Happy holidays everyone, and all the very best for 2007! I have a feeling it’s going to be a good year.
Archive: 2006
Karl and Grant have tagged me for this meme and I haven’t had time to post anything yet this month, so here’s five things that people probably don’t know about me:
- When I was a kid, I wanted to be a postman. However, having taken things apart and not quite put them back together again (Mum’s radio), I ended up an electronic engineer. I have a Masters degree in Electronic Engineering with Music Technology.
- Recently, I’ve been learning British Sign Language.
- I grew up in a guest house in North Devon. It was strange to have so many strangers around all the time, but pretty cool too as I considered many of our regulars to be my extended family.
- Lately, I’ve been enjoying researching my family tree.
- I was a very fussy eater when I was young. I hated peas for years because a psychiatrist told Mum that she should force-feed me peas so that I’d at least try them. I’m a lot easier to feed now I’m older and I now like peas. I was also quite a tubby boy. Recently, since starting on a Slimming World diet at the end of May, I have lost over 3 stone. I feel much better for that!
There ya go! I’m not fussed about tagging others, but if any one of FairyJo, Vigo, Pix, Lorna or Zach want to take part, feel free to leave a comment with a link to yours…
Following the disappointing redesign of the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) website earlier in the year, an online petition has begun to collect signatures on the Prime Minister’s website in an attempt to highlight the issue of accessibility standards for UK Government websites.
A little background
Earlier in the year, the DTI re-launched their website after investing £200,000 to rebuild it, the requirements for which included meeting the Government’s accessibility requirements.
In December 2005, Alun Johnson of the DTI had the following response to a question from Charles Hendry, Conservative MP, regarding the level of accessibility the DTI intended to achieve:
“DTI follows the Guidelines for UK Government Websites which mandate Level A of the W3C‘s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. DTI aims to go beyond this by meeting the AA standard, along with those elements of AAA which are considered best practice.”
However, the new site was launched failing even basic accessibility guidelines, hence failing to meet those standards and the requirements specified in official documentation.
Since the launch, two respected professionals in the Web community, Dan Champion and Bruce Lawson, have contacted the DTI in an attempt to ascertain how a Government body could allow such a failure to occur, and what plans are in place to rectify the situation. You can find out more on Dan’s and Bruce’s websites. Suffice to say that the DTI are lacking in useful responses, but an accessibility audit of the website is being carried out.
So, a Government body who claim to champion equal access to online services – and indeed should be attempting to do so – have instead seemingly wasted a large amount of resources and public funds on producing something that is far from adequate in the eyes of the Web design industry. And it’s only going to cost more to rectify the situation.
We the undersigned…
An important question now is one of how to ensure that the mistakes of the DTI are not repeated in other government organisations.
If you are a British citizen (or an expatriate) and think that websites launched by the UK Government should be accessible to disabled people, you can show your support by signing the online petition on the Prime Minister’s website, which has attracted over 100 signatures in its first week.
If you are a Digg.com user, you can digg the petition and help by increasing its circulation.
Updates
21 Mar 2007
The Government has dodged the point in its response to this e-petition. It’s a shame, but probably to be expected judging by the responses from the DTI concerning their website. Read more in Government responds to website accessibility e-petition.
Due to an increasing amount of spam comments on my site, I am trying out my own version of a plugin (mrw_spamkeywords_urlcount) that should fish out a large majority of the offending posts.
The plugin uses some new features in the latest textpattern (version 4.0.4) that allows for comments to be processed by plugins before being saved. As a result, my live comments preview has been disabled for now – the plugin that runs the previews (nhn_livecommentpreview) is not yet fully compatible with the new handling of comments submission.
This also means that comments have gone back to the defauilt textpattern process of having to preview your comment before finally submitting it to the site. This is a bit ugly and I don’t like making people have to step through a preview of their comment first, but until I tidy things up, it will hopefully help to curb the spam a little further!
Questions concerning current support for aural CSS have come up on Accessify Forum and a couple of other places recently, so I decided to collect my knowledge of aural CSS into a single resource to share with all you lovely people.
After some discussion on the GAWDS mailing list at the end of September, I ran some tests to see whether or not there was scope for using aural CSS to control how a screen reader says different types of abbreviation. In turn, this involved determining the level of support for aural CSS properties in current software. The tests failed in JAWS and a bit of research that followed uncovered various suggestions that there is very little support out there.
So, expanding on and supplementing my notes from those tests, I have written up a page covering my knowledge of aural CSS for anyone that is interested. Perhaps having this information in one place will be useful to people:
Aural CSS: Support for CSS 2 Aural Style Sheets / CSS 3 Speech Module
If you find any of the information to be incomplete or inaccurate, please let me know so that I can update the page.
On the Web, we deal with spam every day. Just having an e-mail address, you can hardly miss getting your daily dose of spam! I want to shift focus in this post and look at the junk mail that comes through our front doors.
A helpful postie
Back in August, an enterprising postman made the news when he issued leaflets on his round that advised people on reducing their junk mail. He lost his round for it.
I find it interesting that I’ve never heard of the Royal Mail’s opt-out policy. Now I know what to look for, I’ve found a page on the Royal Mail website about it: Controlling your mail.
Waste
Take a moment to think about how much unwanted post you get through your front door when your postie makes his drop. Think about where that post ends up. Think about the resources, time and money that is wasted in getting that unwanted post to you. Think about the impact that must have on the environment.
The potential waste is not limited to your home either. How much waste is there at work? What about previous addresses you have lived at?
Trail of waste
As a student, I lived in six different houses in six years. Students get quite a bit of junk mail, particularly from credit card companies (I’m looking at you MBNA and Capital One), so I wouldn’t be surprised if those houses still get junk mail addressed to me. We certainly stacked up quite a lot of post for previous tenants at our houses and much of it was junk.
If we couldn’t forward something on, we’d either recycle what we could or return to sender. Recycling things doesn’t solve the problem though, and the public only end up paying for recycling a growing amount of junk, so we’d try to stop the mail at source. Several times we even ended up calling or e-mailing companies as far away as Australia to stop them sending things.
Even more waste?!
Unfortunately, it looks like it’s only going to get worse. A couple of weeks ago, news came that Royal Mail intend to scrap their limit on junk mail of three items of unsolicited mail per household per week. More junk mail through our doors. More junk mail ending up in landfills. More of our planet’s natural resources going into things we don’t even want. And what’s it usually all in aid of? Businesses making money.
The call to action
Save yourself from the junk sent to your home. It only takes a few minutes to start reducing your junk mail and the environmental footprint it leaves behind. It probably takes you just as long to sort through your junk mail!
Write to Royal Mail and tell them you don’t want them to deliver unaddressed mail. This doesn’t include mail addressed to a generic recipient, such as “The Occupier”. If you own a business, you could do this for your business as well.
You can either write to the Royal Mail’s Freepost address for out-outs or e-mail them (see Controlling your mail for all contact details). If you use the e-mail address, Royal Mail will send you a form to sign and return. I wouldn’t bother with calling the phone number: reports are that it is permanently engaged.
If you also want to reduce the addressed mail you get from direct marketing campaigns, you can do so for free by registering with the Mailing Preference Service. Again, this won’t stop mail addressed to a generic recipient, such as “The Occupier” and mail from local business. There’s more infomation on the BBC website: How to junk junk mail.
And if you receive something through the post from a previous owner or tenant, try to stop it at the source. It will save you the headache and is better for the environment and the public wallet.
Energy Saving Week
This post coincides quite nicely with Energy Saving Week, which you might think I did deliberately, but is actually totally unintentional!
Even if you don’t do something to reduce your junk mail, I encourage people to get involved with Energy Saving Week. Each weekday focusses on a different measure you can take to reduce the energy you use. The Energy Saving Trust website also gives a useful top ten tips for saving energy, which could save you some cash. You can even do more and make a commitment to saving 20% of the energy you use everyday.
More information on junk mail
People may find these links helpful:
- Postwatch.co.uk: I keep receiving ‘junk mail’ through my letterbox. How can I stop it?
- Postwatch.co.uk: I keep receiving mail for the previous owners. How can I stop it?
- Junk-Mail.org.uk
- BBC News: Junk mail limit warning is made
- Maggie on junk mail – I can identify with this woman who had junk mail sent to her husband, who had passed away 18 months previously. Mum’s been gone over ten years and we’ve recently had things sent for her. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
A couple of weeks back, I discovered the Session Saver extension and I just can’t believe that I had never installed this wonderful Firefox extension! Get it! If you don’t already use it, just forget the rest of this post and install it… now! Update: Or install Firefox 2.0 and set up the Session Restore feature!
Session Saver has got to be one of the most indepensible extensions out there. And this one’s not just for all the Web developers out there either. I reckon this even beats the Web Developer toolbar in terms of usefulness.
Gradually going ga-ga
I’ll often have several windows open and several tabs open in each of those windows. Maybe I’m researching something or I’ve ended up multitasking again!
Then, I find myself in one of the following situations:
- I’ve hit utter knackeredness and need to get some sleep. I’d usually hibernate Windows, but this sometimes leaves your programs running sluggishly when you resume Windows. As long as I don’t have any half written posts or other programs open, I’d bookmark all my open tabs and come back to them. Now, the problem is that I have a silly number of bookmark folders!
- I go off on a little tangent and try out a demo for SVG or something. The demo crashes Firefox and I lose all the pages I have open.
- My computer crashes, or Windows just decides that there’s some driver problem and restarts without any warning. Again, I lose the pages I have open.
- I somehow manage to click “Close tabs” when I accidentally click the close button on the browser window.
All of the above situations usually end up with me trawling through my browsing history to find the useful pages I had left open to either read or bookmark.
Well, no longer. Session Saver will save pretty much everything, the entire state Firefox is in, including half-written posts.
A word of warning though: don’t panic! If you somehow manage to lose your previously saved state or accidentally close a single tab (I’ve done both so far), Session Saver backs up your previous state and the last ten tabs you have had open. Don’t do what I did: close Firefox one window at a time, worry that the two windows you wanted didn’t get saved, open Firefox, swear a lot, close Firefox only to ponder about whether or not Session Saver backs up your previous sessions, open Firefox to find it was too late and your last session had been backed up over the session you wanted.
A huge thanks to Jeroen for linking to the extension in the post I was reading about Multiple Firefox Versions.
How about you?
There are other extensions I use, but I’m not going to list them all here. I’ve seen several lists of essential Firefox extensions around, so I don’t see the point in adding mine. What’s the most indispensable extension you use?
This is just a quick post to say that I have updated the lab with some of my latest screen readers tests, including a series of tests investigating how screen readers pronounce certain words and phrases in different contexts.
I’ll be updating those tests with more results as I get them, and I may be persuaded to re-post here with any findings too!
Some of my feeds are busted at the moment… something to do with the feed URLs not using the same year/month/day/title format as the rest of the site. I’ve now fixed the feeds (see below).
Thanks to Pat for the heads up.
Updates
14.09.2006 @ 16:15
All seems to be working again now. For some reason, textpattern 4.0.3 doesn’t report the correct “Permanent link mode” when building feeds for sections, while the main feed will work fine. I’ll try to delve into it more when I have some time.
Please post a comment if you are still having problems.
14.09.2006 @ 16:33
Note: The problem described here appears to be fixed in Textpattern 4.0.4.
If anyone having the same problem stumbles across this post, I worked around the problem by editing “/textpattern/publish/rss.php” and replacing the line that builds the permanent link URL:
$permlink = permlinkurl($a);
…with this:
list($dtj_y,$dtj_m,$dtj_d) = explode(”-”,date(“Y-m-d”,$a[‘posted’]));
$permlink = hu.”$dtj_y/$dtj_m/$dtj_d/$uTitle”;
…to make sure that the date format is used for the permanent link URL when building all feeds.
I recently ran into a couple of problems with the wonderful Sage extension for Firefox where it wouldn’t parse some of my feeds. I figured the feed URLs must have been updated, so I went to the sites and grabbed fresh RSS URLs. Some of the feed URLs had indeed been updated, but some of them still wouldn’t work in Sage.
As it turns out, there were two problems occurring:
- The URLs had the “feed” protocol tacked on the front.
- One feed was actually invalid. Despite it validating with feedvalidator.org and the W3C feed validator, the Firefox XML parser failed on it, as did Sage.
The Feed Protocol
Once I had actually figured out what was going wrong here, it was simple enough to fix! Simply remove the feed protocol from the start of the URL to stop Sage choking on it.
Marvellous! But it did leave me wondering what use the feed protocol is to us, and whether feed aggregators should be expected to deal with the protocol just in case somebody uses it. I submitted a Sage bug report about the feed protocol all the same, so I’m hoping Sage will get updated with a fix soon enough.
Some time ago, I began to encounter more and more feed URLs using the protocol (probably as a result of WordPress including it by default at the start of its feed URLs), so I read up on it a little. Without wanting to come into what is an old issue, I do wonder whether it is at all useful any longer, especially when so many of our beloved browsers can now handle feed subscription. We could send commands to applications aware of the feed protocol as we can do with mailto, but what useful commands would we send? Perhaps I’m stuck thinking about how these might be useful to aggregators and not a wider application, but surely aggregators just need to know the location of a feed? With that in mind, it just seems redundant information to me, although it could be useful in identifying a feed without needing to use MIME types.
Named HTML Entities in RSS
The second problem wasn’t so obvious. This time, Firefox was choking on the feed because it found an undefined entity in the RSS – … – a horizontal ellipsis. I wasn’t sure why that’d break the RSS, so I did a little digging.
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