Scarf*oo

The People at RNIB have released the Surf Right Toolbar, which is — you guessed it — a toolbar for IE, which is designed to bring to the surface the often hidden accessibilty settings, such as turning javascript and images on/off, changing text size and so on.

Quoting:
“The Surf Right Toolbar is really for anyone who wants to adjust the way they view content on the web to make it easier to read. This could include people with mild disabilities, the elderly, people with reading problems, cognitive problems, using dial-up, photosensitivity and so on.”

You can grab the beta, right here.

There are tutorials and there are Tutorials coming from great web authors like Cameron Moll. The Highly Extensible CSS interface is a great collection of resources divided into four distinct parts, which guide you into creating a neat and sophisticated web page. Each part provides you with a working online demo, downloadable files, and links to articles and books related to each step of the tutorial.

• Part one builds a resolution-dependent page layout and demonstrates the use or a reset style sheet.
• Part two demos the use of CSS selectors and dives into the realm of scripting and adds some neat effects using the jquery library.
• Part three covers the integration of ajax technology and starts up with a shout-out on resolution dependence.
• The fourth and last part in this series is about testing for extensibility with 8 benchmarks to thoroughly bulletproof your site.

Overall this is a carefully written Tutorial worth spending time on. Thumbs up!

After nearly two years of development, the WCAG Samurai Errata - corrections to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 - were finally released to the web development community three days ago.

The reason for the update is because version 1.0 was originally published back in 1999 and in that time both web browsers and assisting technologies have evolved considerably.

Note that the WCAG Samurai Errata is not a standalone document, you should really use it as an update along the original WCAG 1.0 guidelines.

Also note that there is a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 working draft available, lastly updated in December 2007, which you should consider to use over the 1.0 counterpart.

So you have designed a beautiful and usable menu, provided breadcrumbs to backtrack your steps, designed a “you are here” marker, but your site is growing fast, providing hundreds - if not thousands - of pages of information. In that case, you might want to give your users something more - you might want consider implementing site-wide search. While many sites nowadays implement some form of search, it is surprising that only a few do it right. In this article, I’ll try to show you some common problems, and how to avoid them when implementing a search facility on your web site.

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