Punkchip

Take a straight forward question that is usually asked during any online sign-up form:

Gender: Male Female

It is marked up according to the WCAG Priority 2 checkpoint 12.4 that says you should associate labels explicitly with their controls (i.e. by using the label element).

<input type="radio" id="male" name="gender" />
<label for="male">Male</label>

However, I want to explicitly link the original question (gender) with the 2 possible answers and this isn’t possible using the label element because there can be only one label and one control per line. There are a couple of solutions.

Continue reading Accessible Radio Buttons/Checkboxes

September 18, 2006

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This is quite a specific tip, but one that caused me quite a bit of frustration.

The Problem

Each time I run the JAWS screen-reader software (version 7.0) on Windows XP, it nearly doubles the size of some icons on the screen. The ones that you find next to the clock in the taskbar, the quick-launch icons and also the small icon in the top left-hand corner of each window. They remain enlarged even when you exit JAWS and the computer restarted.

I’m not sure if this is a bug in JAWS or just something it should be doing to help users (I’m pretty sure it’s a bug). I can’t find any other documentation on why it would happen, only a couple of other users with the same problem in JAWS 6.0, who were trying to find a solution.

Continue reading Quick Tip: JAWS and Enlarged Icons

September 15, 2006

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Last Friday (2006-11-08) I was at d.Construct, a web conference held in Brighton. The official tag line was …an affordable, one-day conference aimed at those building the latest generation of web-based applications and discussed …how new technology is transforming the web from a document delivery system into an application platform.

Summary

To summarise, the day included discussions on API’s and web services, tagging and mash-ups with a bit of accessibility and usability thrown in for good measure. This post aggregates any slides that are available, along with the small amount of notes I took during the day (attendees were left in pitch black for the first lecture, so I was jotting blind). It is by no means a comprehensive account of each session, but notes of what I found to be most interesting and useful for the future.

Continue reading d.Construct 2006

September 11, 2006

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