I was going to save this one for the Goldfish’s BADD, but as that is usually in May, and it’s only March now, I didn’t really think that I’d remember about it. A few days ago, I noticed an article on the BBC News which was about someone with Down’s syndrome: Otto Baxter is 21 [...]

Apparently, some parents think that their children should live in a world filled with fluffy pink cotton wool, ethnically cleansed of anything potentially offensive, controversial, or even anything that will make their children ask questions that the parents will have to answer. And these people are cockwits. Now, as a parent I understand that it [...]

Yes, it’s a controversial subject, talking about stuff like euthanasia/ assisted suicide, so it was obviously a toss-up for which flippant song title I would use as the title of the post. In the end I went with the song best known as the theme from M*A*S*H, although I did also consider Ozzy’s Suicide Solution [...]

This is a continuance of the previous piece looking at BS 8878, “Web accessibility — Building accessible experiences for disabled people — Code of Practice”. Problems The ‘Accessibility Policy’ section demonstrates that for all the “we can’t be using WCAG 2.0, as it’s not ready”, it appears that this document is not ready itself. We’re [...]

BS 8878 Web accessibility — Building accessible experiences for disabled people — Code of Practice has been published. While this is a little bit of a mouthful, it is basically the first draft of an official British Standard for web accessibility. It’s important to note that it is not necessarily the final version: it has [...]

There are some words you just don’t use in conversation. This post is going to discuss them. If you are likely to be offended by them, when used in context about the use of language (as opposed to them being used as a slur), then you might not want to read on. Oh, yeah, and [...]

I’ve been to London. Well, I say I’ve but really ’twas the Clan Pickard: me, GLW and the two kiddies. We had a couple of nights staying with my Dad and his family in Brentwood (and the kids were delighted to see Grandad, Nanny and their Auntie and Uncle), and a couple of nights staying [...]

Tom Shakespeare is an academic based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He is also a person of restricted growth. He was travelling on the city’s metro recently when he was verbally humiliated and intimidated by a group of schoolgirls. Was he a victim of a disability hate crime? BBC News Magazine It might seem obvious that the answer [...]

There’s this blogger I know who is dying; her body is giving out on her. I don’t mean she’s got something that will eventually get her; I mean she’s in that final Departure Lounge. And she’s writing about it in a way — like most of her writing — that is powerful, visceral and sometimes [...]

Guidelines And then they look at previous guidelines designed for older people. There have been more than half a dozen sets of guidelines published before — the only one of which I’d previously come across being Webcredible’s Usability for older web users, which I would still recommend as a useful starting point. Scrolling and other [...]