Who needs Valid ID ATTRIBUTES or one HTML tag anyways?

I was checking out all my twitter follows today and I noticed one link by John Foliot, a person whom I respect.

RT @johnfoliot: & If your (X)HTML is valid & your ARIA is valid, your document is valid, so don't worry about it. http://ow.ly/BdiE  (@jared_w_smith) #a11y

This link is an interesting argument around ARIA and Standards an argument that I am not personally for or against. However, I am concerned with what will be the unintended consequences of institutional violation of long time standards. Let’s take the conversation a bit further. What I read the conversation to be saying is (and I may be wrong):

“If the page still renders and the same page provides valued information to some group and since there is no harm and there is value in the standard not being complied with then the standard, which is not valid, should not be marked invalid - so instead of failing the page let’s just give a warning.”

To the readers of this blog post, I have to ask, have you ever cursed a software company for extending capabilities of their browser or web based software because it was outside of standards, do you have blogs that say right on top, best viewed with a standards compliant browser. Should the text on your blogs template read “best viewed with standards that I agree with and with exceptions that a respected group of people said are fine?” How do you suggest that I teach this deviation?

Let us take a walk on the web, shall we? So I travel out to a public web site, for a company that I founded in 1996, and I see they are registering people for a big seminar, an accessibility roundtable with distinguished experts, this is good right?

Let us look at this page: https://www.hisoftware.com/SP2010roundtable.htm  .

• Let us ignore that it does not validate for a minute (because the importance of validation is in question, isn’t it)
• Let us also ignore that it has two HTML Tags (same pesky validation issue that does not impact rendering)
• Let us forget the 52 Errors (same pesky validation issue)
• Let us also forget that this page is a tribute to “Spacer.Gif”
  

Instead, let us forget these things because our argument is that there is no harm therefore no foul. To repeat the argument posed: if the page renders properly and meets the site or application developer technology baseline, sorry to drag that specter out, someone has to say it (I know I am taking it a step further and I will show you why in a moment, please be patient), then why not issue a warning and call this page valid! Let us look a little further: on this same page, put forward by the distinguished experts (in this case excuse the pun) we find an interesting error that would have been caught by AccVerify (IMHO – the gold standard). The error is with the ID’s on the form. IDs are case sensitive (same pesky validation issue); therefore, what do you think happens in the following case”

//Please excuse the stripped HTML for blog purposes.

label for='name'

Name/label td width="50%" height="25" class="bodyText" align="left"

input id="Name

Now in IE 8 if you click on that label (Name) the input field is selected, now why not, the attribute requirement is silly, case sensitive? Why not change all validators to warn, most miss it anyway?

Now in the Latest; Firefox, Opera, and Safari (please forgive the lack of versions) nothing happens when tabbing or selecting. So why am I even looking at different browsers? I should not have to look at different browsers if this page was developed to standards. Is this not the purpose of the standards to begin with, standards are not for fun, are they?

Look at this table:

table role="presentation" width="100%" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0

Is there not some valid attribute that can be used on this static HTML page to let a user of “AT” know that this table is for layout only? Shouldn’t the people that cry out for the need of standards compliance be the ones that defend them versus making excuses as to why it is OK to break them?

Why not just add stuff, separate from the standards and let AT Vendors take advantage of the new stuff! ON HTML5: why fight about accessibility attributes or features in the standard? Just put them in and User Agents and screen readers will take advantage of all the new stuff, even if they are not in the standard!

I know I take this a bit too far, but I have to remember my Dante; what was it Canto XXIII, Eighth Circle, Sixth Pit? OK I Digress, I have to ask my readers - when I go out and mentor young engineers, and they say “It works in IE, Firefox and Opera, which is all I code for” - what should I say to them? Should I tell them that the standards are arbitrary and that if it renders for their technology baseline, that they have selected for their project, then they are good? What do you think?

Download PDF of the Post: http://www.yonaitis.com/WhoneedsValid.pdf

Rob Yonaitis, HiSoftware founder, writes his 1st Fiction Novella

A Horror of an office by Rob Yonaitis
download complete book:


A Horror of an Office
A Novella by Robert B. Yonaitis

Synopsis
I am working on my new novella “A Horror of an Office” this is a fictional tale that is meant to be funny while combining urban legend and other fictional tales to provide a worst case office situation. The company name is Blue Marine Software.

Characters

William – The Founder of the company is a Scientist with Degrees in Computer Science and Aeronautical Engineering, specializing in Aeronautics and Space Studies. William is an amateur artist and a Pilot who has authored several books. William dedicates his free time to different local charities and is a supporter of the arts.

Kent – The CEO hired by William before he stepped down from control of the company to focus on his inventions and improve his flight skills. A man of short stature that has to put his name on everything that he did not write and then frames it and hangs it in the office. He can be seen at any moment sitting in his office staring at his pc with a blank expression on his face. The type of a man that would pay a marketing company to pose a photograph to make him appear to be the tallest when he was the shortest.

TC – The CFO who always works with Kent (Partners in Crime). Whenever he talks he tells the young boys in the company, his favorites, that if they work hard they can get a watch or car like his. At company parties he brags how this company paid for his watch, this company paid for his car, and this company paid for his pants. TC can always be counted on to lie to investors or shareholders!

Johnnie – Johnnie is the VC that recommended Kent. Johnnie can normally be seen with a glass of Vodka in his hand and if there is no vodka in the office TC will send out one of his boys to the package store to get it fast. Johnnie has no idea how much money Kent and TC Steal from him nor does he know how often they lie to him.

Lilly – Lilly is the salesperson that cannot sell and has one claim to fame, she did not testify against TC and Kent at the last company that they were at together “Moon Crater Software.” Lilly has been the salesperson of the quarter for three straight quarters, not because she could sell but because Kent assigns other peoples sales to her as payback.

Sub-Stuff
The company is partnered with the world’s largest software company “Acme Software” and Kent is doing all he can to steal from them in every way possible. The story takes place in 2012 and as I have chapters ready I will post them. I look forward to all feedback.

Dead Space is now my Personal HiSoftware Museum

This weekend I was preparing the third floor of my house with what I needed for taking classes at Embry-Riddle (ERAU.edu) this term. Well, I am one of those people that collects stuff and the third floor is a collection point. In the very beginning , HiSoftware had one employee, me and from 1996-98 I had collected much stuff!

The company started in what was essentially an unfinished Attic, the attic having a dead space of about three feet along the wall (because of the roof) does waste much space. So, as I was setting up the space it seemed a shame to waste the three fet of space. Thus, I had a dilemma, what to do with the dead space?

As you can imagine I had much stuff from the founding of Hiawatha Island Software Company (HiSoftware). You can download my PDF Book, My thoughts on the founding of HiSoftware online and free and no registration of course!

I gathered together the stuff:

• My desk chair worn and junk - trivia: I wrote the first TagGen In that chair and later the award winning Hi-Caption and AccVerify.
• My First Stock Certificate
• Box Sets of the WebSite Promotion Suite and Hi-Traffic Suite
• TagGen T-SHIRT
• Original Delphi Build Environment
• ETC...

I set up an old Monitor to play the da Vinci Award video

So now, in the dead space, is the HiSoftware Museum, dedicated to those that made HiSoftware special; note- none of the original engineering, qa and board of director members are left at HiSoftware.

Cheers,

Rob

viridis ire

I was just out on the street talking to the Waste Management people; WM is the company that picks up my recycling at my lab (34a Labs). This is a good change if you consider not long ago they would have been here to pick up my trash. So from trash I went to no trash and how did I get here? About 1.5 months ago my city (Concord, NH USA) started a new program where if you wanted to have them do trash pickup then you need to buy trash bags from the city, however, recycling was free. I have to admit that at first I was upset! I ended running into them as they were just picking up my recycling when I was going out for my containers: one large trash can for the bottles, cans, plastic containers and the smaller orange bucket that is used for paper and cardboard.

I went back and put these back on my deck and headed in to get the one soda can and some paper, that I had gathered since the night before, and deposited them into the containers. After doing this I carried some onion scraps and some tomato ends into my new compost bin in my back yard.

I was talking to the Waste management people to tell them that I had one trash bag left (the purple Barney bag) and when it was gone I would not be using them anymore. This is the first in a long list of steps that I had taken to reduce my personal impact on the environment. The list of what I have done includes but is not limited to:

· Insulation of the lab space
· Adding another layer of R-19 insulation in the labs attic space
· Adding Multi Paned insulated windows and storms
· Replacing all light bulbs with energy saving bulbs

So now; having done all of the above I have done the last step, no trash cans at the different workstations just recycle bins. I kind of have the same feeling that I had after I stopped smoking. When I stopped smoking, I wondered for the first year, why did I smoke when I knew it was damaging. I suppose that there is some odd intersection between doing the right thing and the path of least resistance. It was very hard to quit smoking (bad habits are not easily ejected) and it was no easier than turning 34a Labs green. So now I am thinking why or how was I ever so unaware of the waste of resources. I hope I am a better ex resource waster than an ex smoker.

Don’t get me wrong, if I am out at a bar and perhaps had one or two too many glasses of wine, scotch or Guinness I may borrow (borrow loosely used here) a cigarette from you totaling perhaps 10 cigarettes a year compared to the three packs a day that I smoked about eight years ago. So I suppose, I may find myself wasting something here or there, but every time I do, I will not make excuses and I will work to keep it rare.

Training young engineers to code with accessibility in mind

In recent days there was a conversation online about education of and outreach to young developers to support the development of accessible site s and applications. I have had some experience with this so I thoughtI would write an article on this topic and some of the hurdles that I have overcome in accomplishing this task. The issues I have dealt with and my thoughts on the same are enumerated below:

• Company commitment
• Perceived value
• Sex
• Money
• Players of FUD

The first thing to address is lack of company commitment. By this I mean that the company does not support the training of internal developers to better prepare and dare I say enlighten them about developing for standards.In most cases the respect of these standards leads to the outcome being more accessible. I remember as the founder of HiSoftware I developed a comprehensive training process for interns and new engineers that included mandatory reading of standards every day for one hour, before company work was started, and with pay. This may seem silly but once they were educated, the developers built applications that were usable by design and not as an afterthought.

Frankly, this initially seemed like a large cost to the company and the shareholders, but these efforts resulted in products developed under this regiment that were to become the standard for years afterward. Next is perceived value. Again, at HiSoftware, I would immediate involve all new employees with accessibility, whether they were a part of sales, marketing, or engineering. A breeze through the archives of the HiSoftware press releases will show many employees providing quotes for projects with which they were involved. From a perception perspective, this brought them pride in their work product. It was our goal that everyone could go home with pride in both the company that they worked for and the product that they produced. This pride reinforced their commitment towards development to standards that supported accessibility.

Let us not forget sex (or perhaps the “appeal factor”.) We all go through life and if we are lucky we build a group of friends, not all are equal in achievement or personal goals. So when your group of comrades meets up on Thursday night and one says they are designing a new application for some company like Google that will change the world-and the other says that they have designed a tool to help developers create accessible content-there is a gap. To ignore the wisdom of the crowd would be foolish, so as leaders and innovators we need to give the people we are educating in accessible development the tools to speak with pride about the solutions they are building and in a way that20has universal appeal. And we need to be serious about this, some marketing and not the threat of a law suit is needed to achieve this goal.

Money, much on the mind of the 20 year old, and frankly not a bad thing, needs to also be addressed. Traditionally the hottest, sexiest jobs pay more. This means that unless people are beating down the door for software or websites designed to be accessible by default then companies are not bending over backwards to pay for this development.

Because of this, standards groups like the Authoring Tool AccessibilityGuidelines Working Group (AUWG),http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/Overview.html, are needed to drive the content and application creation tools to develop Accessible by default.” Accessibility truly needs to be pervasive in the organization. Players of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) are everywhere and this is to be expected. We need to be very clear, that in every market there are the carpetbaggers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetbagger ). Those that come into the Accessibility space only for financial gain. They do not embrace the importance of their work nor do they care about the people they are serving. Their job is to tell you about accessibility and then to make you afraid of it. Then after they scare you they then sell you the solution on how to fix it. Oh and there is a cost. What is perhaps the biggest and most appalling part of this approach is that the solution does not always work and they don’t care. Anyone who has worked in this field knows what I am saying is true, whether they admit it or not.

So what are the problems and the impact that result from what I’ve listed above? Well due to pressures; financial, peer, work and bad characters, accessibility gets a bad rap – and we have to admit that. I have seen it firsthand. Just recently I was chatting with a young engineer and he was stating that he wanted to add accessibility to his tool box. This was good because I believed I finally had gotten through to him but alas I did not and the reason I say I did not is because his plan was to develop the site and then make it accessible as an added service. While progress, it’s certainly not the end game that I would embrace. This is not the time to pat ourselves on our backs there is much work to be done and this is a good cause.

Blogged: A Horror of an Office Chapter 1-8 Roll-up PDF

Chapters 1-8 PDF Rollup
Chapters 1-8 PDF Rollup

http://www.yonaitis.com/A Horror of an Office.pdf

428 kb

The Northern way of looking at new standards (HTML5)

Last week I was at a very interesting conference in London. During the conference a few questions on HTML five were posed to the attendees as related to accessibility features and whether they should be removed or included. One example was the table summary attribute. The question was should it be deprecated and if it had value- should it not be visible to all. I found this interesting and it lined up with other questions of the day such as redundant usage of Title and Alt attributes for form fields.

So, as an old-timer (yes I can now wear that title), I am against deprecated items, so why deprecate the summary attribute? I think this question itself is simply a group of developers assigning value judgments to something based on how they see the future working. When I hear this, the first thing I feel, a guttural reaction, is STOP.

There were two questions; One should it be removed and two if it was valuable should the summary be visible versus a non-display attribute. I will deal with both questions at the same time; Why not, by default, keep it the way it is and add a new attribute called “summary-visible” if you want as a way of answering! Personally I think leaving it the way it is works.

There are many sayings that I can think of, like; “if it isn’t broke do not fix it.” OK, I digress. In the north we have a way of going out into the wild. We understand the utility of clothes. Let’s say you were going to drop me onto Mt. Washington, New Hampshire, USA. This mountain is known to have some of the worst weather in the world. So, if I was going to be dropped, I would want layers- all that the North Face could offer. So even if you were dropping me on a day where it was 60 degrees and sunny, with no wind I would want to be prepared.

In the north we know that if you are too warm you can always take off a layer, we do not fear this, and we embrace this fact. It is not having too much that is a threat but rather it is having too little. If you drop me on the mountain in a t-shirt and shorts because it is all I need today or at the moment then I do not have layers at my disposal. I will not be prepared if the weather declines. You have taken away my choices.

Back to the conference-in addition to the table summary attribute new form fields were also discussed and the question was what levels of styles should be allowed. I go back to the layers, give us a slider or a submit button and let us style it how we want and leave options open for people to override the designer via the browser.

By doing this you make it easy to train young engineers that they should follow standards. To not do this and to say that an attribute was deprecated because some people in an ivory tower decided it’s time had come is at best a poor and makes it difficult on those who train on the importance of not using deprecated elements.

I would suggest that the people working on HTML 5, making decisions on what to throw out, think of the northern way. Once you throw out the summary attribute and others that have utility-you may not get them back. By leaving the attribute as valid you do no harm, in fact you just give another layer that can be peeled back if not needed. It is always easy to take off a layer if you are too hot on the mountain but if you are too cold and have no layer to put back on you are out of luck. One can never go wrong by providing choice, if it is there you can use it if you want to if it is not, well you will be cold on the mountain. The frame of mind on the new standard as items are removed must be does it hurt to leave it alone or does it hurt to add it, if not add it. Looking back, I remember I was told XHTML or nothing, now it is HTML5. We know that what is to be the standard has a short life and innovation will replace it soon enough it should be made easy to adopt.