London: Shawn Lawton Henry on WCAG 2.0

Shawn Lawton Henry is the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative Outreach Coordinator, and so she’s very familiar with WCAG 2.0.

Her chapter in Friends of Ed’s Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance, Understanding Web Accessibility is an excellent practical introduction into the barriers disabled people face when using the web. One point in particular stood out for me: Allowing text to increase in size is not enough, sometimes content can be more accessible when text size is allowed to be reduced. Take for example a person suffering with tunnel vision, the range of view is limited, so a smaller font-size allows more content into their field of vision.

The RNIB Web Access Team are hosting Shawn’s accessibility talk which covers recent developments, current issues, tools, web applications, ARIA, and the WCAG-complementary guidelines ATAG and UAAG.

The talk is on Tuesday 5th June 2007, at the New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University, London, UK. The nearest tube station is Goodge Street. Starts at 7pm. Book your place now! (hat-tip: Stuart Colville)

Apollo alphas released

By Aaron Gustafson | March 19th, 2007

Today Adobe released the first alpha of their new cross-operating system runtime, codenamed Apollo.

For a while now, people have been making desktop widgets using (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but soon designers and developers will have the opportunity to create full-blown desktop applications using the web standards troika as well. This will all be possible using Adobes new cross-platform runtime environment, codenamed Apollo.

Today Adobe released the first alpha of the Apollo runtime environment as well as an SDK and other associated developer tools (the developer downloads require registration). This first alphas only support developing Apollo applications in Flex, a close relative of Flash that is geared toward application development and rich client interfaces, but according to Adobe the next beta should support (X)HTML-based applications. They have not given a time frame for the beta release, however.

Apollo promises to open up a whole new world for designers and developers, allowing us to make our mark on more than just the web as well as allowing us to bring the web experience offline to users on any operating system (I cant wait to see what people come up with). Plus, as Apollo is built on Webkit, it will have excellent standards support right out of the gate, and I think we can all appreciate what a blessing that is.

This is great news from WaSP or the Web Standards Project anyone interested in learning more about them click on the above link, then “about us.”