Web Standards, Accessibility & More

Last week I attended The Ajax Experience 2007 3-day conference in downtown San Francisco. There sure were some big guys speaking including Brendan Eich, CTO Mozilla; Douglas Crawford, Senior Architect, Yahoo!; and Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Adobe.

The sessions varied from Ajax security, to Javascript frameworks, to advanced techniques with forms. Fortunately, there was even a session on Ajax and accessibility, given by Orbitz. I also was happy to meet Aaron Gustafson, and attend his session relating to progressive enhancement. There was definitely a concentrate of topics around Javascript frameworks (a.k.a. libraries, toolkits) such as jQuery, Dojo, Prototype, and more.

On a personal note, I decided to make a family vacation out of the event, so I booked a hotel a few blocks from the conference, and brought the wife and kids. Yes, it was tough dragging around two boys–who are barely toddlers–but nonetheless it was worth it.

Union Square in downtown San Francisco:

Google recently purchased the master RSS feed utility Feedburner. In doing so, Google has made the PRO account and services now free to any user; there was previously a fee for the upgrade. This is great news for folks with blogs and podcasts because you can now do more and better statistical tracking of your readers/listeners. I just enabled the PRO service for my podcast/blog on web accessibility, Web Axe, so not all the data is there yet. But I’m looking forward to this great service! Thanks Google!

A song “Internet Wasteland” from Eddy Boston about web programming and coding. He and a friend dreamed it up over Fish ‘n’ Chips. Some of it is pretty funny, especially the lines about AOL and Adwords. You can read the lyrics in addition to listening to the song.

Eddy Boston is a musician out of Massachusetts. I like the quote from his bio:

If it weren’t for my stupidity, I’d be some kind of genius.

Captchas.net is a great free service that provides web accessible CAPTCHA so that your online forms can be saved from SPAM. Captchas.net also provides sample code for ASP, JSP, Perl and Python. The site is available in English, German, and Italian.

Here are some simple steps on how to install it on a PHP-driven web page, such as a contact form, which will be used in the instructions below.

1. Go to the Captchas.net web site and register an account.
2. Go to the page with the Captchas PHP code.
3. At the top of the page, download the PHP file “CaptchasDotNet.php” from the text link given (this file will be included in both PHP pages we create).
4. From the “query.php” example, create a PHP file for a contact form (or whatever) in your web site files. (The HTML in the given example is poorly coded, so I suggest completely rewriting it, or go to this example contact page that I set up with for an example of a web standards layout, and it uses Captchas too.)
5. In the PHP code, modify the client and secret variables; you should have received them when registering in Step 1. The other variables are optional, but you will probably need to tweak a bit to fit your design.
6. From the “check.php” example, create a PHP file to perform the Captcha checking and form processing (don’t forget to ensure the action of your form goes to this page).
7. In the PHP code, modify the client and secret variables as done in step 5.
8. You may wish to modify the error messages in the if and elseif statements.
9. After the else statement, enter the code for emailing the Contact information (or whatever code you want to run if the Captcha check is OK.)

When I was planning on moving to Northern California, my cousin told me to check out Fry’s Electronics. Man, he wasn’t kidding when he said it was big. It’s like a super Wal-Mart but for just computers and electronics! It’s a computer nerd’s dream! What’s amazing is that there’s enough business for four of these stores in the area, which actually makes sense since this is Silicon Valley.

Fry’s has everything from computer and electronics-related–Macs, PCs, hard drives, flash drives, PDAs, DVDs, blenders, TVs, cameras, air purifiers, blenders, office furniture, and much more (including snacks and cold drinks).

I guess there are Fry’s store locations in Southern California, Texas, and a few other states. I hear the store in San Jose, CA is decorated like a Tiki Hut or Polynesian pyramid or something, and the store in Burbank, CA has a big flying saucer spaceship crashed into the front. Here’s picture of a “normal” Fry’s store:

The idea of my podcast on web accessibility, Web Axe, is to provide “practical web accessibility tips”. The last couple episodes are angled a bit towards theory and ran a bit longer more than my preference, but the topics are essential in the field. Specifically, I’m referring to “Podcast #50: Analysis of WCAG 2.0” and “Podcast #49: AJAX and Accessibility“. Both podcasts I believe went very well, and they cover a lot of good subject matter that may be written about on the web (in blogs, forums, etc), but not talked about. I’m planning more succinct and code-specific podcasts in the near future. Topics may include OptGroup and an accessible slideshow.