place at the pub, not in the sessions. It’s really so true. I felt so fortunate to sit and BS with all these folks at the end of it all. I didn’t have any formal data, but my sense is that most of the folks around the table were the presenters at this event, and I loved sitting with them and shooting the shit.

As I have told the organizers of Access U at any chance I got, I am very glad I attended. Yes, some sessions did not exactly meet my specific needs, and I hope I did not offend with any of the comments I have posted in this blog regarding the sessions. One of the biggest benefits was the sense of community. While I was a bit of a bird of another color at the conference being from a corporate environment, I loved being immersed in the environment. It is one thing to read online resources about accessibility and another to speak with others working on the same issues you are. I am fortunate enough working in a team environment at work, but as I was telling Kathy Keller, often I feel like my mass emails on accessibility tips and tricks go unread. It was wonderful to bask in the shared geekiness and enthusiasm for the area.

The one drawback of attending Access U is the distance from the majority of the participants. While many of them have participated in past years and will continue to participate in the future, I can’t say that I will be back to participate again. At least I will be able to continue to communicate with the folks I have met virtually… once again showcasing the power of the web and the need for universal access!

The keynote speakers for lunch today were a few folks from Christal Vision, a vendor (?) for JAWS. They showed us how they worked with the tool. This was the third time I’d seen JAWS touted out during the conference, but this session was really outstanding.

They showed us the virtual viewer, and several of the different shortcuts for navigating the content. One thing I was really quite impressed with was the ability of a user to customize labels for specific controls. Geoff Stevens had mentioned it, and .. Marcia (??) demonstrated in this session. Using scripting, a single user can create a custom label for a single input element on a specific site. I was sitting next to Pat Ramsey, and our minds were both whirring in the same direction. I asked the question, “can these types of settings be imported?”

How excited I was to hear that ‘yes’!

One of our major challenges in forms is how to share instructional text with users in forms mode. simple things like “e.g. cat OR dog”. Do they go in the label, and then get positioned someplace? Do you not use a label, but use a title instead? It seems providing the content for a screen reader user is at odds with users of other assistive technologies (or none at all). Yesterday I asked Geoff if it would be helpful for a web application to provide “tips for optimizing your experience with this application and JAWS” — encouraging users to change their preferences for your site. My concern with that was that people would not want to change their settings just for your site. Well hello — the idea of being able to create a set of custom labels may solve those issues! Regardless of the user’s verbosity settings, you could recommend they import these custom labels, and you have provided that additional information to help them!

Someone also mentioned Firevox, and right on cue, Charles Chen walked in (he’d heard his name being mentioned). He has created a screen reader for Firefox that has some additional capabilities. Even though it looks as though there are some benefits to gearing towards JAWS (market share and all that), this may be a good alternative to offer…

Notes here: http://www.afhill.com/blog/testing-for-web-accessibility-access-u/

– overheard between Glenda Sims and a woman next to me. “She’s live blogging!”. Then I walked into my next session, and when I said my name, Jim Thatcher said “the blogger! google “afhill” and read all about the conference”.

So hello!