jQuery UI Dialog Accessibility

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jQuery UI is an amazing product. It’s not because it offers the best features, or that it offers the best solution, it’s that it offers a large degree of support for years to come. Which is saying a lot for something that is nothing more than JavaScript. It’s certainly something that many enterprises have begun to look at and look for in the development world. At my job at Coventry Healthcare, I’m responsible for the User Interfaces and generally the User Experience across some very highly visible web applications. One of the most recent developments in our line of business is the risk of not having an accessible site (we fall under Section 508 guidelines because of our Medicare/Medicaid users). jQuery UI has literally allowed me to very easily create and maintain large amounts of code so that I can spend more time making sure that it follows WCAG 2.0 and WARIA (which should cover us for S508). Read More »

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Droid Rooted, here’s my take.

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Before you root, you should probably upgrade to 2.01, as that will ‘break’ your new root access. You can get that download from here, if you have not already received it OTA (Over the Air). You need to follow the directions below, to apply the 2.01. The directions for each download it exactly the same, except for the ADB access.

This ‘root’ is strictly for developers. It’s not going to give you any ability to do anything to your phone yet, unless you really know your *nix commands well enough not to screw something up on your phone. So continue only if you really want this ability (the ability to really screw up your phone).
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Bulletproof @font-face

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There is quite an interesting discussion going on at Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog concerning the @font-face syntax and how to make sure that it is working in all browsers. It’s interesting to see the different ‘hacks’ that are being put together for something that should be hashed out to work well in all major browsers. Why does this remind me of things like the wonky implementations being played out in html5?!

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Usability and a Simple JavaScript hovering menu

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Many web developers ask ‘what is usability?’.  This is one of those topics that I can explain, but it may be easier to demonstrate. My this experiences have led to some principles; one of them is that if I’m going to build it, it must be usable.   Unfortunately, many sites that I like, that tout usability, screw up one important concept that annoys me greatly.

I ask myself, “when using a menu, why do I have to drag my mouse from one button to the next, and fear losing the menu if I cross it’s border anywhere?”  Some menus are just annoying because they disappear mid mouse move, some are extremely hard to use because of several layers of menus, some I have resorted to using `tabs` to get to the correct menu item.  It’s unfortunate that people can’t get this right.
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