Web Standards, Accessibility & More

I took the family on a return visit to the Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield, California (only a 1 1/2 hour drive). Picture of wife and kids at Jelly Belly. Also went to the newly re-opened Happy Hollow Park & Zoo in San Jose. It’s very nice, and we’ll definitely go back soon. Picture of my boys on the Frog Hopper ride. (And we’re off to Humboldt later this week!)

In late March, I attended the CSUN conference in downtown San Diego (Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference). I co-presented one session with Joseph O’Connor, Accessibility of Twitter for Mobile, Desktop and Web. It was a great learning experience, and I also met many great folks who I know from the web, especially Twitter. I also spoke at the CSUN Tweetup. Check out my Flickr album from CSUN 2010.

More recently, I was interviewed for a BlindMind.net podcast: Interview with Dennis Lembree, creator of AccessibleTwitter.com & author of web accessibility blog Web Axe.

View from Manchester Grand Hyatt hotel during the CSUN conference in San Diego, California. March 2010.

Like many folks, I very much enjoy Twitter, the mini-blogging sensation. I recently went over 1,000 tweets! You can find me at @dennisl.

One issue with the site is that Twitter is not web accessible. I’ve recently been resolving this problem by writing a new web application Accessible Twitter. It’s currently in Alpha status, so some functionality still needs adding/improving, but it’s mostly complete. You can learn more about me and the project here: Five Questions With Dennis Lembrée – Creator of Accessible Twitter.

So I’ve become familiar with questions that tech companies ask when interviewing candidates for web developer positions in “Silicon Valley” in California. So if you’re interviewing, you should prep yourself for the following interview questions that always seem to come up:

• What JavaScript libraries have you used? (And for YUI, which seems to be popular, which components have you used?)
• What’s the difference between “if (a==x)” and “if (a===x)”?
• Have you developed CSS for different browsers and versions? What are some examples of issues you’ve had? (i.e. box model)
• How do you keep up on web technology? (books, blogs, etc.)
• Use this text editor to properly properly markup this form from memory (with XHTML, CSS, JavaScript).
• Use this text editor to properly properly markup this table from memory (with XHTML).
• What’s the difference between “visibility:hidden” and “display:none”?
• What’s the difference between using var inside and outside of a JavaScript function? (or an exercise involving this)
• How would you write the HTML and CSS for a standard three-column layout with header and footer?

So Ross Johnson and I recently did another big interview for the Web Axe podcast. We spoke with Andrew Kirkpatrick, a leader at Adobe in product development and accessibility. And a nice guy.

Podcast #53: Interview with Andrew Kirkpatrick

We used Skype to record the podcast, again, and it sure makes it easy when folks are separately geographically–I’m in the Bay area, Ross is in Ann Arbor, and Andrew is in the Boston area. Scheduling is a bit tricky because of the time zone differences and everyone’s busy schedule, but that went fine since I planned a few weeks out. It’s still a bit difficult to get the audio levels right, though, and unfortunately we experienced this problem a bit on this podcast…check it out and let me know what you think…

Ross Johnson and I recently interviewed Patrick H. Lauke, the webmaster at University of Salford (UK). He is a vital member of Accessify.com and a member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force (ATF). He is also a co-author of the book Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance.

The interview was scheduled for 11am, but with the change of daylight savings time and time zones, there was a slight mix-up. So we ended up starting early, at about 10:30am, which was fortunate since we ended up speaking longer than planned. Every minute was valuable as Patrick is very knowledgeable in the web standards and accessibility world, and has a very pleasant demeanor. (It seems most of these guys live and work in the UK!)

The Patrick H. Lauke Interview on Web Axe

If you follow the web design industry, you are probably familiar web celebrity Paul Boag. He is co-founder of a British company Headscape, and runs a very popular site boagworld.com. So, Ross Johnson and I interviewed him at 8am last week, but didn’t actually start until 8:30 because of technical difficulties. I was late for my day job, but it was worth it. Paul is a very fun and knowledgeable guy, it was great speaking with him.

Listen to the Paul Boag Interview in Web Axe podcast 31 (practical web design accessibility tips).