The Tink Tank

The tenth in a series of posts that bring together the two sides of my blog: Food and technology. I’ve asked the great and the good from the web standards community to share their favourite recipes. Next up is a beautifully written Italian classic from Joseph Karr O’Connor, Section 508 educator, accessibility consultant, and the [...]

Most current screen readers support ARIA to one extent or another, and many now support some features of HTML5 as well. With ARIA and HTML5 making increasing amounts of semantic data available to screen reader users, it’s really easy to inadvertently overload people with too much information. Let’s take an example that crops up from [...]

The ninth in a series of posts that bring together the two sides of my blog: Food and technology. I’ve asked the great and the good from the web standards community to share their favourite recipes. Next up is an easy pasta dish from Graham Armfield, accessibility consultant, active supporter of Make WordPress Accessible, and [...]

The Image Description extension re-introduces the longdesc attribute to HTML. Although most people recognise that longdesc is flawed, finding a viable alternative has proved surprisingly difficult. For now longdesc is the best solution we have, but in the interests of finding a better option perhaps it’s helpful to take a step back and look at [...]

W3Conf is the W3C’s annual conference for web professionals. I was asked by Doug Schepers to talk about accessibility, so I took my Design like you give a damn! post and turned it into a presentation. Slide deck Design like you give a damn! (PPT, 18Mb) Useful links HTML5 Accessibility NVDA screen reader Using ARIA [...]

HTML5 includes a handful of section elements that give documents a robust semantic structure. The header, footer, nav, article, section and aside elements give different regions of a document meaning. Amongst other things, that meaning can be understood by screen readers, and the information used to help blind and partially sighted people orient themselves and [...]

This recipe is fabulous for brunch on Christmas eve, or any lazy weekend when you’re feeling indulgent. Cheating is perfectly acceptable if you don’t want to make the Hollandaise sauce from scratch, but it tastes even better when you’ve done it all yourself!

The main element extension specifies a way to markup the primary content area of a web page in HTML5. There are several good reasons for introducing the main element, including a more reliable way for screen readers to pinpoint the start of the primary content area on the page.

When a form is used to update information on the page, it can be troublesome for screen reader users. Unless the screen reader is focused on the relevant bit of the page, the update goes by un-noticed. ARIA live regions are a simple way to improve the experience for screen reader users.

With Guy Fawkes’ night coming up, these cheeseburgers and sweet potato wedges are great to eat before you head out to enjoy the fireworks. They’re incredibly easy to make, and madly versatile, so you can rustle them up anytime throughout the year. Ingredients Serves two people. For the cheeseburgers 250g Ground beef. 2 Shallots. 2 [...]