Accessibility statement

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I’d done this once before, but as it got lost in my site crash, I took a few minutes to go through Dive Into Accessibility and make sure that my site was up to spec. I’m good to go, so here’s the official babble:

Note: This accessibility statement was written for my old site at djwudi.com. While the majority of it will still correspond to michaelhanscom.com, I’ve yet to go through and double-check everything. Please bear that in mind. Thanks!

Accessibility statement

This is the official accessibility statement for www.michaelhanscom.com. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at djwudi@myrealbox.com.

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

  • Access key 1 – Home page
  • Access key 4 – Search
  • Access key 9 – Feedback
  • Access key 0 – Accessibility statement

Standards compliance

  1. All pages on this site are at least Bobby and WCAG A approved, AA and AAA when possible. This is always a judgement call; many accessibility features can be measured, but many can not.

  2. All pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines. Again, a judgement call.

  3. All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This is not a judgement call; a program can determine with 100% accuracy whether a page is valid XHTML. For example, check this page for XHTML validity.

  4. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for the header, H2 tags are used for main titles, H3 tags for subtitles, etc. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+4.

Navigation aids

  1. All pages have rel=previous, next, up, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).

  2. The home page and all archive pages include a search box (access key 4). Advanced search options are available at the advanced search page.

Links

  1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).

  2. Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

  1. All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes.

Visual design

  1. This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.

  2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers.

  3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

  1. W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.

  2. W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.

  3. W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer’s guide to accessibility.

  4. U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

  5. Dive Into Accessibility, a comprehensive guide to implementing these guidelines in websites, with a focus on the most popular blogging software.

Accessibility software

  1. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.

  2. Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.

  3. Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.

  4. Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.

  5. Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

  1. Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.

  2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.

  3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.

  4. Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

  1. WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.

  2. Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.

Recommended reading

  1. Joe Clark: Building Accessible Websites. Comprehensive but not overwhelming.

  2. Jim Thatcher and others: Constructing Accessible Web Sites. Less comprehensive than Joe’s book, but goes into greater depth in the topics it covers. Gives screenshots of how various screen readers and alternative browsers interpret various tags and markup. Also has an amazing chapter on the current state of legal accessibility requirements.

Thanks to Dive Into Accessibility for the template for this Accessibility statment.

Oingo Boingo

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Y’know, I wish I had an excuse for not discovering Oingo Boingo years ago…but I don’t.

However, somewhere along the line I ended up with the Best O’ Boingo CD. I don’t know that I’d ever even listened to it before, but ever since I got my iPod whenever an Oingo Boingo track shows up in the random playlist I use, I end up thinking it’s really cool, checking to see who it is, and kicking myself for never having gotten into this group before. I really should have — I’ve liked their song ‘Dead Man’s Party’ for years, and have thought for a while now that Danny Elfman creates some of the best movie scores I’ve heard, but I still didn’t ever bother investigating them.

Ah, well. Better late than never!

So it’s been a year

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I’d like to come up with something amazingly deep and profound to say, but for one reason or another, it’s just not in me. Besides, plenty of other people have worthwhile things to say.

I think part of my little bout of writer’s block is just that the entire situation is frustrating. One year ago, something huge and immensely terrifying happened. In the year since then, however, a multitude of other, smaller, less immediately noticeable things have happened (usually in the name of ‘patriotism’), that added up scare me as much as (and quite possibly more than) the attacks themselves. It’s a different kind of scare, but it’s a scare, nothenless. Awareness of this side of things does seem to be growing, though, which is good.

I guess, most of what I’d really want to say I’ve said already, either in some of my rants over the past year or in the links I’ve chosen to highlight in this blog (the majority of which, unfortunately, still reside in limbo).

I dunno. I’m rambling. Caught between wanting to say something, and not really having anything of real import to say.

Portland protest

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Bill of Rights, R.I.P.An interesting and nicely even-handed writeup of an anti-Bush protest in Portland that went wrong — from a peaceful protest march to conflicts with the police, including pepper spray and rubber bullets. What happened? Murphy’s law…

…I felt that the police and the protestors were, behaviorally, mirrors of each other. The police officers were mostly acting within decent bounds, and the protestors were mostly peacefully making their views known. However, just as the police had a few unprofessional punks who felt compelled to spray and shoot at protestors, so did our side have its share of adolescent morons who thought it was a good idea to spit at the cops, throw things at them, try and force their way past them, and generally try to provoke violence. As some of the asinine “kill a cop” “they are subhuman” sentiments one hears clearly show, our side cannot claim to be free of infantile, violent cretins, much as we might like to believe it.

It is time to be serious-minded, friends. All the best things about this nation are under assault, and we have lost a great deal of ground already. We have mostly lost it through shortsightedness, internal bickering, and an annoying habit of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. We need to stop acting as though “smash the state, stick it to the Man” is anything other than a child’s point of view. We need to take actions that will have a real effect, supporting candidates who can win even if they’re not 100% ideologically perfect, forming alliances with people who might not share every one of our pet issues, and generally approaching this problem as adults in the real world approach problems. Our freedoms will not be won back in the streets by dashing young revolutionaries. Get that image out of your mind. Our freedoms will be won back by dull people at city council meetings, by policy wonks in congressional office buildings, by months and years of painful, uninteresting, and EFFECTIVE work.

(via Boing Boing)

Search re-enabled

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I know that the majority of my posts lately have been site-oriented, and are probably insanely boring, but…well…from time to time, I fall into full-on-‘geek mode’. Just bear with me, I’m sure things will be back to the normal boring drivel (rather than the current technical boring drivel) soon enough.

The site search function has been re-enabled. I’m currently using the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine, which has the dual benefits of being very easy to set up and configure (I’ve even got it matching the look and feel of the rest of my site, something I hadn’t bothered to do before), and is extremely powerful. Since I’m still in the process of re-entering all my old posts after the recent crash, it’s only got so much to draw on, but by the time I finish putting two and a half years worth of babble back online, it could be quite useful for finding specific posts.

9-11 tributes

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Yahoo! on 9/11 2002Several sites across the ‘net are altering their front pages as a tribute to the 9-11 attacks. Some aren’t bad, some seem to be pretty ridiculous (to me, at least).

Of the ones I’ve seen so far, Yahoo‘s seems the silliest. Essentially the same old Yahoo! as ever — just all in greyscale. I kind of prefer the approach that other sites have taken (such as Excite, who set their main page to a simple black background, a rememberance message, and links to enter the content area). This just gives me the feeling that while Yahoo figured they had to do something, they sure as heck weren’t going to hide their content — why, some poor soul might actually get distracted by thinking about actual issues and miss out on some ads!

Then again, maybe I’m just too cynical.

(via MeFi)

The Height of Ambition

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There’s an incredible article at the New York Times Magazine giving a great history of the World Trade Center, from its politically-charged beginnings to the architectural choices that both kept the towers standing as long as they did after the impact of the planes and contributed to their eventual collapse. Just be sure to set aside some time — I just spent the past hour reading this.

When the north tower, the first to go up, was finally topped out on Dec. 23, 1970, it was foggy, and no one could see the view. But James Endler, the West Point grad and construction contractor who oversaw the entire job for the Port Authority, made a point of showing up at a celebration for the workers held on one of the skeletal upper floors — the first open-air party ever to take place 1,300 feet above the street. There was a band, soda and sandwiches. But when the band played the Mexican hat dance, the construction workers started stomping in unison, and Endler — standing next to Jack Kyle, the Port Authority’s chief engineer — began to feel odd vibrations in the structure. The floor did not seem steady. After all the wind-tunnel tests, the computer calculations, the structural innovations, had something been missed? Had the thousands upon thousands of steel parts been fitted together incorrectly?

”Jack, how do we stop that vibration?” Endler asked.

Kyle turned to him, expressionless. ”Don’t play that song anymore,” he advised.

(via MeFi)

Font tweaks and hiding links

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Just on the off chance that anyone visits my site tonight (the evening of Sep. 9th, possibly into the morning of Sep. 10th), no, the site normally doesn’t look quite this wonky. I’m working on adjusting my font stylesheet to be a bit more what I’ve got in mind — but things may be a bit odd in the meantime.

Deal with it.

;)

Update: All done now — now things look the way I wanted them to. And, of course, I’m playing with a few more tricks…

Read more

So long, Webloggers

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Well, it’s official — the Webloggers Webring is dead. Not a big surprise, really (some sort of crash had wiped out the linking system a few months ago, and it had been in limbo as to whether or not it could be recovered), but still something of a shame. Better remove those links from the sidebar….