WebSG

The Economist on the Semantic Web

2008-04-22T14:16:08Z

Something a little unusual in my weekly copy of the Economist: An article on the Semantic Web.

While it’s probably too early to brand the Semantic Web as “Web 3.0”, it was heartening to read about how things are starting to take shape. Now I know that Reuters may have a killer app called Calais that converts meaningless data into something more semantic. Other companies are following suit.

These semantic tools may just bring ‘sexy’ back to the web.

Weekend Must Reads

2008-03-29T05:48:10Z

It has been quiet around here, but no more! Allow me to interest you in a few fabulous links:

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Designer’s Guide to SEO - This is a great checklist of things you should take care of while you are optimizing your webpage for Search Engines. The list is not just good for Search Engines but also good for accessibility.

10 best CSS Hacks - Some of you must be having a hangover from the “x best…” lists that keep floating around the web. Fear not, this is not one of those. It is a truly resourceful list of the hacks that occur frequently enough in our HTML experience to be documented with solutions. Of course, the IE hacks are best applied with conditional statements.

Ajax and Screen Readers - I think I have linked to it before, but still worth a revision. This issue crops up frequently with regards to how accessibile are AJAX requests. Yes, there are a few screen readers that can support it. Read more in the article for details.

Thats it! Now I shall get back to reading Ambient Findability.

Meetup for Makan

2008-02-28T07:38:14Z

We’re having a casual meetup next week, so if you can make it, leave a comment below!

Date: Thursday, 6th March 2008
Time: 7:30pm
Place: New York, New York, Citylink Mall (City Hall MRT Station)

Abusing Accessibility Techniques

2007-12-19T00:13:02Z

Roger Johansson has yet again written an excellent article on how accessibility techniques are misused. And I just realised how pertinent that article is with regards to my note on accessibility in singapore websites.

Of course, the PDF by Patrick H. Lauke on Too Much Accessibility is a must read for anyone who is interested in not abusing accessibility.

Cross posted at nimbupani.com

Advertising Gone Awry

2007-12-10T02:01:01Z

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love Digg. I read Digg semi-religiously, watch Diggnation, bought the T-shirt…you get the idea. I must, however question their decision to include intrusive ads on the homepage. Their flashing, fit-inducing gifs are a pain in the butt. What’s worse is that they’ve gone NSFW and some of the ads are extremely distasteful.

The Email Standards Project

2007-12-03T18:01:39Z

The recently-launched Email Standards Project endeavours to ‘to improve web standards support and accessibility in email’.

As with the Web Standards Project, there is an Acid Test… for email clients which confirms my suspicions that Lotus Notes, even in its latest form, still sucks. I’m not even using the latest version. Or the second latest. I’ll share my little story with you.

]]> For the past few years, I’ve designed email newsletters for my organisation to send out. I’d code the web page using CSS and XHTML, only to find that Lotus Notes didn’t understand the styles. The only solution was to either send the email as a huge image - which I disagreed with on semantic principles - or to use tables. I settled for the latter (and hoped that nobody in Websg.org would ever see my emails in circulation).

This worked fine for newsletters sent within the organisation, or to other Government organisations that also used Lotus Notes. However I heard that recipients using a different version of Lotus Notes also did not view the newsletter exactly as it should have looked. It was a pain.

Worse, when we wanted to send our emails to external parties, we discovered that what we saw was not what they got. Our emails turned into gibberish, with broken image links everywhere. We settled for an opening line at the start of each email: “If you cannot view this email, please go to http://nameofsite.com”.

There are discussions over at WASP and Zeldman.com as to whether email’s role should have expanded beyond plain text, but I feel that is beside the point now. HTML emails are here to stay, so we might as well work towards better standards support in email clients.

SXSW 2008 prelim schedule out!

2007-11-08T18:03:32Z

The preliminary schedule for next year’s SXSW interactive festival (7-11 March) is out. Check out the listings. Can’t wait…

Incidentally, anyone wants to join me for ETech (3-6 March) right before this?

Second Life Job

2007-10-26T04:33:25Z

NUS is hiring for its Second Life community. Wish they’d pay me well to play WoW.

Accessibility in Singapore websites

2007-10-11T15:04:29Z

Accessibility has been in the news lately - with Target’s accessiblity lawsuit being given the class-action status. Now, lets take a look at what was missing in Target’s website that caused the complaint in the first place (summarized from the official NFB Vs Target legal docs):

lack of alt-text on graphics
inaccessible image maps
the lack of adequate prompting and labeling
the denial of keyboard access
the requirement that transactions be performed solely with a mouse
lack of navigational links

In Singapore, accessibility services seems to be provided majorly by Designafa - especially for government websites. Lets see how well these are managed by their own website:

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lack of alt-text on graphics

The first thing that strikes you is that the navigation links are separated by images that have no alt text. Moreover, you have the fluffy rounded corners images with no alt text as well. The problem is not that there is no alt text, but the very existence of these images. If they are not required for screen reading why are they present - impeeding the screenreaders? They should be background images using css. Alas, as the site structure shows, they had not thought about using css and webstandards.

The next thing I notice is that the image says “Key to successful web (sic) Accessibility & Usability” while the alt text says “Accessibility for all, Making your website Accessible”. If the image does nothing but display text as an “image” then the least that should occur is that the text matches that on the image.

Another interesting alt text is this “Commemorating International Day of Disable Persons 2006” for the image that says “Forum on E-Accessibility in Singapore” and the date that is mentioned in the image is 22 June 2007.

inaccessible image maps

The site doesnt use any image maps thankfully.

the lack of adequate prompting and labeling

This is definitely missing in the form on the contact page. Labels are wrapped around the input elements without a “label”. The fields are also filled but use javascript to erase it once clicked - I am not sure how that works well with screen readers, but I dont think it is that accessible.

the denial of keyboard access

They have provided excessive keyboard access. Given that they have ordered the tab indexes as well as providing access keys for navigation links as well as other links (including blank ones for labels). The very idea of changing tab index from the natural order itself is murky waters. The idea of access keys have got negative reactions from the accessibility community (Dave Shea’s comment) (alternative suggestions).

the requirement that transactions be performed solely with a mouse

This again is taken care of with “onkeypress” and other inline javascripts. But for usability, the submit button is not focussed when tabbed to or even when focussed with the mouse - so u never know when the “submit” button is active or not.

lack of navigational links

This is clearly present, but their “skip to content” link goes to the content below the announcement of the latest event.

The idea is not to criticize their work, but to showcase what has been missed in this race to get accessibility certifications. Having an overdose of access keys or incorrect alt texts is definitely not accessible but it does not get detected in any of the automatic tests (which the website seems to clear). Given that they consult the government on accessibility - I think they should have some of these things resolved. If you go to the Prime Minister’s Office website, the headings are actually encapsulated in tags - so the screen reader wont know it is a heading - which if you were able to see the website you would be able to. You might notice the unusual number of
s are well. The Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports has a “increase text size” widget slapped on the top as well. Here is what Roger Johansson has to say about these text resize widgets:

Something that always bugs me is when somebody slaps a text resize widget on their site and calls it “accessible”. Job done. Maybe that is a bit unfair since there are many sites that actually are accessible that have a text resize widget, but my non-scientific guess is that a majority of sites that have a feature like that are a long way from being accessible and use a text resizing widget as a band-aid instead of addressing the underlying problem.

It is great that we have a committed organization for providing accessibility to singaporeans but the current usage of accessibility techniques in their client websites as well as their own seems like they haven’t caught up with the latest accessibility techniques as well as discarding those that are deprecated. While the websites pass the automatic tests, they still are not accessible as well as they could be to a disabled person.

Easiest Way to Embed Google Maps on Your Blog

2007-09-10T07:18:15Z

Since the beginning of time, embedding Googlemaps or Yahoo! Maps has always been a royal pain the behind. Since Yahoo! doesn’t offer any maps of Singapore, we’ll only cover how to embed a Googlemap on to your website or blog.

They have made it so simple, you got to be crazy to use streetdirectory.com.

Previously, you had to:

Get your own Googlemaps API
Find the geographical coordinates by ripping it off the browser’s location bar
Substituting the coordinates and zoom level into some obfuscated code
Pasting the code onto your site

Christian Heilmann and Mark Norman Francis’s book Web Development Solutions has a short section on how to embed Google Maps via microformats, but it’s still not as easy as it should be.

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Log into Google Maps with your Google login

Click on “My Maps” on the left sidebar and choose “Create Map”

Use the tools to markup your map. Drop markers, draw lines, go crazy.

When you’re done, save the map, click on “Send” on the top right of the map. Cut and paste the code in “Embed in website” in the popup.

Easiest way to embed Google Maps on your blog.

Journalism 2.0 Talk

2007-08-16T03:23:09Z

“Thanks to youtube, camera phones, podcasts and blogs - any ordinary person can report the news. Technology has empowered millions of citizen journalists to file scoops, fact check and expose mistakes. But it’s also harder to know who and what to believe. Kristie Lu Stout navigates the promise and pitfalls of Journalism 2.0.”

What: Journalism 2.0
When: Monday, 20th August 2007 @ 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Where: NUS Lecture Theatre 11, Kent Ridge Campus, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Hat tip: Midnight Monkey and Siva.

I don’t know why they don’t have a website.

Malaysia formally embraces Open Document Format

2007-08-15T03:54:41Z

Our neighbours have adopted the Open Document Format. Can Singapore move towards becoming vendor-agnostic and more user-centric? My personal opinion is that the Singapore government’s IT plans are often too vendor dependent.

Don’t even get me started on our efforts for a standard operating environment.

Adopt open standards and avoid chaining yourself to proprietary solutions.

SXSW 2008 registration

2007-08-13T18:59:26Z

Good news: SXSW 2008 is now open for registration. Not so good news: The price has gone up a bit. See the rates. I’d say it’s about US$100 more expensive for the Interactive badge now. And I was hoping for to make it for the Music festival this time, meaning I have to buy the Platinum badge. But I’m sure it’s worth it…

Join us on Facebook!

2007-08-09T03:47:57Z

We just started a Facebook group. If you’re on Facebook, do join us :)

Thanks to Coleman for taking the initiative.

Bulletproof Web Design, 2nd edition

2007-08-08T19:02:15Z

Dan Cederholm reports that the second edition of his book, Bulletproof Web Design, is out. To quote:

This isn’t a giant update nor a new book entirely. Rather, it brings the examples in line with Internet Explorer 7 (which wasn’t released when the first ed. was published) and adds several more examples based on ems (which were sorely lacking from the original book). There are of course errata fixes and nips and tucks throughout as well, and about 30 additional pages were added in total. All in all, I’m happy to have the book be all the more solid and relevant.

I’d like to see what he says about ems because I use that for font sizes, mostly to enable users of previous versions of Internet Explorer to resize text if they needed to. However, on some occasions I’ve received comments at work that the font size on my websites is too ridiculously large. Usually that’s because their font size settings have been set to ‘large’ or ‘larger’ and they’ve forgotten about it.