Is this thing on?

Wikipedia has a nice and extremely useful map of the Beijing metro system with upcoming extensions. As the Beijing metro system is expanding extremely rapidly the future is almost now.

Like most Wikipedia maps of this type it is made in SVG (using Adobe Illustrator). The code it generates it fairly decent, better than some code I have seen earlier, but still hard to read and use for my purpose, so I cleaned it up with Kommodo Edit. The regular expressions work well in that editor, which makes clean-up much quicker and easier.

Maps are, or at least should be, ideal for SVG and SVG animations. Famously they are not the territory, but they are a layer of information that can be used instead of or as an overlay to other maps of the territory, highlighting the information you are looking for and hiding the information that distracts.

Read more...

I have earlier proclaimed markup an [necessary] evil. A more constructive way of putting it is to say that markup should always be minimal. You should use as much markup as you need, and no more. Markup is something we add to aid machines. Too much or wrong markup can do more damage as too little or too vague.

This design principle determines how to standardize markup. Unless the author knows something the user doesn't, the markup should not be there.

This principle obviously caters to the author's laziness, the admirable human trait not to do more than necessary. It is less obvious, but no less important, that it also empowers the user. More minimal markup means more flexible and accessible markup, assuming that the user agents do their job and actually act on their users' behalf.

Read more...

For many "accessible JavaScript" would be an oxymoron, but in principle JavaScript could be as accessible as anything else if the author was very careful or if the user agent would know more of what is going on.

Read more...

Should-read article: Accessible drag and drop using WAI-ARIA

The keyboard-friendly design of Opera was one of the things that attracted me to the browser in the first place, and one I am disappointed with the slow progress with. Keyboard-wise Opera today isn't substantially better today than Opera 3, or at least Opera 7. In some cases it is better (like spatial navigation when it works), in other cases it is worse (I still haven't found how to recover the Alt+Z history view, one of Opera's greatest inventions). I don't think Opera does any keyboard-only or keyboard-augmented usability testing.

Opera's lack of progress is one thing, but in the Web sphere things are actually getting worse. Early on you could do keyboard-only browsing most of the time. If the site used frames it was very awkward and it was better to use any mousing device available, and you had the occasional idiot who used 'onclick' functionality to recreate actual links, either because he didn't like the colour or underline of links or simply because he could.

Most of those idiots have discovered CSS by now (there should be a Hall of Shame site for those who haven't), but in these webapp ajax gidget 2.0 days recreating the user interface is the game of the day, and that usually means breaking the keyboard.

One of the tasks you can't reliably do with the keyboard today is drag and drop, and that goes for navigating to dynamically generated submenus and choices as well.

In my view the raging accessibility question shouldn't be whether the 'alt' attribute is optional or mandatory, but how we can make the Facebooks of the future accessible.

This ties in with HTML5 and the obituaries over the dead discontinued XHTML2 spec. XHTML2 and XForms were designed with accessibility in mind, HTML5 was designed primarily with web designers in mind. For a devoted keyboard user that should make the preference easy, right? Not so. The HTML4 spec, like XHTML2 and XForms, is filled with well-intentioned accessibility features, but those features are no good if they are not used.

An attribute like 'longdesc' can make an inaccessible picture into a device-independent and accessible textual representation of that picture. All the designer has to do is to spend a couple hours for each picture describing them in detail what they depict and what they are used for in an as context-independent way as possible. For some reason most web designers opt not to do that.

Given the choice between having Facebook and similar sites mostly usable or the WAI site and a couple other special interest sites perfectly accessibly marked up, Facebook is the winner. If the spec can give designers the features they crave and then behind the scenes give the browser or the assistive tool the information they need to cater to their users we have a winner. The HTML5 work with drag and drop looks very promising in this regard.

What the HTML5 spec doesn't cover, and which Opera has struggled with in its extensive keyboard support, is how to handle the conflicting interests of the web application developer and the user agent, be it a browser and/or assistive tool. As an example Opera uses the A key to navigate to the next link, what if that key is used by the application? In a keyboard not having the A key another key is used instead, or the user can configure his own keyboard mapping, so it wouldn't make sense to make a collection including A "reserved key" unavailable for the application. So who should win in a battle of A, the web application or the user agent? CSS has covered a similar conflict in the Cascade (the C in CSS), essentially default < author preferences < user-important preferences. For a User Agent I believe the best option is to let the UI be overridden by the web application (otherwise the application won't work in that environment) but have a mechanism to override the application when needed.

Related, given the great variety of keyboards, some user mechanism to remap keyboard mappings is necessary not only for the user agent, but for the web application as well.


Here is a demo of keyboard-accessible drag and drop in action.