Web Standards, Accessibility & More

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.

Guess what? Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS4 Beta is available! And I’m just getting used to CS3! New features include:

• Live View
• Code Navigator
• CSS best practices
• Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript frameworks
• HTML data sets
• Photoshop Smart Objects
• Subversion integration
• AIR support
• New user interface

jQuery is a great JavaScript library for fast, easy development. I met the creator John Resig at a conference last year. He’s a great guy, and I even “won” a nice jQuery book.

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages

Here’s a good overview slide show on jQuery:

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Here are some Acronyms and Quotes that definitely worth reading!

On future of Ajax:

“Ajax is the frames of web 2.0″

How true; Ajax is overused and many times not used correctly.

Jeremy Keith in Hijax presentation:

“Plan for Ajax from the start; Implement Ajax at the end”

Great advice. Go read his book, Bulletproof Ajax.

D.R.Y.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself”

Meaning don’t rewrite and duplicate code. Great idea, especially for larger sites.

i18n

“Internationalization”

Cute, isn’t it? Comes from “i” + 18 letters + “n”.

X.H.R

“xmlHttpRequest”

P.O.S.H.

“Plain Old Semantic HTML”

My favorite!

A quote about friendly web development:

“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”

Be responsible with your code.

A quote about using Macs:

“Once you go Mac, you never go back.”

Is that not P.C.? Ha ha.

A.H.A.H.

“Asynchronous HTML and HTTP”

Becoming a much more relevant term; there are other often-used alternatives to the X in Ajax (XML).

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:

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.

The company I’m working for in California (Redwood City, Bay area) is looking for a web developer/coder with skills similar to mine: XHTML, CSS, DOM scripting, AJAX (preferably Hijax), and web accessibility. We’re getting a web application up to speed with web standards and web accessibility and there’s a lot of work! It may be contract to start, but I’m sure it pays well.

If you are skilled in the areas listed above, and you are interested, please send me a message at dlembree at g mail dot com. Serious inquiries only. You must have at least a few years experience.