Assistive computer technology and web accessibility

Just thought I’d pass this link on: http://www.assistiveware.com/videos.php (short write-up here — thanks to Roger Johansson for the link.)

These are video profiles of people with disabilities — mild to severe — who use assistive computer technology to improve their lives. Some people use the computers to simply help them with their jobs (such as a blind person who is a professional French-to-English translator), while others use their computers as a lifeline to the rest of the world.
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Armed with a basic understanding of accessibility, and with a little planning, a web developer can create courses and/or websites that contain rich content — even Flash movies and videos — while supporting a majority of assistive computer/alternative web browsing technologies.

ActionScript, JavaScript, and SCORM

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For the last week, I’ve been doggedly attempting to create a hybrid of Flash-to-JavaScript communication techniques for creating cross-browser SCORM-conformant courses that work with almost any version of Flash Player. Today I threw in the towel. Here’s my story.

A cross-browser JavaScript prompt

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While working on a project earlier today, I discovered a nasty little problem… Internet Explorer v7 (IE7) disables prompt() by default! This means you can’t rely on prompt() being available in IE7 when building your online applications. I decided to make a workaround using Microsoft’s proprietary showModalDialog function.

Email address obfuscation

Everyone knows the story: an innocent email address is posted online and a big bad spambot finds it, relaying it to every spammer on the face of the earth… the email address becomes useless due to the 500 spam emails you get every day!

Vertical centering — without using tables!

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Every now and then, a developer will come up against something that was SOOOO easy with table-based layouts and winds up being a royal pain with CSS-based layouts. One of these “d’oh!” moments is when you try to vertically center an element on your web page. Umm… hang on, let me rephrase that: One of these “d’oh!” moments is when you try to vertically center an element on your web page when using Internet Explorer 6.

Making Actionscript calls from Adobe Captivate

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Captivate 2.0 doesn’t include the ability directly manipulate Actionscript. This has been problematic for people like myself who have Flash-based ‘players’ that load and unload both Captivate SWFs and Flash SWFs; we often need the Captivate SWF to perform some kind of action when it reaches its end.