XML News from Sunday, November 21, 2004

The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has posted five public working drafts covering various topics:

These describe "design principles for creating accessible Web content. When these principles are ignored, individuals with disabilities may not be able to access the content at all, or they may be able to do so only with great difficulty. When these principles are employed, they also make Web content accessible to a variety of Web-enabled devices, such as phones, handheld devices, kiosks, network appliances. By making content accessible to a variety of devices, that content will also be accessible to people in a variety of situations."

There's some useful information in here. I knew most of this stuff already. but I did find a few new ideas. Frames can have titles, which I didn't know, but then I rarely if ever use frames. More practical for me is that I can put an abbr attribute on th elements to provide terse substitutes for header labels to be used for screen readers. Also, "Use the address element to define a page's author." I'd forgotten about that one, but I'll be adding it to my pages now. And I should probably be using an abbr element with a title attribute rather than spelling out "Java Specification Request (JSR)" every time somebody submits a new draft to the JCP. See? I used it already!