How to tackle the hot new shit in an accessible way (btPlay!)

I held a similar talk to the one at FrontendUnited at “beyond tellerrand — play!” in Cologne the same week. It went quite well and @marcthiele was an awesome host. Learned a lot about Flash techniques and general playing with technologies at that conference, so a really good view over the “tellerrand” for me.

How to tackle the hot new shit in an accessible way (FrontendUnited)

Thanks to @mortendk for asking me to speak at this nice conference in Amsterdam. It was really nice to see so many frontend people discussing over the future of Drupal. A sign that we chose the right system.

Here’s what Morten had to say about my talk:

the accessibility session that for once was not one long boring talk about you being sued if you didn’t put ria roles inside you code – This was about getting it done (and cock pushups…)

And here is your chance to give the organizers a review of my talk.

Designing in the Browser is Not the Answer

…says @andybudd, and I think he is somewhat right. The browser itself is no design tool, you don’t have that much possibilities to be creative efficiently.

But it depends on the definition of what “designing in the browser” actually is. For me, the PSD I get is almost every time a starting point. We don’t have a PSD for every possible state of the web page but extend from the design patterns we get off the document. This will be reviewed by the designer and if they got comments or other ideas they just use Photoshop to visualize those things and hand it back. Designing in the browser isn’t just the HTML/CSS part and you don’t need to go the whole way browser-only. Use the appropriate tools to solve the problems as they arise.

AccessifyHTML5.js 1.0

Just quickly announcing AccessifyHTML5.js is now online in version 1.0. Biggest feature: Documentation! ;-) You’re now able to add role=“main” to your main content and the script stops changing your HTML role attributes if there are some present.

OpenType font features in CSS

Really looking forward to all those OpenType font features in Browsers. I wonder how long it takes until we can chose stylistic sets in font services like Fontdeck. Another question is how much weight they add to the font file.

Web designers have had access to OpenType features for a year or so, through properties proposed in the CSS 3 Fonts Module. Firefox has supported this since version 4, and but until recently it was the only browser do so. Now Microsoft has joined the party by announcing OpenType support in Internet Explorer 10, along with Chrome on Windows (not Mac yet).