ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

It’s been a while since Joe Clark brought us The Week In WCAG and I was starting to wonder what was happening. Maybe I should email him to ask?
Then I thought: am I really that lazy? Since I’m the one who wants to know, why don’t I go and look it up for myself. Obviously […]

Read: What’s happening in WCAG 2? »

I came across a post today, which was commenting on Joe Clark’s article To Hell With WCAG 2. This article was to my mind was the first major piece of any kind to take an in depth look at the WCAG 2.0 documentation and present it to an decently sized audience outside those who spend […]

Read: To Hell With People Saying To Hell With Joe Clark »

Basically, what it says on the tin:
The theme for this year’s International Day of Disabled Persons (3 December 2006) is accessibility to information technologies, and the day will be referred to as E-Accessibility Day.United Nations
Although I notice the UN are capitalising the e in their E-Accessibility, I’ve got to say it’s not very often that […]

Read: e-Accessibility and the United Nations »

This version of the page is styled to fit with the normal look of my site. There is also an unstyled and cut-down version of this page which may be more suitable for actually carrying out comparisons, as you won’t have the side and far bars “getting in the way”.
Note this page is currently in […]

Read: Text Resizing Results »

One of the biggest things that my recent trip to the “Government websites 2.0: the next generation!” conference left me with was a question. Two questions actually. The first being “was that exclamation mark at the end of the title really necessary?”.
Chris Rourke of User Vision suggested that you shouldn’t use self-referential links as […]

Read: Self-Referential Links: Controversy Rumbles On »

I spoke at a Public Sector Forums event on the 15th August on WCAG 2.0. I promised to various people that I’d make my speaker notes available online, so here they are. This is based on the second draft of my speaker notes, which is a slightly longer than the final version and obviously may […]

Read: Whistle Stop WCAG 2 : To Hell … and back »

The Triple-A level of Accessibility, as defined by WCAG has long been considered a Holy Grail - something to strive for but virtually impossible to achieve. However, with my new site design, now powered by WordPress and using a modified version of Mike Cherim’s Seabeast theme, I’ve achieved just that.
I’ll say it again: this site […]

Read: The Web Chemist & The Holy Grail: Triple-A Accessibility »

Because I think it’s important that validity should remain in WCAG 2.0, I’ve written to the Working Group and asked for it to be retained as a level 2 success criterion. I’m happy with unambiguous parsing being a level 1 success criterion, but I’d include along the lines of "Create documents that validate to published […]

Read: Validity: Those Taking Up Arms »

In case you’re not aware, WCAG 2.0 doesn’t insist that web pages should be valid. It instead insist that they must be able to be parsed unambigously. Basically, this means that your nesting of elements should be correct and you shouldn’t have overlapping elements. The only publicly stated reason that I could in anyway see […]

Read: Validity: A Call To Arms »

@Media 2006 ("atmedia") was a web development conference held in London with speakers on various topics from across the country and beyond. If you want to find out what it was like from a web development perspective, you’re in the wrong place. I did say it was an alternative review. This is the not-the-conference review.
As […]

Read: @Media 2006 - The Alternative Review »