Technically speaking is our blog written by Nigel Dunn on a variety of Internet issues affecting the not-for-profit sector - accessibility, usability, web standards, the opportunities/pitfalls of Web 2.0 technologies, etc. - and maybe the odd foray into jazz.

Latest posts

  • TinyMCE improves the code it generates

    February 12th, 2008

    I was playing around with the current development version of WordPress (2.5 will be released in March) & had a nice surprise when I tried out the WYSIWYG editor. It’s about a year ago that I was last taking a serious look at the code they produced in response to Peter Krantz’s round-up over at “Standards Schmandards”.

    Anyway it was nice to see that the indent button no longer uses the BLOCKQUOTE tag to achieve the desired styling, and that the alignment buttons have dispensed with the ‘align’ attribute.

    It’s been a bugbear of mine that whilst the developers and designers of a site might be required (& also have a passionate desire) to work to standards, the content providers are being offered tools that makes all that effort redundant. In the case of these particular buttons they would have stopped a page from conforming with the Double-A WCAG 1.0 accessibility requirements and…

  • Screen reader company not helping the cause

    January 11th, 2008

    Jared Smith has raised a good point over at WebAIM in his recent post - JAWS license not developer friendly. Basically the licensing agreement for the trial version of the software (one of the most popular screen readers) specifically prohibits using it for testing purposes. I would have thought that the fewer barriers that web developers have in understanding assistive technologies the better. Ultimately it would be to the benefit of JAWS users, and that would also reduce support issues for Freedom Scientific.

  • Documenting page designs

    December 21st, 2007

    A quick post before the Christmas break.

    I recently came across Pearl Crescent Page Saver and I can see that it will be another useful tool to be used in 2008 when I’m working on template designs. Rather than just producing an image of what is visible on the screen, as happens with normal screenshot programs, it will include the whole of the web page. There’s also an option to run it from the command line, so it would be possible from a single command to create a batch file (or similar shell script)  to capture a range of templates that I’m working on.

    I’ve found that it has been very useful for documenting the evolution of templates & I can see that it will be handy for comparing different versions (e.g. how a template looks as plain HTML/CSS pages and when it is integrated into a system, or to ensure that there…

  • Browser market share - 2007

    December 4th, 2007

    After warning about the misuse of statistics, I’m likely to find myself hoist by my own petard now, but here goes…

    It’s over a year since Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was released so I thought it was time to revisit the issue of browser market share, especially after the dramatic take-up of IE7 in the first few months.

    However, first things first. Before getting to the detail of versions it’s worth looking at the overall market share for the browsers themselves. Over on Net Application’s Market Share site they’ve got this graph for November 2006 - 2007. You’ll see that whilst there’s some variation over the period, in general there’s not that much movement - Internet Explorer under 80%, Firefox hovering around the 15% mark, Safari reaching 5% and the rest less than 2%. The statistics collected by TheCounter for November 2007 show a roughly equivalent situation.

    There’s a gradual shift from Internet Explorer…

  • Convergent needs of mobiles and accessibility

    November 20th, 2007

    With all the (technical) media interest in the iPhone I decided it was worth taking a look at the iPod Touch to test out its new web browsing features. Other handheld devices and mobile phones have gone down the route of reducing a web page to fit the restricted environment of the screen, as can be seen in the screenshots for Internet Explorer Mobile. However there seems to be a trend for this paradigm of using a normal page but zooming in & out and scrolling around with your fingers. For example the new mobile operating system that Google have developed (Android) has similar features, as can be seen in this demonstration.

    As I’ve been testing it out I have been struck by the similarities with the screen magnifier demonstration that I posted about before. There have been discussions in the past about the link between improving your search engine ranking and…