James Oppenheim’s blog

Welcome to the 2009 CSS Naked Day. It is a celebration of semantic HTML markup by turning off your website CSS styles on 9th April each year.

I am in - do you want to get naked too? You will have to be quick it only lasts a day.

Technorati Tags: Areeba, CSS, Personal, Web Standards, Usability

Apple’s Safari web browser has for a while had the ability for users to drag the bottom right corner of a textarea and resize it to make room for more content.

While resizing textareas creates a nice unobtrusive enhancement, unfortunately it can sometimes break your CSS layout as well. So how can you turn it off? Well you actually have two easy options:

Option 1: Add min and max widths to your textarea so that Safari users can only resize it as far as you will let them.


textarea {
max-width: 300px;
max-height: 300px;
}


Option 2: If you do not want to let a Safari user resize the textarea at all, you can use the resize CSS property.

textarea{
resize: none;
}


Nice and easy - see my example of How to turn off Safari’s textarea expand.

Technorati Tags: CSS, Web Standards, Safari, Web browsers, Textarea resize

I have been working in the web design industry for a number of years now and I am still unsure of exact requirements for disability rights and Australian websites. With today being blogging against disablism day I thought I should find out.

America has Section 508. But does Australia have anything requiring electronic technology developed in Australia to be accessible?

One thing for sure is that all websites need to be navigated and read by everyone, regardless of location, experience, or the type of computer technology used. This is outlined in the Australian Human rights & equal opportunity commission’s ‘World Wide Web Access: Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes‘. But what does this mean for Australian web developers? Do we have to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines priority 1, 2 or 3? And if so, who is enforcing these laws?

There has been one legal case concerning Web accessibility known as Maguire vs. SOCOG, where SOCOG was sued because its website was seen to be inaccessible. This shows us that inaccessible websites can and are seen as illegal!
Therefore, while not being specifically law, it looks like it is up to the web developer, company or client to decided on a moral or commercial grounds weather the website they are building should be done with accessibility in mind.

I don’t think this is the right situation. Maybe there should be an Australian law enforcing all website to be built in an accessible manner? But more importantly, I believe there should be more resources and eduction on building usable and accessible websites that can be used by anyone with any technology and disability.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, web, Australia, disability rights, Blogging Against Disablism Day

I am going to participate in the 2007 CSS naked day on April 5. The creator of CSS naked day, Dustin Diaz believes it is the ideal event to promote web standards. While everyone will be able to see my XHTML for its semantic and structural integrity, it may provide some usability problems. I think promoting web standards is a great idea, however, should we do it at the cost of usability? So I will run a small, very small, focus group. If you find it hard, confusing or just plain annoying to navigate my site on April 5, please let me know and I can try and make the necessary adjustments.

I will be away camping at Mungo National Park over Easter - more importantly CSS naked day - so I will 700 KM away from my computer. Consequently, I will not be able to show off my by disabling my stylesheets for the day personally. Hopefully, however, Guff’s Word Press: Naked Day plugin will handle the job for me, so everyone will be able to see me in my birthday suit, if only for one day.

Hopefully this will provide some useful comments on the structural usability of my site as well.

Technorati Tags: CSS, web standards, web, accessibility, usability, Mungo National Park