Jeffrey Zeldman: 20 years of Web Design and Community (Video Documentary)

Who is Jeffrey Zeldman? The "Miles Davis of web design"? "Godfather of the web"? Or simply "your friend on the Internet"? For people who make websites, Zeldman is all of these and more. He's been a guiding voice in web design since the earliest days of the Internet, leading the charge in the fight for web standards. He's an educator whose businesses—A List Apart, An Event Apart, and A Book Apart—are extensions of his basic instinct to share his best ideas. He's also a community leader that other designers look to for inspiration. This film is an intimate portrait of a man who has helped shape the web but isn't recognized by most of the people who use it everyday. Learn how he evolved his influential mailing list, how he convinced Netscape and Internet Explorer to support HTML and CSS, and what he's doing to pass the torch to the next generation.

Watch more documentaries like this at lynda.com/vimeo.

Jeffrey Zeldman: 20 years of Web Design and Community from lynda.com on Vimeo

Pebble SDK 2.0 Developer Preview

Pebble smartphone SDK 2.0 will be released later this year. It introduces new build tools, support for accelerometer, data logging, persistent storage, JavaScript and Web API(Geolocation, Local Storage) API. Developers can distribute apps on Peeble Appstore for free.

Pebble SDK 2.0 Announcement

Check out the technical talk for full details. Grab the latest Pebble SDK 2.0 Beta7 and use iOS/Android 4.0 mobile device to flash your Pebble with latest Beta firmware.

You can view this presentation slides on slideshare

Understanding Accessibility for Web Developers (Video)

People with disabilities are your users too. Why not spend 20 minutes to learn accessible web design today. Watch Katie Cunningham talk about disabilities and making websites for everyone. I'll also recommend reading her Accessibility Handbook to learn more about making your website accessible to people with disabilities.

Making Websites for Everyone - Katie Cunningham

Katie Cunningham's talk: Making Websites for Everyone at jQuery Conference Portland 2013. View it on Youtube.

At National Workshop on Web Accessibility in Trivandrum

Delivered a lecture about Ubuntu accessibility features and Orca screen reader at the National Workshop on Web Accessibility here in Trivandrum. I had to wrap up the usually hour long talk quickly so that I can catch the train to Bangalore to be at the Pycon India 2009 the next day.

The two day Web Accessibility workshop hosted by SPACE and Centre for Internet and Society concluded at Christ Nagar International School today. 43 participants from various Government departments and private firms took part in the workshop. The aim of the workshop was to educate web developers of Government and non Government agencies on how to develop websites that are equally accessible to people with disabilities.

Read More

National Workshop on Web Accessibility, Trivandrum September 2009

During the last National Workshop on Web Accessibility in Bangalore I said to Nirmitha (Center of Internet and Society) "Let have the next workshop in Trivandrum".

Thanks to support of Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE), Insight ICT Centre for the differently abled and Kerala State IT Mission this event comes to Trivandrum, Kerala.

We want to take this workshop to other cities in India. If you are interested leave a comment or email me.

Announcement of National Workshop on Web Accessibility

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE) are organizing a workshop on web accessibility for web developers from the public and private sector from September 25 to 26, 2009. The workshop will take place at Christ Nagar International School, Kowdiar, Thiruvananthapuram, between 09:30-17:30 hours each day.

The workshop seeks to bring together practitioners from Government Departments, as well as from small and medium enterprises across the country. The primary aim of this workshop is to demonstrate the importance of creating accessible web sites and to educate the developers of government and private web sites on how to incorporate accessibility features into new as well as existing web sites.

The training comprises both theory-oriented and practical sessions.The trainers are specialists in various aspects of web accessibility. The main focus will be on WCAG 2.0 guidelines. The workshop is for persons already involved in developing web sites with good knowledge of HTML, XML, CSS, etc. In addition to training web developers in accessibility, the workshop will also serve as a platform for capacity building by training potential accessibility trainers.

The programme is supported by Kerala State IT Mission, which runs INSIGHT - ICT Centre for the differently abled in association with SPACE.

Hurry! Interested persons are requested to register immediately as seats are limited.

Candidates may register directly on the website at http://c11.space-kerala.org/webw/

National Workshop on Web Accessibility, Bangalore June 2009

Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has been a forerunner in advocating for a national policy for electronic and web accessibility for persons with disabilities. In addition to seeking a policy reform in this matter, we are also bolstering our advocacy efforts by organising trainings and workshops at no cost for web developers across the country to spread awareness and build capacity in this area in both the public as well as the private sectors. Our first workshop, which was organised jointly with UN Solution Exchange and supported by the NIXI, took place in Ghaziabad earlier this year.

We are organising our second workshop on web accessibility for developers at Bangalore from June 5th-7th, 2009. The workshop will take place at the CIS office on Cunningham Road. Registration is free of charge. If you or any of your colleagues are involved in developing websites and are interested in making your websites accessible to all groups in society, including persons with disabilities (approximately 71 million Indians and 6% of the total world population), please register for this workshop at the earliest.

The trainers are experts in this field from Delhi and Bangalore and have been working in the field of accessibility for many years.

For more information and registration, please mail Nirmita Narasimhan:nirmita@cis-india.org or call: 080 40926283.

http://cis-india.org/events/national-workshop-on-web-accessibility-june-2009

How to Bypass Internet Censorship :: Book Review

The book How to Bypass Internet Censorship using free software tools is now out. The book is distributed on Lulu.com. The interesting aspect about this book is that it is created using collaborative content development system over a period of (just) five days by various contributors.

In the past I had blogged about how to bypass the filtering systems using translation services like Babelfish, however I think the book would be more informative for all.

About The Book

Because of concerns about the effect of Internet blocking mechanisms, and the implications of censorship, many individuals and groups are working hard to ensure that the Internet, and the information on it, are freely available to everyone who wants it.

This book documents simple circumvention techniques such as a cached file or web proxy, and also describes more complex methods using Tor, which stands for The Onion Router, involving a sophisticated network of proxy servers.

FLOSS Manuals publications will always be available for free in HTML and PDF from the FLOSS Manuals Website. Each book sale generates $2.50 (USD). 100% of this income goes back into the development of more manuals about free software.

You can also order a dead tree version of this book or just download it.

Character Encoding Problem in Anusaaraka Urdu to Devanagari transliteration script

While test driving the latest firefox3 I found that the Anusaaraka Urdu to Devanagari transliteration system was not working as expected. After looking around I figured out that the CGI script was setting the page encoding to Western (ISO-8859-1) instead of standard unicode(UTF-8). Perhaps the developers should note that setting correct parameters in HTML/XHTML meta elements is not enough. You need to set the proper encoding via the HTTP headers returned by the Web server, in this case I guess the CGI script didn't do that and the web server sent the default headers.

Oops

Often character encoding issue like this is mistaken for missing fonts or worse lack of proper support in the web browser (sic).

After changing to Unicode (UTF-8)

WCAG2 objections, threats, unprintables

Jonathan Chetwynd posted the formal objections against WCAG2 on the bbc backstage mailing-list

WCAG 2.0 claims to define and address the requirements for making Web content accessible to those with learning difficulties, cognitive limitations and others. We object to that claim.

Specifically, the success criteria requirements for making content understandable ignore the needs of people with learning difficulties and cognitive limitations. Please note that there are guidelines published by other groups that will make content much more accessible to these users. However, with the WCAG claim to address learning difficulties and cognitive limitations, people will not know that they need to look further.

We would like to see continued work in this field and a statement in the WCAG 2.0 abstract and introduction modifying the claim that they currently address accessibility for learning disabilities. Specifically, we recommend removing learning difficulties and cognitive limitations from the list of supported disabilities. A sentence may be added later in the abstract that “these guidelines may also provide some benefits for people with learning difficulties and cognitive limitations”. We would then like to see a statement of intent such as: “the working group intends to build additional success criteria to address accessibility for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations.”

The aim of the objection is that:

a, The working group understands that WCAG 2.0 dose not provide all the requirements for access for cognitive limitations, and b, they continue work on an extension guideline that will address these needs.

The good news is that this effort is already being taken seriously by the WCAG co-chairs. It is not being seen or understood as campaigning but as a constructive criticism aimed to making a better and fairer set of guidelines. The more signatures we get now, the better the case will be made.

Meanwhile Joe Clark vents out some anger in To Hell with WCAG 2

The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are about to be updated for the first time since 1999. Joe Clark takes a close look at WCAG 2 and reports back.

Read if you really care about an accessible web.