I was recently given the opportunity to review the Packt Publishing book Drupal 6 -  Social Networking by Michael Peacock.  I'm impressed. The book was well written and well organized. It starts with the basics of a Drupal installation, and quickly walks you through to the more complex configuration of a Drupal site with a social networking focus. While you might not be starting a new social media website, there are aspects of social media that can benefit almost any site. Blogs can drive traffic, and forums can aid with project discussions. Do you have a FAQ section on your site, maybe a well done WIKI would be a better choice. The possibilities for enhancing an existing site are huge. Like all good technical books, this one made me think. Michael Peacock made me reevaluate what a website is, and what it should be. I'm not yet planning a dedicated social media site, but I'm giving serious thought to how I can use social media function to improve my current projects.  If you're a designer or developer using Drupal, then you need to read Drupal 6 -  Social Networking.

Why does making your site accessible matter? First let’s give a definition of accessibility, I like Jim Thatcher’s best. “Basically, technology is accessible if it can be used as effectively by people with disabilities as by those without.”

1. 12.8 percent of adults (21-64) are disabled in some way. Bjelland, M.J., Erickson, W. A., Lee, C. G. (2008, November 8). Disability Statistics from the American Community Survey (ACS). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability Demographics and Statistics (StatsRRTC). Retrieved April 7, 2009 from www.disabilitystatistics.org
2. 8 to 12% of males of European origin have a color deficiency. Accessibility and the Web
3. 5.5 million people have obstructed vision because of cataracts. - Statistics on Blindness and Blinding Diseases in the United States
4. 4.2 million people have impaired vision because of corneal dystrophies. - Statistics on Blindness and Blinding Diseases in the United States
5. Worldwide, 42 million people are blind. - Statistics on Blindness and Blinding Diseases in the United States
6. Approximately 17 percent (36 million) of American adults report some degree of hearing loss - NIDCD Health Information
7. Only 1 out of 5 people who could benefit from a hearing aid actually wears one - NIDCD Health Information
8. 5% of people have javascript turned off - W3 Schools
9. Internet Explorer 6 still has a 17% browser share - W3 Schools

Using IE6 isn't a disability, but it does fall into the realm of accessibility. Choices you make on your site platform and design can limit who has access to your site. Identify your links with only color? Did you eliminate 12% of the male population from seeing those links? Use sound without captions? Did you just remove 36 million Americans from your viewing audience? How many people do you remove from your audience if your site requires the use of a mouse and not just a keyboard? These all add up, and they add up quickly. Each accessibility problem you have removes people from your audience. Maybe the real reason that you haven't become a famous blogger is that the right people just haven't been able to see your site yet.

Interested in 9 Ways to Make Your Site More Accessible?

Celebrating a Newly Discovered Ability

Also, because this event was on accessibility, I needed my presentation to be ultra accessible. I needed a way to caption the presentation for those participants who were Deaf and hard of hearing. A transcript would be provided for those who were deaf-blind.

Glenda doesn't just write about accessibility, she requires it. She isn't just an expert in accessibility, she's also our target audience. Go listen to what the word accessibility means to her.

More bad news from Microsoft. Despite the uproar caused when they originally suggested making developers opt in, to get standards compliance mode in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) they've now quietly returned to this unwise strategy. So developers are now back where we were a year ago, before Microsoft backed away from this plan. It seems we're being reprimanded for not making all of our sites compatible with a browser that hasn't been officially released yet. Why didn't I fix my sites for IE8 Beta? Because I'd have had to fix them again for IE8 Beta 2. Why not for Beta 2? Because I'd have had to fix them for IE8 Release Candidate 1. You get the picture.  Microsoft has a history of making significant changes right before the official release of their products, so I'll be waiting until I see a finished version before I change anything. Here's a few choice quotes about the progress of Internet Explorer 8. IEBlog : Compatibility View Improvements to come in IE8

With IE8’s Beta 1 release, Microsoft demonstrated its commitment to interoperability by making the most standards-compliant default view for web pages IE’s default.

With IE8’s Beta 2 release, we introduced the Compatibility View button. This button enables savvy end-users to resolve compatibility problems they encounter with sites that rely on legacy IE behavior.

When users install Windows 7 Beta or the next IE8 update, they get a choice about opting-in to a list of sites that should be displayed in Compatibility View. Sites are on this list based on feedback from other IE8 customers: specifically, for what high-volume sites did other users click the Compatibility View button? This list updates automatically, and helps users who aren’t web-savvy have a better experience with web sites that aren’t yet IE8-ready.

I translate this progression of quote like this

1. We'll be standards compliant
2. We give you the choice of being standards compliant
3. We'll choose whether you're standards compliant or not for you

While they suggest that users will get to choose to opt out of this "compatibility list" on installation, how many users will select "review and modify each setting individually" on installation? I'd guess very few. This setting will theoretically also be in the preferences, but I'd be willing to bet few IE users will go looking for it there either. Microsoft says that they're taking this course of action because they became aware that:

"...large groups of people were having a less than great experience because they weren’t aware of the manual steps required to make certain sites work."

They were surprised that a new feature was not being properly used in a Beta product? Did it occur to them that fixing the problems with the Beta product would alleviate this issue? How about educating their users about their new feature? Apparently not. Why spend all this time and money to improve their product, and IE8 is a big improvement, if you're going to force it to replicate the behavior of its flawed predecessor?

Website's in general, and blogs in particular, are all about links. Sending people where you want, to content that they want. Are your links easy to find? How about if your site was viewed by someone colorblind or partially sighted?

Accessibility can be viewed as the "ability to access" the functionality, and possible benefit, of some system or entity. - Wikipedia

If your viewers can't find your links, can't navigate your site, can they benefit from your content? The problem I often see with links isn't with the main navigation, but with links in the content of a page. Too often I see content links that don't contrast enough with the main content to be easily identifiable. They blend in to content, and therefore are useless. A link unseen is a link unused. In this sentence, which words are links? It's a trick question actually, because every word is linked. I've used a bit of inline CSS to change the appearance of most of them. I've also suppressed the hover and focus psuedo-classes on some of the links. This means that they don't change when you mouse or tab over them. Not a helpful change if you're trying to find links, but one I've seen in use. The important part of links is that they are consistently identifiable. They need to be seen to be used. Links can have just about any effect applied to them you'd like. Choose from things like added color to bold, italic, underlined and overlined text. These can be done singly, or in any combination. For accessibility purposes, you should use at least two of them. One thing that accessibility guidelines agree on is that color should never be the sole method of passing on information. WCAG 1, WCAG 2 and Section 508 all have similar things to say on this subject. If color is your only identifier, it only takes a poor monitor to make them invisible. Use multiple signals to identify links and everyone will be better off. I'll go into the CSS of links in another post, but for now think on this. The design of your links is important. Color and style, underlined or not, background color or not, these are all can affect the flow of traffic through your site. How important is visitors finding your content to you? Thank you to Glenda Watson Hyatt for starting the discussion that lead to this post. Now I suggest reading her post on 3 Tips for Making Your Hyperlinks More Usable.

Have you heard of Mozilla's Ubiquity? I think it's the beginning of something big.

Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

It's going to change how people interact with the web. I don't know how exactly waht it's going to turn in to, but it's a project that I'm going to be watching.

I've logged close to thirty hours in Internet Explorer (IE) 8 in the last few weeks doing browser testing. The more I use it, the more I think to myself "why would you use Internet Explorer?" There are other, better choices. Here's a quick roundup of what's out there to choose from. Internet Explorer: Each version gets better, I'll grant you that, but that's about all I'll grant you. Even the soon to be officially released IE8 isn't going to stand up to Firefox, Opera, or any of the others listed below. It's a step ahead for IE, but not a big step. Improved security, improved rendering, improved standards compliance... sounds good, doesn't it? Let's look at it another way. The last place runner in the race for the perfectly compliant browser has made huge gains on his competitors... but hasn't caught any of them. Internet Explorer 8 will remind you of Internet Explorer 7. In fact it looks just like it.  As with other Microsoft programs, you have no choice of themes. It does have a few add-ons for functionality, most notably the web developer toolbar which has now been built into IE8. It is supported on the Windows operating system (OS) only. It does not support mouse gestures, a method of executing common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by moving the mouse the current web page, without using the toolbar or keyboard. Firefox: It has good web standards compliance and quick loading times. It's highly adaptable. I see just over 6,000 add-ons available on their site, and about 600 themes. Some of these would be for older versions, but it's till a high level of support for changing function and appearance to suit the user. It is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Several add-ons are available which add mouse gesture functionality. Opera: This may be the hidden gem of the browser world. It's highly web standards compliant, quite fast, and comes with a lot of the features people add to Firefox built in. Mouse gestures, bookmark synchronization, RSS feed previews, and speed dial are all standard. It even allows for custom theming to change the appearance to suite you. It is supported on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD operating systems. Flock: Like social media like Flickr, MySpace, and Twitter? Flock has the benefits of the base installation of Firefox, with all the social media functions you'll need. It's based on their Firefox browser, but with social media in mind. Set it up and it will keep you connected to all of your social sites.  It has themes and add-ons available, but comes standard with a blog editor, photo upload functionality, feed reader, media bar and more. It currently doesn't support mouse gestures, even with an add-on, but it's a relatively new browser and I expect that to come allow later. Chrome: Produced by Google, Chrome is one of the fastest browsers you could choose. Along with good web standards compliance, that makes it a nice choice for the everyday Internet user. While it might not have the add-on base that Firefox does, it has everything the average user needs in a nice presentation. While it doesn't have theme capability, it actually doesn't really need it. Made in a very minimalist style, very little of the browsers is actually visible. What you see is the web page you want. Personally, I really like the ability to turn a tab into a solo page by just dragging it off the page. A very clever option. Currently only available on the Windows OS. Safari: Originally for the Mac, Safari is now available for Windows as well. With the good standards compliance in both versions, this browser advertises itself as the "fastest browser on any platform". While you could argue that other browsers have now surpassed it, you can't argue that it is very fast. While it doesn't come with much in the way of appearance customization, its clean appearance goes along way toward making up for that. While it isn't my favorite choice, it surpasses IE on just about every way measurable. That's not the whole list. There are other choices available. Take a look and I'm sure you'll find a browser with the features you want. Whether it's minimalist styling, hundreds or thousands of add-ons and themes, extremely fast loading, or all of the social media functionality you could want, there is a browser out there that has it. Give them a try, you'll find the one you that's right. Maybe you'll find more than one.

In an effort to start testing site in IE8 while maintaining the ability to test in IE7, I tried Tredosoft's Standalone Internet Explorer 7 and Multiple IE along with an upgrade to IE 8 Beta. Browsing is possible in IE6, IE7, and IE8, but IE7 and 8 share two problems.

1. Once IE7 and IE8 are both installed, their pop-up blockers refuse to turn off.
2. The pop-up blockers start triggering on things like form select menus.

Ever tried to test a form when you can't see the select menus? Useless. Every time you open a select box, the pop-up blocker stops it. Thought your pop-up blocker was turned off? It might be, but it makes no difference. Add the site your testing to your trusted domains? Makes not difference. I also tried Internet Explorer Collections to install Internet Explorers 6, 7, and 8. Identical problems. They do install, and you can test page layout, but testing anything that might induce a pop-up like effect, including form select is not going to happen. Uninstalling either package will not fix the problem. My solution with Tredosoft was to uninstall their products, then IE8, then install IE8 again. Just reverting back to IE7 itself didn't fix the problem, it required the re-installation of IE8. My solution with the Internet Explorer Collection test was also to install IE8, but in this case IE8 was part of the collection itself, so once I uninstalled their product, I was already at the IE7 stage. To get full IE7 functionality back, you might be able to uninstall IE7, then reinstall, but I haven't tried that. For the moment I'm satisfied to test IE6 (Multiple IE) and IE8 beta2. They don't seem to conflict at all. If you've found a way to install IE6, IE7, and IE8 with moderately complete functionality, please let me know.

I finally installed IE8. It's time to starting making sure all my sites working in IE8 before it comes out this spring. I'm using Internet Explorer Collections to run Internet Explorer versions 5.5, 6, 7, and 8. Internet Explorer 5.5 isn't really necessary I suppose, but I was curious how it stacked up. It's doing about the same as Internet Explorer 6 in my testing. Internet Explorer 8 isn't as bad as I'd feared, but it's not as good as I'd hoped either. We'll see how the final version comes out.

I love Portable Apps. A very convenient way to take your tools with you. While they're great for when you're on the road, you know they aren't just for USB drives? You can install them on your hard-drive as well. Need to run two different versions of Firefox? Install one normally, and install the other as a portable. I've been testing sites with a Firefox screen reader called Firevox. Some of Firevox's shortcut keys conflict with my development plugins. That isn't a problem though, because I just setup a portable version on my hard-drive and installed Firevox there. Now I can run Firevox without a problem, and I didn't have to disable any shortcut keys.