“If you want your website to be accessible there are two things you absolutely have to do:

• Specify that accessibility is essential in your requirements definition.
• Arrange that the site is tested for accessibility.

The first requires a bit more than just saying “the site must be accessible” but there are lots of examples of such requirements and people who can help you write them.

However, the second is much more difficult because:

• Defining what needs to be tested is complex: what disabilities, what functions, what assistive technology, what browsers.
• There are a variety of ways to do the testing: automated testing, desk checking by people who understand accessibility, testing by people with a variety of disabilities, testing by end-users.
• The testing cannot be done solely by the developers because a developer is unlikely to have a sufficiently detailed understanding of the issues to test adequately.

“

Read the full article at IT Director and get tips to improve your web site’s accessibility.

“Visually impaired users rely on alternative text for a description of what an image conveys. Using alternative text, you can provide a text description that conveys the same information as the information you are trying to communicate through the image that the text is associated with.

You can customize the alternative text displayed for images by setting the alt attribute of the appropriate <IMG> tag in SharePoint ASPX user pages such as the Home page or list view pages. For example, you can set the alternative text used for the Home logo and other images contained within these pages by modifying the respective Default.aspx or AllItems.aspx page. Alternative text for logos can be customized within the following ASPX pages of a site definition:

• Default.aspx. The Home page.
• AllItems.aspx. The page for viewing all the items in a list.
• NewForm.aspx. The page for creating a list item.
• EditForm.aspx. The page for editing the contents of a list item.
• DisplayForm.aspx. The page for viewing a list item.
• Site application pages in the Local_Drive
:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\Locale_ID directory. For a list of possible values for Locale_ID, see LCID Property.

When you create a site definition, as described in Creating a Site Definition from an Existing Site Definition, the new site definition directory includes one Default.aspx file, as well as AllItems.aspx, NewForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx, and DisplayForm.aspx files for each list type (for example, announcements, tasks, document libraries, and so on). Each list you create in turn creates an instance of one of the list types, whose supporting XML, ASPX, and other files reside in one of the subfolders of the Local_Drive”

Read the full article at Microsoft’s own Developer Network.

“Many webmasters like the idea of adding background music to their web sites but most shy away from doing it worrying about slow loading pages and large file sizes. There are many different ways to add background music to your site and some of them don’t require large files to achieve professional results. Let’s examine all the different ways to add background music to your site and rate them to find the best solution for you.1) MIDI Files

MIDI files are very small because they actually use your sound card’s built-in instruments to create the sounds. The problem is that most sound cards don’t have any decent sounds to start with, plus no two sound cards sound alike and therefore the results are very unpredictable. MIDI files usually sound like they’re coming from one of those cheap Casio keyboards. Using MIDI for background music is very likely to make your site seem amateurish. Want to know how to do it anyway? Just add the line to your site. (Replace xyz with the name of the MIDI file you want to use!) The Autostart command will play the file automatically when the page is loaded.

PROS; Very small file size, easy to implement

CONS: Unpredictable results, amateurish sounds”

Read the full article hosted by Webraydian and learn more about the many different sound types.

There are many fantastic points and examples in this essay by Phillip Hoyt. One of the most unique items he brings up is the file type’s abilities with regards to Gamma Correction.

“From the LibPNG site: “Gamma correction basically refers to the ability to correct for differences in how computers (and especially computer monitors) interpret color values.” There are two factors here: the ability to predict what an image, say a photograph, will look like on another monitor; and the ability to match the colours from different sources on a single page. Predicting what an image will look like is a laudable goal, but unrealistic for me to explore here since it requires seeing the same image on two different computers side-by-side. I can, however, compare html/css colours to image colours. Ideally, a colour which Photoshop (or your graphics application of choice) calls BF2026 should be indistiguishable from the same colour embedded in a web page.

For this test I cut the same graphic down the middle and placed bars of the same colour (by hex code) beside the image for comparison. I tested on graphics created in both the GIMP and in Photoshop with upredicatable results.

The GIFs matched the html colours on all machines and browsers that I tested. There were only two cases that I found where the PNGs matched the html colours — the Photoshop PNG in Apple’s new Safari browser, and the GIMP PNG in Mozilla.”

Read the full article hosted by evolt.org.

“As you may have gathered, the format is a bit different from what you may be accustomed to when writing an XML document. This is because you need to follow the specification used for captioning set by the World Wide Web Consortium, and the XML document prepared for use with the captioning component must follow that standard.You will notice that you can set the styling for the text, and that each caption needs to have a start and an end point. This means each caption must have a begin attribute, which determines when the caption should appear. If the caption does not have a dur or end attribute, the caption disappears when the next caption appears, or when the FLV file ends. The begin attribute means, “This is where the caption becomes visible.” The dur attribute means, “This is how long the caption remains visible.” Alternatively—and this is really a matter of taste—you can omit dur and replace it with end, which means, “This is where the caption stops being visible.”

In this example, the first caption would appear 25 milliseconds into the start of the video, and remain visible for 3.25 seconds.

Where do you get those timing numbers? You can use the time code in the FLV Encoder to find them, the new Preview parameter in the FLVPlayback component, or you can use the time code displayed in the QuickTime or Windows Media Player interfaces. Another place would be in the video editing software used to create the video in the first place.

Here’s how to hook Timed Text captions to the FLVPlayback component:”

Read the full article on Digital Web Magazine.