Gez Lemon has put together an excellent introduction to W3Cs WAI ARIA standard; what it does and how to use it,

Aaron's report shows that accessibility is on the main agenda.

Another good article from OSS Watch.

This post on the Top 10 Web Accessibility tips based on WCAG may be mostly familiar and even a little dated as we're experiencing a sea change from techinal issues to usability issues (and I'm not so sure about<NOSCRIPT> either) but the point that stood out as I scanned it wa:

Tesco Access - Case Study: Tesco was the UK’s first grocery chain to invest in an accessible online shopping site called Tesco Access. It cost £35,000 to develop. It was calculated that if all 1.9 million visually impaired adults in the UK (estimate at the time of launch) purchased just one average trolley-full of shopping through the new site it would be the equivalent of £161 million of business.

Epic Thinking

Marco has announced the Firefox 3 with screen Readers FAQ is now live

I like the new mozilla.com look as described by John Slater, creative director. I find it friendly and human yet not overly cute and definitely not the usual corporate blandness so often seen. It has a creative, hand crafted feel, almost as if it could have been drawn by anyone in the community.

Several years ago a HP (I think) TV ad really struck me. The intention was obviously to show how smooth modern and efficient life would be using HP kit but I got quite a different impression. They juxtaposed simple  plain, even bland, computer graphics of a peaceful office life with a Jan Svankmajer-ish chaotic stop-motion animation of moving pens, paper clips and other office equipment. The trouble was I found the first totally boring while second really grabbed my attention and engaged me greatly. This influenced me enough to start to wonder about the influence of IT in society and my involvement in it. Not for too long I hasten to mention, though I do still wonder about the relative interest of computer graphics compared to grungy old reality.

Anyway, back to Mozilla.com. It's really good to see that the design brief for targeted images included one for accessibility or universal access. I like it but I'm not sure how well it encapsulates the concept.

Matthew Gertner rekindles the discussion on the Mozilla Platform

When it comes to building Mozilla on Windows I seem to have a knack for running into problems. This is not a reflection on the quality of the tools; Ben's new Mozilla build system makes it really straightforward to setup up, even with the maze of Microsoft development tool options and permutations. The use of Mercurial rather than CVS is a good move and the large complex config + recursive make build system works well (given the limitations of recursive make).

No the problem is somehow I seem to hit issues that others haven't and that take a while to solve.

For example the first time I tried building for Jambu it would get halfway and reboot the PC at varying places. After a long battle that turned out to be a resource leak in ZoneAlarm (presumable only noticed as building opens so many files). So I don't use ZoneAlarm anymore.

More recently I tried to do a quick build of the Windows accessibility components to generate some IDL for someone and my previous VC 7.1 setup failed after updating the code and build system. So I tried VC 8 free as Marco said it worked just fine for him, and I hit missing files at the config stage. This turned out to be my registry settings had been set to a case not covered by the build system scripts (see bug #446191).

Next I created a simple XPCOM component in C++ (based on work by James Boston at Seneca) that lets you run,stop and monitor a win32 process (the existing IProcess is only partially implemented, and kill doesn't work on Windows). I had little trouble working out how to build this from other examples in the tree and it built fine. However I kept getting Firefox crashes and much head scratching and tightening up of the code showed this to be when the Win32 API functions got called in the component. Eventually after even more time I happened to try on another PC and it worked perfectly. It appears to be an issue specific to running Firefox on Windows XP in VirtualBox on Ubuntu. That's really annoying as that's my preferred development setup. Oh well back to the old laptop.

As a final check, and in case there is a bug just not being exercised on other PCs, I decide to build with MSVC7.1 to eliminate it being s a problem with differing C runtimes (I'm running against the FF 2.0 release. Rather than risk breaking the build system on my laptop I went for setting up again on an ancient and slow PC and would you believe that has problems with the build scripts as well (not pulling in all the SDK INCLUDES it needs, seems you need at least 3 SDKs). See bug # 450241.

But this is *not* a whinge as these problems are an opportunity to delve in deep and get a good understanding of how things work. For example I finally got my head around the windows command processor's (cmd) early/delayed expansion which has been bugging me for ages (here's a good explanation).

It's just that at the moment I'm working on a project with incredibly short timescales.

So no more blogging.....

Having browsed through the videos from the Project Possibility Semester Project awards ceremony I'm very impressed by the energy and quality of the effort that the students have put into creating Open Source assistive technology software projects.

The winner (and there had to be one though the vote went to the audience) was the word prediction team who created an On Screen Keyboard that predicts words as text is typed. It uses a data set created from wikipedia and can be seen in action 1/3 of the way through the presentation video as David Richardson demonstrates. Not only does this project provide a useful input device but the techniques used could be leveraged with various alternative input devices to speed up text entry. It could even be added to disambiguation keyboards.

The complete results in order are; Word prediction, SUN FLARE gesture recognition input device, community captioning, mobile currency recogniser (US dollar bills are indistinguishable without vision) and the Assistive Technology search teams.

You can find out more about these and other projects on the Project Possibility web site .

What fantastic work. The projects have developed impressively since I saw the initial design presentations last year. We can expect more exciting projects for Project Possibility in the coming years as more students get involved and take their positive experience of developing accessibility projects along with them. 

Having see all sorts of mime types used for the script tag with javascript I wondered which was approved by the standards. For example I've seen many of these listed in the RFC:

      +-----------------------------------------------------+
      | text/javascript          | text/ecmascript          |
      | text/javascript1.0       | text/javascript1.1       |
      | text/javascript1.2       | text/javascript1.3       |
      | text/javascript1.4       | text/javascript1.5       |
      | text/jscript             | text/livescript          |
      | text/x-javascript        | text/x-ecmascript        |
      | application/x-javascript | application/x-ecmascript |
      | application/javascript   | application/ecmascript   |
      +-----------------------------------------------------+

 So todays total geek factoid is that RFC 4329 says

Use of the "text" top-level type for this kind of content is known to
be problematic. This document thus defines text/javascript and text/
ecmascript but marks them as "obsolete". Use of experimental and
unregistered media types, as listed in part above, is discouraged.
The media types,

* application/javascript
* application/ecmascript

which are also defined in this document, are intended for common use and should be used instead.

So now you know.

Oh if your wonder what the difference between them is it's that ecmascript has stricter handling of the version specification (see the RFC for details). And the 'problems' with the text top level is in assumes a particular character coding.

As explained by Frank Hecker the outgoing Executive Director.

Thanks to Frank for all his hard work and especially for keeping accessibility firmly on the agenda with many projects funded through the grant scheme.

In a fantastic post discussing options and problems with making Firefox Accessible on the Apple OS X platform Aaron Leventhal also give's some real insights into the crucial role Mozilla have had in improving Windows and Linux accessiblity as well as keeping the web open.

I recently spent some time fixing a problem where any attempt to use an UNC name in explorer to access a share from Vista was failing with Logon failure: account currently disabled. The reason this really annoyed me was the share was on my READY-NAS, was open to guest (no login) and both XP Samba on Ubuntu had no problem accessing it on the workgroup. I even tried enabling the vista guest account to no avail.

After a lot of googling I enventually tried Net Use in case a mapped drive would work (and I could use DOS/Windows file path even though the days of patchy UNC path support are long gone.This gave me error 1331 which turns out to be 'a cache credentials issue. what ever that might be. The fix is to use

  net use x: \\computer\share /user:guest

and you can magically access all shares on the device without any more problems.

This is a nasty hack as it ties up a drive but that's not a big issue. A bigger problem is you can't make it persistent as it fails to login again without any user error or prompt. Thus you have to do this each time you want to access the drive after a restart. I guess it's a bug in Vista but perhaps there is a better solution. I don't have time to find it. Does anyone know?

Vaguely related rambling

Recalling that UNC names are supported in nearly all applications these days prompted the memory that at least since DOS 3.1, system calls support / as well as \ as the path separator. In fact there was even an interrupt (API) to change the command line switch character from / to - which removes the obvious clash. In fact I've been using this as a somewhat lazy hack to specify local paths on Windows in some Mozilla XUL to avoid using the platform independent path APIs. The pretend portability of using POSIX style paths obviously falls down if you need to specify a Drive in WIndows' multi-rooted file system.

Great for exploring compressed javascript.

And JSLint rocks for your own code.

Marco has announced an exciting position at Mozilla for an accessibility developer. A key part of the skills being sought for are Mac experience and this follows Aaron's recent post about how to improve Firefox accessibility on Apple's platform.

It's a wonderful opportunity to join a friendly dynamic team who are working at the heart of making the web accessible to all.

If only I'd done more dev with Macs than play with Smalltalk on a Mac classic many years ago.

As I have previously mentioned Project Possibility (P:P) are being very effective in getting computer science students excited about accessibility and hooking up with leaders in industry to create new assitive technology projects. So I'm very pleased to be able to announce 2 exciting pieces of news.

1. The IRS has recognised P:P as a 501(c)3 Tax Exempt Non-Profit organization. As Elias says:

   Obtaining a 501(c)3 is a very big step which opens many doors for Project:Possibility. We can now accept tax free grants and donations from individuals and organizations. In addition, any grants made to us provide a tax break for the donors.

2. In response to Chris Leung's nomination and the subsequent P:P Board vote I have been welcomed on-board. This is a honour and exciting as it allows me to personally develop my ideas as well as be part of a team who are also passionate about Open Source accessibility and connecting users and developers. This will be an important step in realising the vision that I share with Simon Judge and the OATSoft.org community. P:P are getting attention in the a11y and educational communities and with their vigor and enthusiasm. Although rooted in USC in LA, we're have a growing international flavour, with Chris in Shanghai and myself in the UK. It's particularly satisfying that joining P:P brings together the main strands of my activity; a11y, software, open source and education.