Refreshable Braille and the Web came up as a search result when I was looking for CSS language accessors and IE. While it’s not what I was looking for, I took a few moments and watched the video. I know there are screen readers out there, as well as language translators and more, but this was very compelling to me. I did not know that there was a braille reader which is essentially either a keyboard or an attachment to a keyboard which allows the reader to read just as if they were reading a book. Instead of reading lines of braille, there is a single line at a a time which is available.
Articles like these remind me of why great HTML markup is SO VERY important to accessability, and forward thinking. One of the points which is made is that the HTML outline is used by the screen readers to not only describe where the reader is, but also describes the importance of that information which is being read. Ironically, I do not believe I have ever worked for a company which specifically targeted their audience which may require the accessability standards which are now in place. Just like you and me, people who need the accessability standards work, shop and play online. It is important to make sure that we test not only for the vast majority of our users, but we also test for those who may need that extra little push of our time at the end of the day.
I hope that you find the video as compelling as I did.
This is actually a great presentation on post click marketing and landing page myths. It contains information that I was learning when I was working with paths for a really great company a few years ago, and rings very true to what we found out. It is an overview, but also goes into depth as well. Just one more thing that I need to understand fully…
Google asks people in Times Square “What is a browser?”… Considering I started using a “browser” back in 1995, I was in a good deal of shock that most people had no idea what a browser was. No wonder so many people still use Internet Explorer after all these years!
At this point, if you have watched the video already and are still looking for the answer. It is simple.
Simply put, a web browser is the thing you use to visit websites. The most common web browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera. There are MANY more not mentioned here.
A SEARCH ENGINE – Google, Yahoo, Bing (it’s new), and Web Crawler (do you remember that one?) …
What causes the confusion?
There are a lot of factors, but having the Search Engine plugins which automatically search when you get your website URL wrong is probably a good indicator of why there is confusion. If you don’t understand how it works already (and most people don’t want to understand) then you will think that all of the rolled up technologies are a single technology instead of seeing the small moving parts.
Something that I have been detesting is how my sites have been looking in Firefox under Windows. I know, I know, you deal with these things for security, etc. But I looked at Safari, and the fonts were always clean and crisp… So what gives?
I found an article relating to @font-face css rules, read it in Firefox 3, and then decided to look at the same page in my VM instance of Firefox 3.5. The difference was staggering, and yet very slight. Firefox 3 looks very grainy and even pixelated where Firefox 3.5 looks crisp, like an Arial font should look. I start looking at the author’s CSS (yes, I’m a nosey person) and realize that they’re not actually using @font-face styles on their page! So I looked around the web a little more, comparing the pages side by side just to find that wow, the experience may not bring me headaches any longer!
For me, this one little thing is a huge win. I look at Firefox every day during my development cycle and to be able to see the fonts just as I would in any other application is frankly awesome. This is something that I expect, and it was a disappointment before. I am very glad to see that Safari has taken up the challenge of being innovative and improving the user experience on the web. Other browsers like Firefox are now catching up, and for those of us who develop applications for the web, and those that use our applications, this is nothing but WIN!
Thank you Mozilla – for something so simply pretty. Thank you WebKit for making the challenge happen.
Back in March, I asked the question: Are you afraid of shadows?
In the article, I showed off some really neat transformations which at the time, were only available to Webkit users (Safari and Google Chrome), and the users of the early beta release of Firefox 3.5 (at the time Firefox 3.1).
The little things like text shadowing, which you really wouldn’t think much of unless you look at the power of the iTunes stores. The iPhone App Store in iTunes, much like all of iTunes is simply a web interface to the database of apps available for purchase, but if you’re a developer, you’ll notice the sweet effects that are laid on top of your app icon. Being both a developer and a web developer, I was curious how they went about making that happen automatically. My first thought was that they modified the image, but that wasn’t the case, it’s all CSS transformations which have been submitted for addition to the CSS 3 recommendation. Take a look at some of the documentation Apple has to offer
So now one must wonder if Internet Explorer will try to catch up[1], or if we will continue to require our web developers to handicap the abilities and speed of their websites just to appease the MANY users of Microsoft’s always behind browser. With luck, we will see Internet Explorer 8.5 which will add many of these abilities, and allow even the most novice of users to see the best that the web has to offer, but until then, those users will look upon the web with unseeing eyes. Ironically, once Internet Explorer does catch up, the world will be amazed at everything Microsoft has brought to them, never to realize that these things had been available for years before.
1 – To be fair, Internet Explorer does have this functionality, but it is something that must be handled in javascript, or by other programmatic means in the stylesheet, and is not the cross-browser way to handle this functionality.
Text Shadowing availability by browser:
Safari 3 & 4
Firefox 3.5
Chrome 1
Have I missed a browser like Opera? I don’t run it and am not required to test against it, so if you know of other browsers that support the latest CSS let me know and I’ll add them to the list!
