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Global Design – Characters, Language & More

Richard Ishida

Richard is the W3C’s Internationalisation Activity Lead.

Character Encoding

• There are many options, but Unicode is the best – it supports many languages in a single character set – making it easy to architect multilingual solutions, and have a mix of languages on a single page (if required).
• Makes storing and retrieving multilingual data in a database much easier
• Also provides extra characters such as © ™ etc
• Has wide support in browsers, scripts, editors, databases etc.

You can declare the encoding in the HTML:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />

Or if you’re using XML:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

Databases must be told to save data as utf-8 also – to maximize compatibility. For more details, see:

Richard’s presentation: slides (PDF) | audio (mp3)

WAI-ARIA – It’s Easy

Steve Faulkner

Web Accessibility Initative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications

It’s a W3C spec, close to becoming a recommendatio, aims to make sense out of NOISE, out of silence.

Wherever possible, use the native tags to convey role and state – where you can’t, use the new WAI-ARIA attributes to add extra meaning – this way, the keyboard operability is built in.

Role and state information can be applied to virtually any HTML element. For instance, the extra code for a button/graphic might be:

<a href=”" title=”OK” role=”button”><img src=”ok.gif” /></a>

The extra attribute, role=”button” is the thing which tells assistive technologies more information – the role of the element is a button, and the standard usage instructions fed to the user would be “to activate, press spacebar”.

Of course, the same thing could be achieved with an image button, but WAI-ARIA can still add extra useful information:

Button off-state:

<input type=”image” src=”okoff.gif” alt=”highlight off” role=”button” aria-pressed=”false” />

and for the on-state:

<input type=”image” src=”okon.gif” alt=”highlight off” role=”button” aria-pressed=”true” />

AJAX and WAI-ARIA

It can help in the following situations – when

1. Users not having access to content changes
2. Users not being aware of content changes

Eg Twitter’s letters left indicator – when you’re typing in the box, screen reader users don’t know the numbers are changing (they are in virtual cursor mode for text input).

Live Region attribute addresses this problem – pause during typing, and the letters left is announced by the screen readers. The relevent attribute is aria-live, properties are “off, polite, assertive or rude”. So they gain access to content changes.

Support
Major browser vendors, yahoo, google, Jaws, etc. You can start using them now, they won’t break agnostic browsers, it will be ignored.

FireVox is a plugin for FF – you can test it with that?

Attributes can be added by unobtrusive Javascript. But if you put them in now, they might not validate.

Firefox Accessibility Extension – useful for testing without a screenreader. Knows about WAI-ARIA attributes and will indicate state changes etc.

ARIA: Accessible Rich Internet Applications/Relationship to HTML FAQ

Steve’s presentation: slides | audio

The Why and Which of JavaScript Libraries

John Resig took us through various scenarios when you write JavaScript:

• Plug & Play:
  Drop in a widget, little or no JavaScript knowledge required, just customise some options and go – no flexibility
• Some assembly required:
  Write common utilities, use pre-made code to distance yourself from browser bugs – flexible, until you hit a browser bug
• Down and dirty:
  Write all code from scratch, deal directly with bugs, quirksmode can save your life – eccessively flexible – almost too flexible
• Use JavaScript library:
  Makes JavaScript bearable, gets the job done fast, simplifies cross-browser support – easily customisable

John then did a comparison between the various JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Prototype, YUI and Dojo, which are commonly in use. A developer survey showed that jQuery and Prototype were used by around 32% of developers; YUI was 22% and others around 14%.

John’s full slides give much more detail of each library’s strengths.

John’s presentation: slides (slideshare) | audio (mp3)