Fixing Alt - If Web Browsers Were Celebrities

A humorous infographic was recently published and twittered about, If Web Browsers Were Celebrities (full image). I've noticed more than several of these in the last few months, and one big issue about them continues to nag me: there's no sufficient alternative text! (Also a good case for the longdesc attribute!)

So I decided to to my typing skills to work and provide the alternative text. Hopefully there will be more of these to come on this blog. So here it is, the alt text from the If Web Browsers Were Celebrities infographic:

Browser Compatibility; If Web Browsers Were Celebrities

[Each item includes a nice, large browser icon and a cartoon-style avatar of the celebrity's face.]

Firefox - Can do no wrong, though not as spry as it once seemed. Would be: Morgan Freeman.

Chrome - The new hotness. People love it so much they're nervous it will go wrong and embarrass them later. Would be: Christopher Nolan.

IE6 - Everyone thought it died a long time ago, but still seems to crop up all over the place. Would be: Betty White. [LOL!]

IE7 - After years of giving it chance after chance, performance never gets better. Would be: Matthew McConaughey.

IE8 - Trying desperately to stay relevant, even though it's still the same thing. Would be: The Shatner. [William Shatner]

Safari - Reliable performance, seems to be everywhere. Would be: Samuel Jackson. (Just wait til he collaborates with 'Chrome')

Flock - Hip, but people don't take it seriously anymore. Would be: Michael Cera.

Netscape - When it died, everyone said 'Oh yea, that one!' and then forgot all about it. Would be: Walter Matthau.

Opera - Only ever used if you already have 100 tabs open in IE, Firefox isn't available, and you have no toher choice. Everyone agrees it looks nice, though. Would be: J-Lo. [Jennifer Lopez]

IceWeasel - Who? You mean that weird one? Would be Kristen Schaal (AKA Mel on Flight of the Conchords)

Requires No Browser - Is unquestionably Keanu Reeves. [Avatar of Keanu says 'Wo']

In praise of Internet Explorer 6

On my last evening in Sydney, I was talking to a couple of web developers of similar vintage to myself, and after we polished our ear trumpets and harangued passers-by with shouts of “You young people don’t know you’re born. We fought in the Browser Wars you know” we sat back with a sherry and a custard cream to begin reminiscing about the old days, way way back when Internet Explorer 6 was a good browser.

Because it was, you know. Back in its day it was state of the art. With its super DOCTYPE switching, it managed to be backwards compatible with the broken IE5 box model, while also being super standards-compliant going forward—a trick that HTML5 is just managing to pull off.

IE6 got CSS *right*. Its main competitor, Netscape 4, didn’t – frequently crashing and dependant upon Javascript. Eventually of course we realised that IE6 was full of bugs and CSS weirdness. But that took a while; nobody knew that then because no-one had ever used CSS for designing pages. And Internet Explorer gave a lot of designers stuff that they wanted: web fonts were there (since IE4). You want to colour your scrollbars? Here’s some proprietary CSS to colour your scrollbars. You want filters for opacity, box shadows, transitions and page dissolves and non-standard behaviors? Have some proprietary extras! “Don’t mind if I do”, said the designers and rationalised their behaviour by saying to each other “IE6 is the highest form of browser. If people aren’t using it that’s their problem the silly fools.”

Maxine suggested that I document this fact before history records that we all hated it from the second it was released: we didn’t hate it at all. We loved it.

For those who already knew that, it’s considered axiomatic that the trouble with IE6 was not IE6 itself but but that once IE6 was released, Microsoft stopped innovating. And that’s true — but it’s only half-true. It gives the impression that designers and developers were immediately begging Microsoft to release an upgrade, to standardise all the proprietary flim-flam that they’d built into the browsers.

But they weren’t. While designers eventually began bemoaning the three pixel trouser-flambé peekaboo bug and the lack of :hover on anything other than links, developers were actively propping up IE6 for years and continued churning out IE-only code for ages because it was much easier for them to assume one platform and even code to its bugs rather than code to standards or cross-browser access.

In fact developers of browser-based applications were so desperate not to move on from their IE6 platform that when Microsoft eventually announced IE7 and IE8, it had to ensure all the legacy browser-based systems wouldn’t break by using some magical metatags and heurisitcs.

To spell it out: IE6 didn’t become a zombie despite designers and developers; it became a zombie because of the active support for a monoculture by application developers.

We can look back now and smile at the idea that IE6 was best of breed. We’ve moved on so much! It’s impossible to imagine a world now in which developers proudly browser-sniff to check that the customer is using the “right” browser on the “right” operating system, while they race to code applications that revolve around non-standard “extensions” thereby locking themselves and their users to one browser because it temporarily has the shiniest proprietary extras. That’s absolutely unthinkable as we approach 2011.

The old days eh? Who’d go back there?

Upcoming Accessibility Events

Here are some great events relating to web accessibility that are occurring soon.

• Free 2-day Section 508 conference in Washington DC, Dec 13-14.
• Meetup with Sydney Web Accessibility & Inclusive Design, Tues, Dec 14, Sydney, Australia.
• Perth (Australia) Web Accessibility and Inclusive Design meetup, Wed, Dec 15, 7:30 AM.
• Workshop on Principles of Web Accessibility in Mumbai, India, 16 December.
• CANCELLED! AccessU West 2011, Knowbility’s West Coast web accessibility institute (previously CalWAC) January 10-12. CANCELLED!
• ATIA 2011 Orlando - Assistive Technology Industry Association conference, Orlando, Florida, January 26-29.

Any missing in the next month? If so, please add in the comments.

Accessibility Toolkit on OneForty

I've created an Accessibility toolkit for accessibility-related Twitter applications on the website OneForty, a great directory of Twitter-related apps. A 'toolkit' is a collection of apps with a theme in common. There are only four apps listed in my toolkit so far, so I'd surely welcome any suggestions. Note that the app must be listed on OneForty to be included in a toolkit.

Canceled Accessibility Event

Very disappointing news today. The AccessU West conference by Knowbility scheduled for January 10-12 in San Jose, California, has been officially cancelled due to low registration numbers.

The AccessU training conference in Austin, Texas, May 17-19, 2011, will be held as usual. This event is the original from Knowbility and continues to be very successful. You can also follow Knowbility on Twitter.

Still, it's so saddening that a web accessibility event with major speakers (such as Derek Featherstone and yours truly) has such little interest. Especially in Silicon Valley. Here are some reasons I suspect. Can you think of any other?

1. Accessibility is not 'cool' in Bay area where other exciting web technology is created.
2. Bad timing; beginning of year may be not ideal for people's personal schedules and business' budgets.
3. Competition - too many other great webinars, conferences, and meetups to choose from.

WebAIM’s 2010 Year In Review

As this year comes to an end, we at WebAIM wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. This is an appropriate time for us to look back at the previous year and also to the future.

In 2010, WebAIM saw many changes. For the first time in our history, we functioned primarily without any grant funding – sustaining the project on WebAIM services and consultation. We consulted with five Fortune 500 companies and many government, non-profit, small business, educational, and other organizations. We saw some staff come and some go. We celebrated the birth of the child of Aaron, one of our software engineers, and Stefanie, a former employee.

We saw the end of Google Wave, yet the original WAVE keeps moving along, processing almost a million web accessibility reports in 2010. And that doesn’t include the countless millions of reports processed by those using the WAVE Firefox toolbar. Development of the next version of WAVE continues with a release the first quarter of 2011. We’ve very excited about the future of WAVE!

The WebAIM site also saw much activity with millions of page views from visitors in 219 countries. 42% of our site visitors use Firefox. The top search engine phrase that brought people to our site was, for the 5th year running, “Microsoft Word“. Interestingly, 3 of the top 6 search engine phrases have to do with cognitive disabilities. We will soon be rolling out a significant web site update to both content and visual design.

We posted 15 blog entries, including popular articles on proposed changes to the ADA, the Future of Web Accessibility, and ARIA. Our blog spam filter stopped 162,019 spam messages.

Our e-mail discussion forum saw its most active year ever, with 2,342 posts to date – that’s over 2.6 million distinct e-mail messages distributed.

WebAIM staff also set a new travel record this year, with over 200,000 airline miles flown – enough to go around the world 8 times. We did this in 106 distinct legs. Considering there are only 8 of us on staff and only 3 of us took more than one trip, we really racked up the frequent flier miles. We provided trainings, presentations, consultations, and other services in Nepal, India (twice), Singapore, the Dominican Republic, and at least 15 U.S. states.

Cyndi, Jon, Aaron, Denise, Dio, Jessie, Kim, and I look forward to continuing our mission of bringing about better web accessibility in 2011.

Yearly roundup and festive charidee

What a year it’s been. My employer, Opera, went from 100 million users to 150 million, released Opera Mini for iPhone, Opera Mobile for Android and we went up to eleven on desktop.

I’ve had a the first HTML5 book published with my marvellous co-author, Remy Sharp, which is now in its third printing. Other personal highlights include an invitation from Martin Kliehm to speak with him at South By South West; our panel was voted joint third best of the whole conference.

I’ve travelled to Sweden, Poland, Japan and Australia and met many fabulous people. Special shout outs go to my fellow HTML5 Doctor Oli Studholme, whom I met for the first time last month and who shares the mantle of Nicest Guy On The Planet with Roger Hudson, who organised and guided Steve Faulkner and me for our Australian tour, and who has a fascinating store of traveller’s tales from his days in the movies; he was a scriptwriter for the legendary Aussie soap The Young Doctors (here’s a photo of one his original scripts) and now works in accessibility. From screenwriters to screenreaders; what a career trajectory!

Personally I’ll be glad to see the end of 2010. My Dad had heart surgery. I got sick. My two much-loved grandmothers died; they were both very old, and died without pain and without lingering which is the way to do it, but it’s odd not buying those Xmas presents this year. Tragically, a friend’s baby daughter died.

Festive charidee

Regular readers might recall that I don’t send Christmas cards: polluting the planet to transport someone else’s pre-prepared greetings to be stuffed in a landfill seems like a bad way to spend my money, so I give donation to a charity instead. This year, that charity is Amnesty International because we need freedom of conscience, freedom of thought and freedom from cruelty.

In the UK our government wishes to censor the Internet. In France, the home of chic, they have laws telling women what they can wear and, flushed with the success of that, the government has taken to rounding up members of an ethnic group for resettlement in the East.

Meanwhile, the junta that illegally controls Burma had a pretend election that – surprise! – they won again. Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, languishes in a Chinese jail as a political prisoner. Mad people in the USA are calling for the extra-judicial murder of Julian Assange over Wikileaks. Iran, jealous over the publicity that Sudan got for its superb theocratic misogyny video, sentenced Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani to death by stoning although she was acquitted of any crimes. In Malawi, Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza were sentence to 14 years in prison for being gay and showing no remorse about it.

So instead of sending a card to you, I’m sending some cash to Amnesty; please consider doing the same for me.

Have a Happy Consumerfest. Best of luck for 2011.