Web Access Centre Blog

This is a resource that i think i’m going to find handy - cheat sheets for all manner of client and server side languages.

While not directly related to accessibility, when this one turned up in our inbox we thought we’d post it on here as this is a pretty handy resource for anyone working with the web in any way.

Client side languages catered for include (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript (including AJAX), ActionScript and Adobe AIR.

On the server side, there are resources for Apache Web Server, MySQL, .NET, Perl, PHP and Ruby On Rails.

There are also a number of resources for the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI), Google keyboard shortcuts and popular blogging services including WordPress, TypePad and Moveable Type. Firefox and Thunderbird users will also find some cheat sheets they may find useful and for the creative people out there - Adobe Photoshop!

Enjoy!

Would you even know if it was?

For most people, the answer would be no, and it’d be down to a very simple thing - your default operating system colour scheme. Most people who use windows use the default colour scheme, which comes with a white background colour for applications, such as Internet Explorer. Firefox for Windows also comes with a white background colour by default, regardless of operating system default.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is when you forget that you need to specify that you want that white background colour in your web page.

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Hiding text off the screen view using CSS is one of the ways that web authors can provide contextual information for screen reader users. This is just to make the information that is visually obvious, potentially audible. It’s a great help, but you do need to be careful which CSS technique you use.

If DISPLAY: NONE; or VISIBILITY: HIDDEN; is used, there’s a very good chance that screen readers will “obey” this rule, and won’t read the hidden content.

The surest technique is negative positioning. this only places the text out of screen view, but doesn’t hide it from screen readers. So if the content you are styling out of sight should be available to screen readers, try the following rule:

.screenreader {
               position: absolute;
               left: -999em;
               }

This way, most screen reader users will benefit from your thoughtful additional content.