Accessible Shopping Cart

Up to now the number of shopping cart systems that are accessible i.e. valid xhtml and WAI AA has been low.

I only know of 2 Karova and Trading Eye. However the downside is that they are not cheap.

During the last few months I have been attempting to rectify this situation and will soon be in a position to release The Accessible Shop onto the market, at a very affordable price. Currently the expected initial price will be sub £100, though this may change.

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Posted in Accessibility, News | 4 Comments

Thunderbird and moving emails

I get a fair bit of email, all of which I leave in my main inbox until it is dealt with. After which I then move that email to the relevant place. Problem is Thunderbird doesn’t like quick mouse movements and any secondary, or deeper, menus disappear. I then have to into slow motion to get the menu to retain a focus. Moving emails is generally the cause of this issue.

It is a PITA.

Posted in Rants | 2 Comments

Accesskeys: useful or not?

John Foliot and Derek featherstone over at Wats.ca have long queried the usefullness of accesskeys, and have some very nice articles surporting their claims. More reasons why we don’t use accesskeys from December 2003 is just one of these.

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Tidybot

W3C and WDG both offer validators for download. Every now and then I go and look at the instructions, and shudder with horror. Installation of these things is not easy, and I still don’t think I have the necessary knowledge to be able to do so successfully. Although not usable for many pages Tidy, an html parser, has been around for some time. Recently a friend of mine decided he wanted to be able to create something that would parse a site we maintain, The L-Space Web. So he went off and wrote one.
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Automated accessibility checkers

There are an increasing number of tools that can carry out automated accessibility checks. But are they any good?

For quick checks, I have long used Cynthia Says as I find the resulting report informative and easy to understand. Having just re-evaluated Webxact (formerly Bobby) I see that the report has been extended to include other, none accessibility, issues. Now this may be useful for some, but it doesn’t suit my needs.

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Posted in Accessibility | 1 Comment

How accessible are embedded movies?

Today I have been wrestling with embedding a movie into a web page. To try and ensure cross browser, and cross platform, usability I have had to use the <embed> inside an <object> On an XHTML 1.0 Strict page, this was a fairly major decision, and was only taken after careful consideration of all the alternatives.

I ended up using the following code:
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Posted in Accessibility | 5 Comments