I usually try to avoid polemic but what possible use is there in having 2 competing standards for Office Documents as is the situation now OOXML has been approved for ISO? How does that help sharing information or accessibility?

Well at least one is not full of holes, has real world implementations NOW and perhaps most importantly is truly an Open Standard at heart.

So we will now collectively waste energy creating converters or arguing which is best when we should be moving stuff on.

Glazman puts in one way, I'll put it another

   ODF

See the OpenDocument  Fellowship for more details on that word.

OSS Watch have less emotional commentry.

That April first joke can be seen on iPlayer (which was the reason it was created).

Was that spaghetti that I saw in their beaks?

Sign here

There's been a really interesting thread going on the senit mail list about social interaction via technology in an educational accessibility context. The conversation has moved around a fair bit but one topic is Universal Design for Learning. This is related to accessibility and usability but is perhaps a 'step up'. Ira Socal has a blogged his personal insights into this subject (he's been part of the discussion).

UDL says scrap that system. Under UDL content would be fully flexible in delivery. Want that book on paper - here it is. Want it as an audio file - there you go. Want it as digital text - that's easy - seen a book lately that did not begin as a digital file? Need it in some other form - pictures or braille or whatever? No problem - as long as the content can be delivered.

As more applications and systems move to the web we have an early chance to get these principles embraced by developers. It also critical for leaning systems including VLE/MLEs to be truly Open to all.

In the simple case technology already exists to generate content in different formats on demand in the web server. OSS Watch for example use Apache AxKit to generate high contrast and printable text version of their pages (they used to supply pdf as well).

It's important to note that this is not suggesting passive consumption of media and social interaction implies creative expression by the individual and in groups. This is of course the constructivist view as embodied in the Open Source Moodle learning platform and Elgg social platform. In fact perhaps we should start in these active Open Source communities helping to raise the bar to fully accessible social interaction via technology.

AbilityNet, the UK charity that helps people adapt technology have organised the Accessibility 2.0 conference on 25 April. There's a great collection of speakers covering many important issues in web accessibility. I'm pleased to see Steve Faulkner mention's ARIA in his talk notes.

I will be there representing Mozilla project (sporting a Firefox teeshirt) and talking to anyone who will listen about how great Firefox accessibility is and what's happening in Open a11y land.

Thoughts on the Jambu list - hope to get some good feedback.

Yumm...

Here's some thoughts I passed on to Project Possibility about why Mozilla is a such a great project to work on for Open Accessibility experience and creating accessibility tools:

• basic web accessibility standards
• WAI-ARIA for web apps
• Firefox add-ons
• XULRunner for cross platform rich clients
• Prism for easy access to accessible web apps.
• grease monkey
• Core accessibility code
• supports most a11y APIs: ATI-SPI, MSAA, IA2 (Mac?)
• links with the main Open a11y projects including GNOME, Orca and NVDA
• links with proprietary AT like WindowEyes and Jaws.
• links with W3C, open a11y and others working in accessibility space
• example of large project architecture (code, build and organisation)
• proven large scale OS development practices to learn from
• largest OSS project community with *many* enthusiastic users
• some very smart and approachable people work on Mozilla
• synergy with Seneca College Mozilla work
• Commitment to the Open Web

That's some compelling ways that Mozilla is a great platform for accessibility and an awesome legacy from Aaron's hard work.

As web accessibility become more vital for everyday activities it's good to have student energy input and students will get great relevant software experience.
 

Outside It looks like a Christmas card with snow on the roofs and trees. We rarely get any snow here in the SW of England thanks to the gulf stream. I can't ever remember snow at Easter though we have had frost this late in the year.

I'm off to play with 2 very excited children.

For the students completing the course I knocked up some ideas for a next steps and also mentioning Open Source (espec Firefox, Thunderbird and OOo) and security.

Becta's response to the OOXML ISO announcement shows that they are 'on the ball' on this one.

An very in-depth interview indeed.

The conclusion of this inspiring post by Mozilla's community leader, Seth, is that it's not that hard to create your own add-on; it just requires a desire, curiosity and perseverance.

It obviously requires some technical leaning but I found this really encouraging. I'm really keen to see more users being encouraged to contribute to Mozilla, especially older users and those who use accessibility. Mozilla is community driven after all.

To add a little to Tom's comments:

Try to keep in mind the distinction between client (in web browser) and server ( web server). Both can be scripted for dynamic behaviour and both work together in various ways. You can even generate the client code on the server and push it across to be run.

Libraries like Dojo are client side and make the web page dynamic without necessarily getting more data from the server. Dojo is good because in has support for ARIA which is the new standard for making web apps accessible, and that's vital IMHO. JQuery are working on ARIA support as well. For client side IDEs, Firefox has the venkman debugger and FireBug is fantastic, letting you edit DOM and code and CSS in place.

JS is the only common web client scripting language (though there was some experimental work in Firefox to DOM script with Python). For AJAX you need to script XMLHTTPRequest object to request data from the server so is tied to JS as that is the language available (IE supports VBS too, but I didn't say that ;-)). You can just use JS and XMLHTTPRequest is available for most browsers, however libraries simplify the work involved, espec cross browser differences.

Ajax is good for some things but adds alot of complexity and means you end up duplicating some things the browser does, it also introduces issues that don't quite fit into the web way. For example if you are not careful to ensure a unique URL for each important state then history and shortcuts don't work (which may be what you want).

Serverside: yes ASP is MS only though ASP.NET could potentially run on the Mono platform, but adding more complexity. PHP is an open equiv to ASP and runs on most platforms. Both are fairly low level environments and as Tom say platforms like Rails make life much easier. Drupal is another but perhaps more a CMS. Django is really a framework for creating web platforms (confusing I know).

DBs is a big one, ADO and ODBC are ways you access a RDB. Using a RDB is good for several reasons like enabling new or adhoc querys. SQL is a powerful language in it self and lets you split data from presentation without using object layers which are much more a programming way of doing things. good RDB design requires experience. Stick to an open data base: SQLite is lean and mean and basically aims to be a structured replacment to file operations in smaller sites with lighter concurrency needs, postgreSQL is a full featured RDBMS for large systems, mySQL fits in the middle and is deservedly popular.

As for what to look at well I'm planning to seriously look at RAILS as I hear so many good things with respect to productivity. Combined with Dojo or JQuery it could be ideal. Drupal is the other one on my list to explore. Look for something mature with an active community. Any of the above really.

In her interview with Jack Schofield Mitchell explained why they do not support ActiveX even though that gives the Mozilla team some headaches:

MB: We've made some of those trade-offs. ActiveX was one of the things Microsoft added into the browser to make it easy to make system calls, which we did not implement, and it's the reason that many many intranets even today don't run Firefox well. Even some public parts of the internet would not work with Firefox. We suffered for many years because we would not implement it, but we knew we couldn't make it safe. We paid the price of incompatibility for a long time. That's hard to do.

Now as Computer World reports,  Symantec's latest Internet security report shows that ActiveX in IE accounted for 79% of the 239 plug-in bugs discovered between July and December of 2007.

While Microsoft has gone a long way to improve the security of Microsoft Windows and its applications, ActiveX is still a critical security exposure on the Microsoft Windows platform

Only one vulnerability was found in a Firefox plug-in.

There is debate about whether this is largely caused by the use of an older version of IE in corporate use where there can be factors that result in intertia when it comes to upgrading. However Firefox and Open Source in general provide a very fast response to security threats. When quick fixes is combined with a reduced attack surface, Firefox looks much more secure.

[Update] Here is a more complete commentry of the Mozilla related comments in the report 

We went on a family 6 mile walk today, starting and finishing at Nunney Castle (destroyed in the Civil War). It was an interesting walk, lacking in views but encompassing 2 wooded stream valleys where were saw a plethora of wood anemones. I have never seen so many of these delicate spring flowers. Violets and bluebells are also appearing but celandine is on the way out now. As usual this time of year ramsons leaves are everywhere giving of a delightful mild garlic fragrance.

Ever since my wife's father invented this parfait variation as a treat for his daughter's birthdays it has become a family tradition and firm favourite.

• lightly mashed banana
• broken chocolate digestive biscuits
• raisins
• milk coloured with red food dye

The 1st three are layered and the milk poured over.

A variation we use for those with a milk allergy is goats milk and 'ginger nut' biscuits.

East Summerset Railway made a good birthday treat. A half hour trip in old rollingstock behind a steam loco was followed by a look around the engine shed where renovation is in progress. We finished off with tea and cake and a swing in the play area. For some reason a couple of men were cutting the top of an old ambulance and I had visions of a sharabang being built.

Yesterday was mostly spent looking at houses in the area West of Bristol but we also visited the National Trust property Tyntesfield. In addition to impressive gothic extension work inspire by Pugin, the most interesting feature is that the house and gardens are open while comprehensive renovation work is in progress. The temporary work, obvious damage and clutter all add much interest. As usual the volunteers are well enthusiastic, informed, helpful and very friendly. Fun garden and house 'trails' kept the younger Lees entertained.

We found a useful demonstration of how to clean the inside of a monitor screen.

This post from Max Kanat-Alexander neatly summarises an important design priniciple, namely if a problem gets complex it's time to step back and see if you've 'painted yourself into a corner' and need to change your assumptions.

This is something I first learned from requirements that customers come to you with. Often they ask for something that is really 'their' solution based on what they know. You need to dig deep and find out what the real requirements are, and then solve those.

In his book on 'Lateral Thinking, I remember Edward De Bono neatly describing this as the process of stopping an attempt to dig a particular hole deeper, and starting to dig another hole in a better place.

I found this happens in many areas of life, especially with children.

The new OU distance course 'Accessible on-line learning:supporting online students' looks like a valuable course for educators in FE and HE. Perhaps also for those working in the compulsory sector too.

I spotted it via Jane Seale's blog. Jane is a consultant on the course and has written a book on the subject.

Hardy Heron, the  8.04 release of Ubuntu, is due on 24th April and this is one of the early reviews. The distowatch page has more reviews and details. I've not yet upgraded my laptop from Gutsy but only as I'm in the middle of some fairly critical work. I'll probably do it next week.

When I choose a distribution to install on a desktop or laptop system, it's always Ubuntu. It has the most trouble-free installs and usually the best support for the hardware on my systems. Some of the other distribution makers have taken the success of Ubuntu as a wake-up call and are focusing more on creating an easy-to-use desktop experience, but for the moment, Canonical has the lead by several horse lengths. Anyone who tells you Linux is hard to install or use has clearly not seen Ubuntu lately.

That is certainly my perception, plus as it features the GNOME desktop you get all the latest accessibility features.

I did the upgrade and had problems with 'update-manger -c -d' hanging after updating the repository list. I tried various alternatives and eventually got it working, though it seemed to apply all the packages twice. I had problems with the custom custom compiz setup (no title bar in windows) but once I selected none and then advanced all seems ok again. I joined in bug 186465 as others have a similar problem but no luck yet.

But the thing that I've spent ages on is that wifi was broken. The nm-applet (which lets you select settings and pick access points) and networking in control panel were stuck on manual config and I could not edit the manu config for wireless (OK button disabled). I used ifup/ifdown but got errors 'wmaster0: unknown hardware address type 801'. and the DHCPDISCOVER step of dhclient failed. Pouring over logs and config files and iwconfig, lshw, etc show all seems ok with wmaster get renamed at kernel boot to eth.

So after a google intensive time it turns out that error is red herring and it's simply that this version of Network Manager doesn't manage anything listed in /etc/network/interfaces (the last one did). 

So I just commented out the 2 eth1 lines and bingo..... (I had already deleted odd ones like wlan0 ath0).

I still have a problem that current distro version is not found in meta-release file, but that can wait.

Thanks to Gary Bishop for pointing out this presentation from Tod Machover and Dan Ellsey on the excellent TED which covers music creation with AT. The second half shows a performance where the musician controls it using a IR head tracker monitoring head getures. While it's hard to tell from a single performance it seems likely to be effective to some degree.

There's an obvious comparison to be made with the long standing work of Tim Anderson with his E-Scape program, available from the Drake Music Project. This alows recording and performance with many options for effective switch control and use with other limited bandwidth controlers. Soundbeam is a mature sonic position controller that creates virtual keyboards and other effect. Drake have been using these  and other music technologies for many years to help people with disabilities create music. Unfortunately they are currently experiencing funding problems.

Geek note: E-Scape is written in Smalltalk. I know as Tim has let me peek at the code.

Muso note: Soundbeam founder David Jackson was saxophonist with prog rockers Van Der Graaf Generator.

From David Banes and Adrian Higginbotham on senit

CAST Universal Design for Learning

Becta resources and more resources

TRACE centre technical guidelines


 

Tristan gives us 'Ten reasons to choose Firefox 3' in case we're not already clued in.

Just like Nigel's combo head amplifier from 'Spinal Tap' my list of reasons 'goes to 11' as I'll add there are some significant accessibility improvements.

The Ubuntu Linux installers are now accessible, especially for those using screen readers, as Luke Yelavich, Ubuntu's accessibility lead, has just announced.

Both the traditional Live CD installer and the new Windows installer have been improved to allow key access and screen reader integration. The CD installer is available after booting from the Ubuntu CD and the Windows installer lets you install Ubuntu from the CD much like any other Windows program and Ubuntu then runs in a virtual machine under WIndows.

The Echo Nest looks like brilliant solution that is still looking for the killer application. And there must be loads of them. Thanks to Music Thing for pointing out this interesting web service that analyses an MP3 and returns data about it:

Upload any song and receive an XML 'musical score' detailing tempo, beats, time signature, song sections, timbre, key, and other musical attributes.

My first application will be a mundane attempt to see if it will aid playing along to music by letting me work out the key, notes and cords etc.

The web site needs QuickTime.

There are only a handful of Open Source school admin. systems (AKA MIS systems) and in the UK, schools are pretty much captives of the dominant vendor, Capita. So Tom Hoffman's announcement of a new release of the School Tool program is of great interest.

Previously School Tool was really only a calendar system but the new feature list makes it much more complete and mature. Features include Resource booking, Journalling (register) and demographics.

Not only does School Tool have a great African flavored logo but it is funded by Shuttleworth making it no great surprise that it has excellent integration with Ubuntu Linux (the new version of Ubuntu has just been released and makes desktop Linux even more accessible). A simple installation and upgrade process through Ubuntu's package management system shouldmake it much easier to trial and manage.

School Tool uses the the Zope application server, which in turn is written in Python, giving it very firm Open Source foundations.

Nokia are funding Codethink to perform strategic rework to the Linux desktop accessibility infrastructure, AT-SPI. The work will remove the dependency on depreciated technology and use the same D-BUS message system as other parts of GNOME and KDE, greatly improving interoperability of applications and AT. This not only makes it easier to support and maintain but also reduce the code and memory foot print making it attractive for smaller applications like mobile devices (and the Icon may be one of the first).

Nokai were party to the discussions at the GNOME accessibility conference which led Rob of Codethink to start the feasibility study, so it is fantastic that they have decided to support the community in this important way.

The Firefox web browser has an average 29% market share in Europe according to Jane Finette, European Marketing director of Mozilla. In Slovenia it has reached nearly 50%. Even better is that in Hungary and Poland Firefox 2 has taken the lead in the browser version stats. The greatly improved browsing experience of the imminent Firefox 3.0 should see these figures rising even higher.

This month the computing section of newsagents in the UK have been brightened up no end with the orange Firefox logo appearing on the cover of PCAnswers. This popular PC user magazine is running a 9 page cover article on the advantages of using Firefox 3.0 for a 'Faster, better, safer' browsing experience.

On Thursday I had the great pleasure of lunch with Jane Finette and left feeling that Firefox's marketing and community in Europe is in very safe hands. Jane has an interesting job in steering and advising the passionate but disparate groups of users that exist in the many different cultures that comprise Europe.There is also the mistaken view to overcome that Firefox (and Open Source) are a little too geeky for your Gran to use. That is mistaken because Firefox is designed to be easy to use and highly accessible with features like page zoom. In addition the vibrant community is friendly and offer much good support and advice.

I was also able to provide Jane with some details of the Mozilla accessibility team and community. This work is vital to users who have disabilities and need adaptations but also for this ageing population when we just need little adjustments to suit our individual requirements. Indeed many accessibility features are really just good universal design and mean we all get a better experience on the web.

Fascinated, the vixen stared intently at the image of a bright orange fox curled around a blue circle. This urbanised female fox was sitting on my parents garden path having a good scratch when she suddenly spotted the Firefox tee shirt I was wearing at the kitchen door. She stood fixated for a few seconds as I stood frozen and then returned to scratching.

OK so she was more likely to have been intent on keeping an eye on me rather than experiencing any recognition. And yeah sure, a Firefox is a red panda though John Hicks' has features more reminiscent of a Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes). Still it's a nice image and made me smile.

This particular vixen lives under the shed in the garden at the end of my parent's. She digs up the gardens when hunting for worms and other morsels and her cubs play happily on the neighbour's lawn. At last, I watched her jump deftly over a 6ft fence with ease when she finally finished her grooming, leaving me with an amusing memory.

A couple of years back I became excited about the social and life improving possibilities that Web 2.0, or the Read-Write web offers people with disabilities. When writing a summary of how this development of the web could be used for e-learning with Miles Berry for schoolforge.org.uk, it became clear that the dynamic nature of technologies such as AJAX and dynamic scripted widgets was creating an accessibility challenge. (the report subsequently appeared in Terry Freedman's 'Coming of Age' book). If basic static web document accessibility was being ignored by the majority of site authors what would happen with the new technical challenges offered by these features.

At that time I was not aware of work on W3C WAI-ARIA standard to allow Assitive Technologies to understand these dynamic ways of manipulating web documents, or the work to include it in Firefox 1.5 (released later that year), so I wrote a concerned article in Ability Magazine (UK), hoping to spread awareness. Things have improved a lot since then with ARIA being supported by many Open Source a11y projects including Firefox, NVDA, ORCA, Dojo and Google reader along with support being added to IE 8 Beta 1, Opera and Jaws amongst others. But there is still a great need to spread the word to educate developers and editors about the tools and techniques that ensure the new dynamic pages and widgets that underlie web application and social software are usable by all.

That's a long and rather self indulgent lead-up to introducing the Accessibility 2.0 conference organised by Ability Net to provide a forum for disseminating information about web 2.0 accessibility. Frank Hecker kindly approved Mozilla Foundation sponsorship and I was glad to attend as a Mozilla representative and also flying the flag for Open Source accessibility in general.

Kath Moonan did a fantastic job of organising the first UK web a11y conference which had about 200 attendees. She was patient with my late request to be allowed to 'sell my wares' and in the end the Firefox 3.0 a11y features flier that Frank and Marco wrote for CSUN and some swag made it into the goody bags. I also blagged a few minutes to describe Mozilla's a11y work with Firefox and Open Source accessibility work in general.

Kath had given me the go-ahead to speak on the understanding that I kept it very brief, but as the day drew to a close I thought I had been forgotten, despite the couple of reminder requests I made.  Then, as the very last part of proceedings (before the 'thank yous' and Kath's amusing 'Oscar' speech), Julie Howell, chair of the panel, gave me my chance. Someone had asked the panel about Open Source screen readers to make affordable the testing of their initial forays into making their site accessible as well as using using Ajax.  The Panel members only mentioned Thunder (which is free rather than Open Source), so I fairly jumped up and down waving my hand, desperate to speak. I finally got a chance to introduce NVDA and Orca and suggested he joined the community for ideas on how to test with a screen reader in addition to getting real user testing that the panel rightly recommended as the best approach. I also explained how ARIA can be explored now for free using these screen readers along with Firefox and how Dojo and Google Reader could be used. Finally I described Mozilla's role as 'defenders of the Open Web' and funders of open a11y. Finally I requested they they joined the community and  plugged accessfirefox.org as a source of information on end user a11y features of Firefox. So all-in-all I feel I got the key messages across if in a bit of a rush and a sweat after several re-writes of what I intended to say.

Afterwards Steve Faulkner introduced himself and we spoke briefly about his work and membership of the W3C PFWG who created ARIA, as well as Charles Chen and David Bolter's ARIA work. I also chatted to a web developer, Robin, who is a Firefox nightly user, along with Ubuntu.

The excellent speakers work in a variety of web accessibility fields and presented a selection of themes in the friendly atmosphere. I was pleased that at least 3 mentioned Firefox and Mozilla technologies including  XUL/XBL as well as ARIA. Orca also got a mention. Jeremy Keith mentioned the 'Burning Fox of Fire' in his keynote while both Steve Faulkner, Christian Heilmann gave Firefox a nod. Steve also mentioned Firebug, the excellent Firefox web debugging add on, with features useful for Ajax. Ian Forrester mentioned both Songbird and Joost and described the Joost stack including Mozilla's XBL and XUL as giving excellent accessibility (these make up XULRunner, the Mozilla platform, on which Songbird and Joost are/where built).

The other Firefox related detail was that Josetta Garcia was running the O'Reilly bookstall and the 'Programming Firefox' book was there at 35% discount. This book is getting a bit long in the tooth now but there only a few such books (I can think of 3). This got me thinking that it would be good to have an book on Open Source accessibility with Firefox and that I might consider writing one. I also like the idea of a collaborative effort, like 'Open Sources'.

Slides, audio and transcripts of the presentations should be available soon so I'll give a brief summary of what each speaker covered. My photos completely fail to impress but thankfully there are others on Flickr, many by Christian (codepo8).

Robin Christopherson: of Ability Net kicked off the proceedings as MC. Robin has been with Ability Net since they formed through the merger of 2 other organisations.

Jeremy Keith: gave a hight level talk on why data should be kept open, starting in the year 1066 and pushing for HTML and other simple, open, accessible formats. He later said to me that he had laid in on really thick, but I think that is needed sometimes. He also spoke of how developers need to use PUT and POST correctly, something I whole heartedly agree with, being fed up with URL GETs resetting my account without so much as a button.

Steve Faulkener: gave the most technical talk and as expected covered many of the Open Source projects and ARIA. He showed his ARIA examples as well as other accessible dynamic 'applications'. He used Twitter's 'number of characters left' countdown as an example of what is bad and what could be done better with ARIA. He had a nice slide saying 'ARIA is easy'.

Christian Heilmann: gave a really entertaining talk calling for good accessibility to be a first class part of design and not left to the 'accessibility pixies' to sort out and then be left when updates occur (a sadly common occurrence). He showed some amusing bad design examples from the physical world and made the first alt text joke I have heard (involving the alt attribute for a photo of couple of attractive blue tits on bird feeder. I'll leave it to you to work out, or wait for the slides).
 
AntoniaHyde: described work with the oft left out people with learning disabilities. She gave a presentation in the style of one by/for those with learning difficulties and showed discussion with users trying to get to grips with confusing and fast changing sites. It was clear that many find the social aspects of these new sites very useful. The simple grid and SVG symbol layout of Jonathan Chetwynd's peepo.com was suggested as something to consider as a simple navigation style (I mention the open community developed symbol project I am working on and hope Antonia will get involved).

Jonathan Hassell: gave a great talk about the BBC's work work on inclusion, personalisation and beyond. He mentioned the new BBC site's dynamic yet accessible look and how close collaboration is required in web developement. His main thread was with User Generated Content and how ensuring it remains accessible is a responsibility split between users and system/admins. He also demonstrated their Sonic Science multimedia science education game for blind youngsters that use sounds and the stereo field to provide feedback in addition to speech.

Stephen Elsden: demonstrated Leonard Cheshire Disability's new social portal for people with disabilities, DIP-online.org. He described many of the decisions they had made, including choosing the Open Source Wordpress as the most suitable CMS platform (apparently they still had to do a lot of a11y work and I couldn't resist asking if that was fed back to the WordPress community). They tweaked the tag clouds and kept the look and operation very simple, almost bare.

Ian Forrester: gave a rapid tour of BBC Backstage (very interesting re purposing of BBC content) and things to watch on the web, both good and bad. Unfortunately he ran out of time but will be invited next year to do justice to his entertaining talk. Mozilla technology got a good mention, especially XUL as an open accessible alternative to Silverlight and AIR.

Julie Howell: gave a short talk before leading the panel discussion. One excellent development is that PAS 78, the high level advice for ensuring sites are made accessible (authored by Julie) will become a full standard. She called us to focus accessibility evangelism efforts on the marketing departments who now hold the power over websites. Julie asked the panel a number of questions before opening it to the floor. One point I found interesting is the overlap between learning difficulties and old age accessibility requirements. Someone also said that if you make a site accessible to PWLD then anyone will find it easy to use. I'm afraid I was a little distracted at this point, wondering if I was, or was not, going to get to say anything about Open Source a11y.

We finished off with thanks to Kath and the event organisers who worked with her, and then headed of to the pub. I was unable to attend the after show drinks as I had to get a train, but will ensure I do next year as there were many discussions I would like to have had.

So, Accessibility 2.0 was a very worthwhile conference, and highly recommended. A great big 'thumbs up' to Ability Net for organising this, especially Kath for all her hard work. We can only hope it becomes annual, or perhaps given the rate of change on the web, semiannual.

Usability expert Jakob Neilson has an written interesting piece on web access for those is their middle years, and also touches on the needs of senior citizens.

Between the ages of 25 and 60, people's ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year — mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties.

He concludes:

I do have two actionable conclusions for you:

• When doing user testing, make sure to include test participants across the entire age range you're targeting.
• Don't believe everything your 25-year old Web designers tell you about "what's easy" — especially if your target audience is 50-year-old corporate managers.

 

David Humphrey pointed out this great blow-by-blow account of developing with Mozilla's XULRunner by Richard Crowley of Flickr. It includes a good rational for using XULRunner.

John Resig provides a nice little introduction to ARIA and what you can do with it right now.

Marco Zehe, Accessibility QA Mozilla, makes a case for accepting AJAX in WEB 2.0 and using WAI ARIA as the mechanism to make it accessible.