Inspired from the print world people from Adobe and Microsoft are coming with new features that might (or might not) be embedded into future CSS specs. These new features – CSS Regions and CSS Exclusions – will allow text to flow into webpages pretty much like they do in newspapers and magazines.

I would like to post here a selection of resources that might help you start using ARIA in your web applications or websites – although ARIA is still a draft. you can start using it and some AT will know how to read it.

Try some demos: ARIA Live Regions Screen Reader Demo

And more resources…

We have launched the first ebook “Fairy Tales” by Brothers Grimm which contains a set of 62 beautiful bedtime stories.
It is built as an iPad application available for download on Appstore.

The application has a beautiful and usable interface allowing the user to choose the font, the size of the text and to switch to night-mode for a better reading experience during the night. It saves your current reading position in realtime so you can close the ebook at anytime and return to reading it later.

What can you answer to your client when you try to explain that your code is semantic, crossbrowser and…accessible and your client asks you “Good for you you’re coding accessible websites, but do you actually know any blind user?” Meaning, why should someone care about how you code a site as long as table-based code is still ok and cheap?

Well…you may remain speechless. Cause I really don’t know any blind person nor a person using assistive technology altough I do know people that need to increase the font-size or lower the screen resolution to be able to read better. But even if I did not “see” one that should not mean they don’t exist – but how can this be proved?

After writing an accessible form in XHTML and validating it with a PHP server side script & after that with a Mootools client-side script, I write today about a third way of approaching the subject – using future-to-come HTML5 (by saying that, I really hope to be able to use it waaaay before 2011).

When it comes to accessibility, every coder is a small guru. On the websites where I bid for projects everybody is an accessibility and usability expert (including myself, I admit).

Altough these rules exist for quite a while there are coders who find difficult to implement them – so I am trying to find here what are the tricks that you use in writing your code to make it accessible. For example, although writing semantic code helps (a lot !) it is not always enough. Some try to view their pages with CSS and images disabled, some don’t. Some of us have tricks that we do not want to share to other coders. Some of us share. We’re not all gurus, right? Someone has to start from somewhere.

So if you have something interesting to say, add your own rules here.

Forms are the base of interactivity in webpages. Formating forms can bring a good usability to a page, easing the user’s experience.