Web Standards, Accessibility & More » Google

Disappointed in Google WAVE

Dennis — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:12:56 +0000

Google WAVE logo

What can I say besides I’m just plain disappointed in Google WAVE. There was so much hype, so much excitement about it, and now it’s evaporated.

No HTML5

I understood that WAVE was to be done in HTML5, but it has a doc type of HTML 4.01. And actually, I found that it has a very serious case of “Divitis” (too many DIV tags). Can’t find any type of HTML5 tag at all, not even a section tag, header tag, nuthin’. Just a ton of DIVs and SPANs.

If you’re curious, here’s a look at the top of the source:

And the generated source:

Not Accessible

Google WAVE is not web accessible. Period. Simplistically, this means that people with disabilities cannot use it, or it’s very difficult. For more on this, check out my Web Axe entry Podcast #75: Jeremy Keith Interview, Google Wave and Google Wave Preview Accessibility Review by WebAIM’s Jared Smith.

To further frustrate us web accessibility professionals, Google has stolen the name of WebAIM’s free tool WAVE (web accessibility evaluation tool).

No Usage

No one’s using Google WAVE. Most people I know now who want a WAVE invite (and that’s a lot of folks), has received one by now. And I haven’t seen much activity at all. As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen any new messages for a month now.

If you’re on WAVE, please send me a message; that may help me feel better! (smiley) My address is dlembree [AT] googlewave [DOT] NOSPAM com

Addendum

How ironic. I just noticed that I received some WAVE invites, so if you don’t have an account and still want one after reading this (smiley), please feel free to leave a comment.

I overheard something that made me think of this funny line:

Today’s Google WAVE invites are becoming yesterday’s AOL invite CD ROM disks.

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Attended Web 2.0 Expo in SF

Dennis — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:26:24 +0000

Last week, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo conference at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. The sponsors included O’Reilly Media, Adobe, Microsoft, and eBay. Overall, it was a pretty good conference, with lots of discussion about mobile and geo-location, “Cloud Computing”, and of course, Twitter and Facebook. Here are some tidbits I picked up:

Mobile web usage doubled in 2008.
Nokia is the world’s largest digital camera producer (as they are the biggest mobile phone manufacturer).
App written by Google in HTML5 for iPhone and Android is sweet.
Mobilize Donâ€™t Miniaturize
Need to read up on the W3C Geolocation API
Since 2003, web page file size has tripled!
Only 1% of iPhone Apps are used long-term.
For usability testing, research only what is necessary.
Don’t put branding ahead of users.

The day before the conference, I took and vacation day and brought my wife and kids up from Cupertino to “the city” for a mini-vacation. We stayed at a very nice hotel for which we got a great rate through HotWire.com. Here’s a Flickr album of the family portion of the trip.

Computer nerd area

Exhibit Hall

Dennis at Golden Gate bridge

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About the An Event Apart conference in SF

Dennis — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:54:25 +0000

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).
â€œProgressive disclosureâ€ 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.”

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My House on Google Maps

Dennis — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 04:49:29 +0000

So I was getting directions the other day on Google Maps, and noticed that the Street View is now available in my neighborhood. If the street address of my rental house is entered (“18750″), my neighbors home is actually shown. I had to modify the address just a bit (to “18740″) to get a better shot of my home.

At first, it’s a little scary knowing that your home is now plotted on Google Maps, but I’m down with it. I’m just glad you can’t read the license plate numbers…

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Stats on My Web Accessibility Podcast/Blog

Dennis — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:15:34 +0000

I thought it would be interesting to post some statistical information from Feedburner on my podcast and blog about web accessibility, Web Axe. It had been several weeks since I last checked the stats, and it was a pleasant surprise to see some growth.

The stats are for Thursday, July 10, 2008 and shows one of Web Axe’s highest subscriber rates of 746 (an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period). What I find most interesting is the different types of feed readers being used and how popular they are.Â Google and iTunes top the list. Google feed readers (Google Reader or iGoogle) count for 32%, and iTunes for 30% (17% Mac and 13% Windows). Netvibes, my favorite RSS reader, was next at 10%.

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Firefox Problems: image caching and Gmail/Firebug

Dennis — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:24:32 +0000

I love the Firefox browser, but I’ve had a couple issues with it lately. The first is image caching; Firefox was just not putting images in its cache; the graphics had to keep loading over and over! How obnoxious! After some tedious searching, I finally found the solution, which was a big relief:

Type ‘about:config’ in the address bar
Find ‘browser.cache.disk.enable’, right-click on it and choose ‘reset’.
Find ‘browser.cache.memory.enable’, right-click on it and choose ‘reset’.

The second issue is the use of Gmail with Firefox and Firebug, the awesome web developer add-on. The latest version of Gmail doesn’t like the Firebug/Firefox combination. C’mon, Google, how did that happen?! The solution (unfortunately) is to disable Firebug with the Gmail URL; while in Gmail, right-click on the Firebug icon and select “Disable Firebug for mail.google.com”.

Anyone else had these problems?

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Feedburner Pro now free (thanks to Google)

Dennis — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 17:28:20 +0000

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!

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