David Ruppert

The University of Texas has decided to close the Accessibility Institute started by Dr. John Slatin. The Institute has played a big part in highlighting web accessibility issues and it would be a shame for UT to discontinue its progress.

By visiting the the URL below, you can send the following note to Dr. Stephen A. Monti, the Executive Vice Provost at UT:

—

I am writing to urge the University of Texas to reconsider its decision to close the Accessibility Institute, founded and led with distinction by the late Dr. John Slatin. While Dr. Slatin’s inspirational leadership was critically important to get the Institute started, there are others able and prepared to carry the torch of knowledge forward.

The University of Texas established a reputation as leader on Universal Design issues. The research and practical application of findings pioneered by Dr. Slatin, Dr. Kay Lewis and the graduate students they worked with have helped to shape global understanding of the importance of technology access. Indeed, their work has helped to establish standards and best practice all over the world.

As technology rapidly changes, current accessibility standards continue to evolve. Research-based practices must be developed, implemented and evaluated. Accessibility leaders from all over the world look to UT as an exemplar. At a time when governments are trying to establish equitable standards and businesses are seeking to include all markets in their messaging and services, UT can not stand down from this important work.

Please dedicate the resources necessary to maintain and build on Universal Design theories and practices pioneered by John Slatin at the Accessibility Institute.

—

Please take a minute to do so . . you only have to enter your name and email address.

http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/SavetheInstitute

Hmm, a very interesting mashup coming from Firefox called Ubiquity. A . . . sort of . . . massive tool type thingie connecting what looks like all local applications [or at least a few?] with a Quicksilvery/Launchy’y type interface.

Very cool. Also very much in its initial stages. There are clearly some bugs to be worked out and some standards that need to be adopted, but this could be an unbelievable time saver for several monotonous tasks while specifically browsing the web.

The first example shows the user creating a simple email. An invitation to a friend to meet for lunch at a local cafe. He’s very quickly able to . . . * without opening another tab in a browser * . . . find a map and drop it in his email. Then he does the same for reviews on this restaurant. The copy, images and formatting from his search results on the restaurant reviews are all placed in his email . . . cool.

The next example works for Craigslist only, but I’ve been wanting something like this for a while. He views lofts for rent in San Francisco. Then by highlighting the results, opening Ubiquity and typing ‘map-these’, a Google map appears with the location of all of these lofts pinpointed. SWEET. Again, only for Craigslist right now though.

They allow users to type normal language commands to find results. This could be unbelievably helpful, or amazingly difficult, depending on whether or not it and I share the same ‘normal spoken language’. I’m interested in trying this out and seeing if it’s as intuitive as it seems.

Anyway, watch the video. The first full minute is quite a beating . . its a very retro SWiSH-like splash page. Ugh, but fight through it and get to the good stuff.

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Ok, simply using this as a code toolbox again, I don’t want to misplace some of these links.

I spent the better part of a day trying to get Thickbox to work with some existing [and fairly outdated] style switching code. In an attempt to avoid a typical, blow my top, crap on everyone outbursts, I decided to try something else.

While searching around the little interweb for Thickbox issues, I found a post on a forum about Greybox.

After taking a couple of minutes to drop in the code, it worked like a champ. So . . I’m keeping it.

No knock on Thickbox, just simply didn’t have time to troubleshoot anymore. Greybox seems to provide about the same result [and of course it validates], but instead of linking to a url with a querystring of variables and adding a class of “thickbox”, you simply link to the page with ‘ rel=”gb_page_center[520, 500]“‘ in your anchor tag. This is for linking to html documents . . it’s slightly different to create an image gallery like Lightbox JS has mastered.

Plus, it’s about 10kb less than Thickbox simply because of the absence of the jQuery library.

Lightbox 2

Thickbox 3.1

GreyBox v5.53

I just came across this dropdown alternative this morning. It’s just another pure CSS dropdown navigation, but it’s got a few new added features.

It’s based on Suckerfish but uses jQuery. One thing it has that was lacking with the original Suckerfish is the fact that it’s keyboard accessible . . a needed addition.

Its final weight is just over 20kb using jQuery’s production code. It’s fairly heavy compared to Suckerfish, unless of course you’re already using the jQuery base for something else in your site.

I don’t have a need for it right now, but might read a little more and give it a shot when I do.

Just dropping it here because I know it’ll be completely erased from my mind by lunch.

Superfish v1.4.1

A buddy of mine noticed that firebug recently stopped showing anchor styles when inspecting links. Typically he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but in this case . . much to my chagrin, he was right.

Well since this was clearly an immediate issue for him . . and I was busy with actual work he did some research and found that this was a bug in Firebug. [Huh, what are the chances?]

According to this article about Firebug not displaying anchor styles, there is a bug that the beta version [Firebug 1.1] fixes. I’ve downloaded the beta version and things seem to be working swimmingly.

I ran across a problem at the office a few days ago where a client was complaining about my Son of Suckerfish menus sticking open on a particular page in IE7. The issue was only happening on pages they had created, using templates that we had delivered, so of course I initially assume they’d done something wrong . . you know . . cause I’m judgmental like that.

Turns out that, without the below css update, if you click in an input field on a page using Suckerfish, then open the menus, they will not automatically close on mouse out.

This particular client page triggered an onfocus for the login box [currently very popular . . and annoying in my opinion] once the page loaded. So, without doing anything, the menus would stick open every time.

The simple fix consists of the following addition to your CSS:


#menu li:hover, #menu li.hover {
   position: static;
}


The fix has been around for a while, but I only recently ran into this problem. For more information on the problem, visit Matthew Ratzloff’s explanation at his blog on Built from source below:

Son of Suckerfish fix for IE7