Web Standards, Accessibility & More

Here are some comments on several (American) sports and sports teams.

BCS versus Playoff

It’s become pretty clear that to determine a true NCAA football champion, there must be a playoff and not rely of the top two ranked teams from a computer ranking. I would suggest a 4-game playoff, but a an 8-game playoff would be needed to satisfy everyone completely. Every year, there’s controversy over the “true” national champ, and I’m tired of it! Currently, the top five teams in the college football rankings all have one loss (Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas and USC), so who’s to say which two should play for all the marbles? Let them decide that on the field with a playoff.

Lowly Detroit Lions

So the Detroit Lions NFL football team is 0-12. They are becoming very close to being the first 0-16 team in history. Only one team has gone 0-14, and they had an excuse–it was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in their very first year of existence (1976). The 1980 Saints started 0-14, and last year’s Dolphins lost their first 13 games. The Lions themselves started the 2001 season 0-12 before finally beating the Vikings (who they play tomorrow!).

U of M football and basketball

So I won’t talk about my alma mater’s horrendous football season, but at least the Michigan Wolverine basketball team is finally doing well. They upset two teams already early this season–fourth ranked Duke and the week before, fourth ranked UCLA.

Bay Area Sports

So I’ve been living in the Bay area for 1 1/2 years now, and am still easing into the area’s professional sports teams. I did go to a San Francisco Giants baseball game this past summer, and am looking forward to a Golden State Warriors basketball game. I do have tickets to a San Jose Sharks hockey game in January (they’re playing the Detroit Red Wings).

So I went to the Toronto, Canada area almost two weeks ago and to Boulder, Colorado this past week.

During my 5-day trip to Canada (with my manager), I stayed and worked in a suburb of Toronto, Mississauga. I also spent a day in Waterloo, the home of my new employer RIM (Blackberry). It wasn’t terribly exciting, but it fun to be in Canada again, and to see the French plastered everywhere. And I sure lucked out with the weather; around 65F and sunny, which is amazing obviously for November.

Also, more importantly, I met many people that I’ll be working with from my office in Redwood Shores, which was very important. If a company has offices spread throughout a country or throughout the world, it’s very important for people who work together to meet face-to-face and build rapport.

I went to Boulder to speak at and attend a conference about web accessibility and assistive technology. (See the post Speaking at “Accessing Higher Ground” Conference.) The first thing I noticed was that the Denver airport was really nice. It snowed the second morning I was there, which was neat since I don’t see snow much any more (but it melted by afternoon). The conference was good, met some good people, and I even got a free t-shirt from WebAIM. On Friday night, I ate dinner at Zolo one night, which I totally recommend. Then I met a couple old friends who now live in the area and went bar hopping on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder. Pearl Street is very cool.

Here’s the view from hotel room in Boulder, Colorado:

It’s been almost two weeks now since I started a new (day) job at Research in Motion (RIM), which makes the Blackberry mobile device. The office is located in Redwood City (well, Redwood Shores), California, and is strangely enough, just a few buildings over from my last job. I’m doing software development for Blackberry devices, so it’s a bit of a change from my work in front-end web development, and going well so far. It’s taking a while to get my application environment set up, but then again, I’m also documenting the process at the same time. RIM is actually a Canadian company, and I’ll be visiting offices next week in Mississauga and the headquarters in Waterloo, near Toronto, Ontario.

My personal project this year, TimeTracker, is now complete and available for purchase. It’s a a web application to track one’s time with clients. I developed it for a friend’s employer, Music to Grow On, in order for music therapists to track hours with their clients. Of course, other professionals such as psychologists, teachers, and consultants, could make good use of the application.

Manage session time with clients with the TimeTracker. Manage session time with clients; track and report hours.

In TimeTracker, the professional may enter session information, run reports on his sessions, and view his client information. An administrator may edit user and client information, assign clients, modify all session data, and run detailed reports. In addition to tracking session dates and times, the scope of the project expanded to record driving miles, and to mark sessions as an assessment or a quarterly evaluation. You can read the list of features here.

Addendum, March 2009

TimeTracker has been rebranded as My Client Time.

It’s a pleasure to announce that I’m scheduled to be speaking at the 11th Annual Accessing Higher Ground conference, subtitled “Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference”, which takes place in Boulder, Colorado this November 11-14. The conference is hosted by the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Accessing Higher Ground focuses on the implementation and benefits of Assistive Technology in the university and college setting for people with sensory, physical and learning disabilities. Other topics include legal and policy issues, including ADA and 508 compliance…

My presentation “Ajax and Web Accessibility” will cover a description of Ajax, the positive and negative aspects, and suggestions and resolutions to accessibility issues.The first two days of the 4-day conference offer a variety of labs and workshops. My presentation will be during the second half which is primarily presentations and exhibits.

I’m exciting about not only speaking and attending the conference, but also about visiting Boulder for the second time. And the conference is located at the Millennium Harvest House, which looks very beautiful.

I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that Web Axe, my podcast and blog on web accessibility, has been nominated for .net magazine’s 2008 Best of the Web awards. It’s in the “Podcast of the Year” category, the sixth category down the list. After voting narrows the candidates to three (voting ends October 13), a panel of judges decides on the winners who will be announced in December.

If you listen to Web Axe and like it (or even if you don’t!), you can vote for Web Axe on the Best of the Web site.

Here’s a quote from .net magazine about the contest:

The .net Awards celebrate the best in web design and development. The 14 categories for 2008 range from Design Agency of the Year and Podcast of the Year through to the Infamy Award – a chance to name and shame those ruining your web experience.

I attended the An Event Apart conference in San Francisco (AEASF08) this week, a pretty well known conference “for people who make web sites”, mostly designers and developers. I had the pleasure of speaking to Eric Myer and Derek Featherstone which was way cool. I took the Caltrain from Sunnyvale on the first day and drove all the way up from Cupertino on the second day (found early-bird parking for only $10!). There’s a nice Flickr AEASF08 album which has pictures of people, venue (The Palace Hotel), and the delicious food.

Here are some tidbits from the conference:

• Empathy for the user is what a designer needs most.
• The average headings sizes from nine CSS frameworks from H1 to H6 were (in em): 2.33, 1.8, 1.45, 1.25 1.11, 1.05
• Use visual weight (through size, color, texture, etc) to create a hierarchy of elements on a web page which creates meaning for the user.
• Modern web design (like jazz music) is about creating frameworks where users (musicians) can improvise and participate.
• Pixel/em value make more sense when using the 62.5% method (body font size).
• “Progressive disclosure” is a new term which refers to progressive enhancement used with hiding/showing content.
• Eric Myer discusses debugging in CSS and his CSS reset file.
• Web accessibility checklists are only a starting point.
• Google was lazy in not making Google Map controls keyboard accessible.
• “Math is easy; design is hard.”