Of course there’s always those who think that as long as a page validates and images have an ‘alt’ attribute that their page/site is accessible. I guess in those cases what’s needed is more education and continuing development and learning. No-one knows it all when it comes to accessibility, even the accessibility gurus don’t know it all (and they tend to freely admit that – probably with the exception of useability expert Jakob Nielsen, whose views on useability tend to be rather inflexible), and there’s always more to learn, new techniques, technologies, and opinions on what’s best practice when it comes to accessibility.

The article debunks the usual whining reasons from lazy and/or misinformed developers who don’t get why accessibility is important (you know the kind of thing – accessible design is boring, it’s too expensive, they don’t have disabled visitors anyway, etc. etc.), but most importantly the article gets across that what’s needed is a wholesale shift in the mindset that accessibility’s an optional extra (which of course it isn’t – especially if you’re a business covered by disability legislation).

Probably the most important thing though that the article says, apart from the premise of the entire article of inclusion, is that what we need to get away from (which is what the principle of inclusiveness promotes) is that there is a “them” and “us”. It’s something I’ve long argued is a problem in many areas; that for some reason humans seem intent on separating people into groups and labelling those who don’t share the same characteristics as the majority as “them”. It’s a concept I just don’t get, but that’s another discussion.

Probably my second favourite paragraph in the article is this one:

Once we embrace inclusiveness, it becomes difficult to marginalize others as members of one specific group, such as “users with disabilities.” If we discard “us” and “them” thinking, we stop looking for reasons to avoid accessibility, and we begin to see others’ needs as our own. With inclusion, we don’t dismiss web accessibility requirements, we see them as a chance to create empowerment by embracing our similarities and differences.

As the article says, if you stop looking at groups of people as “other” and concentrate on the similaries we all share, you realise that many of the needs of making a website useable and accessible are common to us all. My favourite line in the article though is this one:

What does your website sound like? Turn off your style sheet and look at what you’ve got. Suddenly the person listening to a website with a screen reader is no longer different from you—your needs are the same.

Good advice, and something we should all probably do with our sites, even if we think we know how to make a site accessible and what accessibility means, because chances are there’ll be quite a few things we’ve missed or simply not considered.

An interesting read.

This gives you a nice texture which takes the ‘glare’ off a stark white page (works best with “natural” type themes) which is very quick and easy to do.

How?

• Open your favourite graphics programme (I used PhotoPlus X3 for this, but any graphics app should do it).
• Create a new image of a fairly large size (I used 100px x 65px)
• Flood fill the background with white
• Look on the menu of your graphics programme for the “noise” option (in PhotoPlus X3 which is my current new toy I’m playing with it’s under “Effects”, but it may be elsewhere in other apps).
• Under “Noise” you should find an “add noise” option, which is what you use to create the background image.
• Once you’ve added noise, simply save as a jpg (which gives a file size of just over 1kb, which isn’t bad for a background image). Using a jpeg format as well, you can slightly tweak the effect by playing around with the quality slider for the jpeg when you come to save it. Altering the quality of the final file you can get some interesting effects from the same ‘noise’ pattern at different quality levels
• Use tiled/repeated as the background for your page!

The settings I used for the “add noise” step were…

In PhotoPlus X3…”Coverage” at 10% with a “uniform” distribution.

To get a similar effect in Paint.NET (which is the other graphics app I use regularly) I used:

• Intensity: 40,
• Colour saturation: 0
• Coverage: 70.

Basically have a play around and have a look what it looks like tiled and play about with the settings until you’re happy with the effect.

This is my resulting background image…

Background image produced with Paint.NET

…and:

Background image produced with PhotoPlus X3

Last week I had a problem with my laptop which I suspected may be malware connected (my firewall, ZoneAlarm, kept asking me to grant server permissions (permission to listen for requests from other computers on the internet) to all sorts of programs which hadn’t ever before needed server permissions), and after following loads of leads/dead-ends after googling, found myself on some malware clearing advice forum where they were recommending a program called Malwarebytes. I downloaded and installed it, and sure enough I found I’d got three trojans, which neither Windows Defender or my anti-virus software, NOD32, had found. Spybot Search & Destroy and Spyware Blaster, hadn’t made it onto my new laptop yet as I had problems with it using a hell of a lot of memory on my old laptop and was in two minds whether to install it again. Jaybee, fellow webdev though was helping out a client in a similar situation last week, and said neither Spybot S&D or Spyware Blaster had managed to remove the problem, though they’d found it. I’m still not sure whether Spybot S&D’s gonna make it back onto mine.

I’ve also discovered Comodo’s free firewall as well, which is much more paranoid while training it than my old ZoneAlarm one ever was (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), and warns you about apps trying to create new directories, dlls trying to do stuff and such like, and actually gives you useful information about what they do rather than just a rather useless “Do you want to allow this?” message. Much more configurable.

What’s so great about the Comodo firewall? Well it’s made by Comodo, the people who are a certification authority for secure sites – the ones with a little padlock in the address bar of your browser when you’re shopping and banking online that shows the link to the website is secure and that the website is what it says it is, and not a scammer masquerading as your bank trying to get it’s hands on all your money. It’s free because it’s in Comodo’s best interests that people feel secure when they’re online, so the more people feel comfortable being online and shopping online, the more businesses that will be created that will their services. It’s not just a cut-down version of a commercial package though; it’s got features in it that some of the paid-for firewall software doesn’t have. It’s a free lifetime license, and updates, that are essential to keep it up to date with the latest threats out there on the internet, are free too, and automatically downloaded daily so you don’t have to worry about it. It also scans your computer for any nasties during the installation process, so not only does it watch out for stuff trying to download itself onto your computer and wreak havoc, but checks to see if there’s anything nasty lurking there so you can be sure you’re clean before it starts doing it’s stuff.

Over the years I’ve used various different security software, and various firewalls, and the last two I used got ditched because they used far too much of my computer’s memory and processor capacity and slowed things down, but Comodo is perfectly well behaved, and using very little of my computer’s resources, which keeps my computer happy, which also keeps me happy.

While I was at it, I also installed WinPatrol, that allows you to look at what processes are running on your computer and what they’re up to in much more detail than the Windows Task Manager program does. The really handy thing about it though I’ve discovered is that it’s got a nifty “delayed start” feature, where as it’s name suggests you change delay the start-up of apps when Windows starts. On my old laptop I had a load of stuff that all started up when Windows started, and it really slowed the start-up up. With WinPatrol though, not only can you easily take stuff out of the startup folder and stop other apps that aren’t in the startup folder all jostling to be opened up first, without using “msconfig”, but you can delay them starting to speed up your startup time.

I have some programs that run in the background, for example the backup program for my forums that downloads a copy of their databases to my hard drive at scheduled times, but I don’t necessarily need it the moment that Windows starts, so I can delay it until it’s actually needed. Similarly with programs such as Skype, where I’m not gonna be phoning someone up the minute I log on, now it starts up five minutes after Windows has started, so my laptop’s starting up much quicker than it was last week.

All in all they’re all playing nice together, and I have to say that so far I’m especially impressed with the Comodo firewall. A very nice piece of kit.

A clean and speedy computer! Now that’s what I like!

It’s been a busy month (hence the lack of me or Bliss around here recently) and I’ve been off on my travels to Brokie meet-ups in London and Brussels, amongst other things.

I’ve had major disasters with hard drives, slight panics over backups when my brain ended up nearly as fried as my hard drive, and the usual crop of medical dramas and unexpected hassles to deal with, and what I could do with right now is a very long holiday.

I’m pleased to report though that I’m now back up and running with a shiny new laptop, albeit with a somewhat temperamental internet connection, and the jury’s still out on Vista. All I can say is that Microshite as usual couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery! For a week now I’ve been trying to sign in to post my tale of woe of my internet connectivity issues on the Vista community forums, but will their damned website accept my email address and password? No! Correct email address; correct password. Microshite thinks they’re wrong though. In desperation I tried re-setting my password. They sent me the email link to reset the password to the correct email address, which kind of proves two things 1) the email address I’d been entering was right all along, and 2) I am capable of typing my own email address.

Next comes re-setting the password. Enter your new password…. *Enters new password* Apparently I can’t have that one because it’s the same as the one I had before…this is the same password I’ve been typing to use all week…

‘Problems logging in?’ asks a helpful looking link, so I click that. Now in Opera (which I’m currently using to browse with as Firefox has recently thrown a major wobbler) the window that should open won’t open. So I switch to the dreaded Incompetent Explorer (you’d have though by version 7 they really would have got it right by now, and then we hear there’s an IE8 beta out – joy!), and guess what? This time the window opens, a “windows help” popup, but scrolling down the list of helpful possibilities for not been able to log in (like you’ve typed your email address wrong, or your password (I think we’ve covered that bit), then I come to one that looks like it might be useful and click on it. I can see from the message in the status bar that it’s a javascript pop-up, but does anything pop up? No! So I click the next one, and the next one (wait for it, you’ll like this one) won’t open because it’s been blocked becuase it’s not been signed by a valid security certificate. It helpfully suggests I should check out IE’s help facility (um, is this the one that I’ve already got open, but it won’t display because they’re blocking their own content because they’re not sure they trust it, and there’s no ‘back’ or ‘forward’ buttons on the help popup, so short of closing it and hitting F1 again I can’t do that?). And 90% of the world’s computer owning population trusts these muppets to produce something that makes their computers work?

*sigh*

Anyhow, as I said, August’s been a busy month so expect lots of updates soon…that’s providing my internet connection holds out, and the Microshite software that runs my computer decides to actually play nice…

On Swatch’sofficial website, right up at the top, next to the breadcrumb navigation, is a little line that reads “@[insert relevant number here] .beats” WTF?! you’re probably thinking. What’s a .beat? Well…

Swatch has reinvented time with INTERNET TIME. Today’s lifestyle which demands simultaneous communication with different parts of the world via phones, Internet, e-mail, video-conferencing, and a host of other tools requires a truly revolutionary way of looking at and managing time. Hence, a completely new global concept of time that eliminates time zones and geographical differences was created.

That’s so true. A while back the inhabitants of one of my forums decided to try and break the record for the number of forum members simultaneously online, and so an arrangement was made that at 9pm on Friday everyone would make sure they were online. Naturally this was met with a chorus of “Hold on…”s from the US contingent, and “Uh?” from the Australian brigade, followed by much scurrying about to try and work out what time that was in their local time. Here’s something that sounds like it could do with being arranged in “internet time”, but what is “internet time”?

INTERNET TIME, an innovative, new unit of time, measured in units called “.beats” was founded on the 23rd of October 1998. On that day, Biel Mean Time (BMT) was inaugurated in a ceremony marked by the presence of N.G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd. and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the Media Lab at M.I.T.

Hmmmm….still a bit light on details isn’t it? Apart from Biel now appears to be the centre of the universe. So off to Wikipedia we go in search of further information on this strange new thing (except that it’s not that new) called “internet time”. Wikipedia is a little more
forthcoming on the details of what this “internet time” malarkey is all about. Apparently,

• instead of hours and minutes, the day is divided up into 1000 parts called “beats”
• each beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds
• there are no time zones; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on the company’s headquarters in Biel, Switzerland (equivalent to Central European Time)
• in it’s notation; for example, “@248″ indicates a time 248 beats after midnight, equivalent to a fractional day of 0.248 CET, or 4:57:07.2 UTC
• Swatch doesn’t specify units smaller than one beat, but others have extended the standard by adding “centibeats” or “sub-beats” as a decimal fraction, for extended precision: @248.00
• like UTC, Internet time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 .beats, or @875, in New York, it is also @875 in Tokyo

I have to admit that I like the idea of .beats. There’s something somehow kind of appealing about the idea of using something “underground” that the world outside the geeky confines of the internet doesn’t understand – hell, .beats even sounds kinda cool and geeky, and having one universal time rather than saying, “Well we’ll meet at 6pm…that’s 4pm in your time, and 2am in your time over there…” sound much better. “Meetcha @650 .beats” sounds infinitely more geeky and cool in comparison.

Now a debate on the T175 course forum a while back was on what was the most important ICT invention – ever? My contribution to the discussion? Well I was torn between the humble microchip and the internet. Now of course the basis of the internet and the HTTP protocol was already in place when the web went and got itself invented – wouldn’t have really worked without it, and fabulous though the HTTP protocol is, if you’re of a geeky bent, without the invention of the web to sit on top of it, and the hyperlink and other hypermedia, it would all be a bit dull. I’m guessing that when people said the greatest ICT invention was the internet, they probably meant the web, and of course in everyday usage the two terms tend to be used interchangeably.

The web has undoubtedly changed the way we communicate, turning the world into a global village, and changed how we interact with so many things from banking and shopping online, to finding information, finding friends, and of course boring the whole world to death with our mundane ramblings on many millions of blogs Of course with good, always comes evil, and into that category falls MySpace, link farms, and Bebo (just three random picks from my list of web annoyances). Of course I was arguing the case for the humble microchip on the grounds that without the microchip and reasonably priced and sized computing power, computers would still be the size of small houses and the play things of scientists and academics.

Now apart from MySpace, there are obviously other disadvantages, or things that aren’t so good about the web. There’s online fraud for a start (I too have started getting inundated with emails from banks I don’t even have accounts with warning me my account’s been locked until I click on this special link and hand over all my personal details and passwords to some Lithuanian con artist). Communicating with anyone, anywhere in the world is probably one of the greatest parts of the web, though putting yourself in ‘Skype Me’ mode is just asking for trouble, and you might as well change all your online avatars to a sign reading “Skype Me – I like talking to perverts from Brazil” or some such like!

Now this is just a wild shot in he dark here, but I guessing that with the invention of “internet time”, Swatch’s marketing people imagined all of those people making arrangements to chat with their new Brazilian friend who’s just taken up their invitation to “Skype them” would be falling over themselves to adopt this new “internet time”, and would of course need a watch capable of displaying said “internet time”, rush out and buy this terrific new invention, and in the process make another few squillion francs for those clever little Swiss. The fact is though that “internet time” never really took off in a big way, and have never really been adopted by geeks en masse.

Why? The answer though I suspect is far simpler than no-one being interested in an “internet time”, but as we discovered from the chorus of “Hold on…”s and “Uh?”s when a few of us tried to arrange a global meeting. The fact is that simply whether you call them .beats, .dots, .nets, or anything else with a ‘.’ in front of it, though you can arrange a meet-up with your new Brazilian friend @640 .beat, though it may be @640 .beat for everyone with a clever little Swiss watch, somewhere in the world @640 .beat is still going to be stupid o’clock. That’s the fundamental flaw of web communication.

Now if those clever little Swiss marketeers could come up with a time machine, then I suspect they’d be really onto something.

For those requiring a text version of the image, the breakdown reads thus:

2% – Time spent actually designing anything
35% – Time spent trying to get the layout to work using only CSS before giving up and using tables
8% – Swearing
2% – Time Spent making the site W3C compliant
43% – Time spent trying to get the bastard to work in Internet (expletive deleted) Explorer
5% – Time spent wishing a slow and painful death on Bill Gates plus more swearing
5% – Time spent looking for that one extra space in the Javascript that Firefox is throwing a wobbler over
JBVoices

My own breakdown would differ somewhat I have to say, partly on the grounds that I hate JavaScript with a vengeance, and I’m crap at writing it (as I’m sure my OU tutors would agree), and do not have the time or resources to check it’s accessible in all situations/combinations of browsers/assistive technologies, so it’s easier to avoid it and achieve the same effect using other methods (e.g. CSS). For me therefore I’d replace the JavaScript with PHP.

As Gill also said in her entry, being the stubborn cow that I am, I refuse to resort to tables, and will chip away with CSS until it damned-well works, and I have to say I must be doing something right, as under the skilled tutorage of Gill, Carol and Helena when I jumped in feet-first and launched myself from M$ Frontpage into “doing things properly”, I developed a fairly good grasp of CSS, and recently something’s obviously “clicked”, because I’ve been finding CSS layouts a lot less time consuming to initially put together (though that’s not to say that I don’t spend ages tweaking things here and there to accommodate horrible browsers and generally knock things into shape.

There are also a couple of differences in my method of working, and the stuff I end up lumbered doing, so without further ado (I obviously had far too much time on my hands that day!), here’s my very own version of “Time management and modern web design”…

And, again, the text version…

• 2% – Time spent actually designing anything
• 18% – time spent trying to get the layout to work
• 8% – swearing
• 12% – time spent making the site W3C/WAI compliant and checking accessibility
• 14% – time spent trying to get the bastard to work in Internet (expletive deleted) Explorer
• 6% – time spent wishing a slow and painful death on Bill Gates plus more swearing
• 5% – time spent looking for the semi-colon in the PHP the server’s throwing a wobbler over
• 6% – time spent staring blankly at the screen, waiting for inspiration to strike/wandering the web in search of inspiration
• 5% – deciding which colour scheming tool to use/deciding a colour scheme
• 1% – changing all the CSS for the new colour scheme I’ve just changed my mind over
• 5% – Searching for accessible/compliant [insert name of widget/feature here] script/searching for prior bookmarked script
• 4% – Trying to make sense of the client’s latest vague design request
• 5% – Searching for stock images to replace rubbish ones provided by client/to meet request, “Oh just put whatever you think there!”
• 4% – Time spent correcting appalling images supplied by client
• 2% – Time spent on phone beating client into submission over appalling design request
• 1% – Time spent deciding on suitable music for coding to (essential to the design process)
• 1% – Time spent wishing real life was more like “Hackers” and I zoomed around on roller skates
• 1% – Wishing I’d chosen something easier for a career…like brain surgery

Of course, hurling obscenities at the screen comes as an optional extra with all the categories, possibly with the exception of the talking to the client on the phone, as they tend to get a bit miffed if you start swearing at them…

…and of course like 67% of all statistics, these figures are dreamt up on the spot.

This week’s been a week of “firsts” for me, infact the past few weeks have held a number of firsts, and I’ve spent a good couple of days this week over on LiveJournal reading fanfiction (another first), just spinning my wheels, which I think’s done me good the state my head’s in at the moment with my current workload.

I spend probably around 90% of my working life online/at the computer, and a good proportion of my “off duty” time online too. I wander around the web an awful lot, researching stuff for work, looking for inspiration for sites, chatting on forums, managing my own forums, and sometimes just wandering around the web for pleasure (though I have to say that StumbleUpon is the work of the devil). There’s some fascinating stuff on the web, there’s useful stuff, there’s downright weird stuff, and everything in between.

What’s the point of this post? Well eons and eons ago – okay then, back in the 80s – there was a line in an old Pet Shop Boys song (I think it may have been “Love Comes Quickly”)…

Just when you least expect it; just what you least expect…
−− “Pet Shop Boys: “Love Comes Quickly”

That’s the beauty of the web, the allure of the web. Out there are billions and billions of pages, and equally huge numbers of hyperlinks. Click on any one of them and you could find yourself somewhere magical. Okay, you could find yourself on the dullest place on the web, on some weird site you just need to back out of as quickly as you can, washing your hands before you touch the keyboard again because heaven alone knows what nasties you could have picked up there. You could find some fascinating site on some obscure Welsh sheep farming site, or some horrendous 90s-esque atrocity complete with animated gifs and more <blink> tags and marquees than you can shake a stick at…or you could find yourself somewhere totally unexpected and wonderful; a jewel amongst the detritus.

I was looking for a temporary avatar for one of my online personae and was using Google’s image search to search out suitable pics. I found myself on Flickr and a few clicks later, though it wasn’t what I’d gone there looking for, I found a photo with a caption and an explanation of what had inspired the photo. Intrigued, I clicked the hyperlink cited, and there I was. I found myself in a place where I could totally lose myself, forget about all of my real life worries, and just immerse myself in another world. For the first time in I can’t remember how long I allowed myself the time to just switch of and read something just for pleasure, something without code blocks in it, if/else loops or tags, and even more miraculous, I actually finished reading something!

That, is the wonder of the web; finding that rare jewel amongst the detritus. One click and you can be in another country, another time, in another place.

One of my favourites of these is a rather nifty PHP include menu which means you can use an include for your navigation list, but still have the current page highlighted in the site’s navigation, without needing extra markup like adding an ID to the ‘body’ element. I can’t accept the credit for this one because it’s not something I coded, but I’ve been using it for so long now that I can’t remember where I first found it.

All you need is two bits for the navigation; your unordered list for your navigation, which of course you can style in any way you so desire using CSS, and a tiny little PHP snippet. First you’ve got your unordered list (I save mine as ‘menu.html’):

</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="mylink1.php">Link 1</a></li>
<li><a href="mylink2.php">Link 2</a></li>
<li><a href="mylink3.php">Link 3</a></li>
<li><a href="mylink4.php">Link 4</a></li>
<li><a href="mylink5.php">Link 5</a></li>
</ul>
<p> 

<br />
 < ?php<br />
 $menu = file_get_contents("menu.html");<br />
 $menu = preg_replace("|
<li><a href=\"" . basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']) . "\">(.*)]+>|U", "
<li class=\"current\">$1</li>
<p>", $menu);<br />
 echo $menu;<br />
 ?><br />
 

Just place the PHP snippet within your page wherever you want to display your menu.

What does it do? It simply uses ‘preg_replace’ to take your menu, find the link to the current page (basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])), and then remove the ‘a’ tags to remove the clickability for the current page (visitors don’t need to click it because they’re already there), and give the ‘li’ tag a class (’current’) and print out the menu on the page. Of course then you can style the ‘current’ class in whatever way you choose with CSS. Though the same thing can be done using the cascade and CSS, that involves using extra markup (adding an ‘id’ to the body and list (’li’) elements), and of course you have to remember to change the body ‘id’ for each page, and adding extra markup to the HTML and CSS seems a lot more cumbersome than this nifty little PHP snippet that does the job without any extra effort on your part. That’s the sort of code I like!

Every day come time to go home, I start shutting down apps in preparation for switching off my PC (wouldn’t want to be caught by the energy efficiency police leaving a monitor or something on! *gasp*) and everything shuts down nicely except for M$ Outlook. Now despite my work PC being afflicted with only 256Mb RAM (sucks big time when you’ve had half a dozen apps open all day, as is my habit) it’s nothing to do with the shortcomings of my machine, as everyone else in the office’s is behaving in a similar fashion, so the dimwit IT dept’s obviously been playing around with something, and don’t seem to be in any sort of a hurry to fix it.

So there I am…Outlook: File > Exit….wait….and wait…and wait! And nothing happens. Not a sausage. Experience has taught me that to avoid the waiting and waiting and total inaction, the best course of action is Ctrl + Alt + Del > End program…but even then the damned things takes it’s time over shutting down. It’s no laughing matter when you’re trying to get yourself and your baggage up to the clock machine to ensure you’re outside promptly on time for your transport home.

*sigh* M$ Outlook, I wish I knew how to quit you!