LessFuss Design

Web form help text & accessibility

In the last piece I did on accessible web forms, I mentioned that in Forms Mode the JAWS screen reader won’t announce any content in a form that isn’t marked up in a form HTML tag. 90% of the time you can make forms more accessible by using labels for each field, but sometimes you want to provide more information than can fit nicely into the label (e.g. some extra help text) without making a meal of the layout and styling. Here’s a way of styling content in an HTML label tag so it looks like it’s separate from the label, but will still get read out by screen readers. Continue reading ‘Web form help text & accessibility’ »

Accessible Twitter: how it should have been done to start with

One day the next big thing on the web that has everyone all worked up will be accessible and built to web standards from day one. Until that day, we have people like Dennis Lembree (the man behind Web Axe ) to thank for making what many take for granted freely available to an even wider audience. With the help of some friends , and the Twitter API, Dennis has created an accessible version of Twitter called, unsurprisingly, Accessible Twitter . Continue reading ‘Accessible Twitter: how it should have been done to start with’ »

Screen readers and radio buttons: using HTML fieldset and legend

You can go a long way to making a web form accessible by making sure every input field has a label. But with a set of radio buttons this ain’t enough. Use labels for each of your radio buttons and the various options will be read out, but how does a screen reader user get the question they’re supposed to be answering? Easy. Use fieldset and legend HTML tags, a simple – yet underused – way of getting your forms to make sense for screen reader users. Continue reading ‘Screen readers and radio buttons: using HTML fieldset and legend’ »

Naked

No, not me you’ll be disappointed glad to hear, but this blog – it’s the fourth CSS Naked Day today, the annual event from the Gok Wan of web standards, Dustin Diaz . I’m de-robing this blog for the first time to show my support, and to demonstrate that while far from pretty, the site should still at least be usable.

Continue reading ‘Naked’ »

WebAIM accessibility survey results

WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) have published the results of a screen reader user survey they did at the end of 2008. Some of the results confirmed what many of us assume (or are led to believe) about screen reader user behaviour, but others were a bit of a surprise. The full results and some analysis is published on the WebAIM website [external link], here’s my list of the main points of interest. Continue reading ‘WebAIM accessibility survey results’ »

Notes on a WordPress 2.6 upgrade

After you’ve been through the upgrade to WordPress 2.6 it says to post about the experience – so here I go. It went smoothly enough for me, but left me with two questions: 1) can I upgrade easily without the fear of overwriting my themes & plugins, and 2) Aaggh! How do I turn off post revisions! Continue reading ‘Notes on a WordPress 2.6 upgrade’ »

Conditional comments for Internet Explorer

Conditional comments, combined with some browser-specific CSS, are a great way to get your website’s design & layout working in the various versions of Internet Explorer. But be careful, browser version targeting can soon have you and your website’s layout in knots unless you know exactly which browser(s) you want to target, and what CSS hacks to use. Continue reading ‘Conditional comments for Internet Explorer’ »