“Accessibility 2.0: A Million Flowers Bloom” is an upcoming conference focusing on Web Accessibility hosted by our friends at AbilityNet. It takes place 22nd September, 10am – 5.30pm at Microsoft’s Victoria offices in London. There’s also a workshop the day before called “Deaf Awareness for Web Teams“. If you need convincing about the importance of making your web sites and apps accessible then spend twenty minutes watching Robin Christopherson’s, AbilityNet’s Head of Accessibility Services,  “Designing for All in a Web 2.0 World” video from Future of Web Design London 2009.

A Day of Inspiration and Advice from the Cutting Edge of Accessibility

All of the information is available on the Accessibility 2.0 website (http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/accessibility2). Here’s the potted highlights:

• Keynote: Finite Incantatem – neither technology nor accessibility is dark magic  – Christian Heilmann
• Inclusive Design  – Mark Boulton
• Understanding Deafness: History, Language and the Web – Lisa Herrod
• Accessibility with HTML 5 and WAI ARIA – Steve Faulkner
• Case Study of BBC Ouch – Michael Delange
• Accessibility beyond the desktop panel discussion with Henny Swan (Opera), Veronika Jermolina (AbilityNet), Damon Rose (BBC Ouch) plus more
• To comply or not to comply? Transitioning to WCAG 2.0, technical accessibility and inclusive design panel with Jon Gooday (AbilityNet), Bim Egan (RNIB) plus more

Highlights Include:

• Mark Boulton gives a “call to arms” for web designers. Accessibility shouldn’t be left to developers!
• A rare UK appearance from Lisa Herrod, one of the few experts in Deaf user experience
• A keynote talk from the developer Chistian Heilmann who has gained the title “Flame headed Love God of accessibility”

Worskhop: Deaf Awareness for Web Teams

21st September, 2.30pm – 5.00pm, City University, London

By the end of this workshop you will:

• Understand the difference between deaf and Deaf users and the different needs of each group
• Know the difference between Captioning, subtitling and subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
• Be able to confidently create web content that is accessible for a Deaf audience
• Know how to conduct user research with deaf users

Tickets

Booking details available on the conference web site

• Conference Full price £195 (conference only)
• Conference Promotional £170 (conference only)
• Conference Student £100 (conference only)
• Workshop £60 (NB: Tickets for the workshop sold separately)

We’ve compiled six useful tips for all you web designers and developers out there. They cover various topics including: accessibility, SQL, web developer plugins for Firefox, HTML emails, design and jQuery.

Feel free to disagree or add your own in the comments below. If you’d like to submit a tip to be considered for future articles, just head over to Tipster and add your own.

Alt Tags and Screen Readers

By: James Fenton

I can’t claim these tips as my own, though my web accessibility hero Bim Egan (of the RNIB) recently gave me a few simple tips regarding alt tags and screen readers.

1. Keep your alt tags as concise as possible.
2. Don’t just describe exactly what is going on in an image, describe what message it is trying to convey.
3. It is OK to leave the alt attribute blank (alt=”") as it can be more of a hindrance to blind users than a help.
4. When an image is essentially just style, use it as a background-image.

Spending a few hours watching (and listening) to a blind user on the web is a mind blowing experience and will totally change how you approach accessibility

Shorter SQL statements by abbreviating table prefixes

By: Joris Heyndrickx

Instead of writing:

SELECT books.title, books.short, books.releasedate, authors.firstname, authors.lastname
FROM books, authors
WHERE books.author_id = authors.id AND authors.id = 21


You can write:

SELECT b.title, b.short, b.releasedate, a.firstname, a.lastname
FROM books b, authors a
WHERE b.author_id = a.id AND a.id = 21

My Top 6 Firefox Plugins for Web Development

By: Simon Hamp

FireBug with FirePHP FTW!

1. FireBug (getfirebug.com)
2. FirePHP (firephp.org) req. FireBug
3. ColorZilla (colorzilla.com/firefox/)
4. HTML Validator (users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla)
5. YSlow (developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) req. FireBug
6. Web Developer (chrispederick.com/work/web-developer)

Image headers in table based HTML Emails

By: Pete Roome

If you have an image as a header on a table based HTML Email it is likely you will find you have a very annoying gap beneath it between your two <tr>’s. Simply add the following styling to your image to close this gap:

{vertical-align:bottom;}

Lighting effects on boxes

By: David Smith

To make a box stand out in your design simply:

1. Choose a colour for your box
2. Create a subtle gradient starting from a slightly darker version of your colour (bottom) to a lighter version of your colour (top)
3. Make sure your gradient is SUBTLE!
4. Draw a horizontal line across the top of your box so that it spans the whole width.
5. Pick a colour from the top of your gradient and lighten it still more. Apply this colour to the line you just created.

You should have an effect which looks like light is hitting the top of your box making it stand out. The blue Tipster banner uses this to good effect.

Manual filmstrips in jQuery

By: Michael Peacock

Here’s how to create a really simple manual photo film-strip in jQuery. It can be used to swap a large image on a page with that of a thumbnail elsewhere on the page, such as different photos of a product in an e-commerce store.

$(document).ready(function(){
imageSwapper(".thumbnails a");
});

function imageSwapper(link) {
$(link).click(function(){
$('#largeimage').attr('src', this.href);
return false;
});
};

Just link the thumbnails to their larger versions and pop them in a div or paragraph of class thumbnails, and give the large image an ID of large image, and you are good to go!

Any tips you can add?

If you have any tips you’d like to add, please do so in the comments below. Thanks!

[Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/dunechaser]

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