Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Christian Heilman talks about how to make web apps accessible at the panel on accessible web applications at the European Accessibility Forum in Frankfurt.
This is the presentation where he was quoted on Twitter as saying “web design is a form of autism.” Listen and find out what he meant.
FairShare is one of several web apps that will follow your copyright protected content. If you think your content is being used without permission, FairShare is a way to track it.
Start by setting up the content your want Fair Share to watch: your blog, your photos, or any text that you publish. (To track images, you have to enter your name and email in a separate screen. Click the “Learn about FairShare for images” link to do this.)
Provide a URL of a blog feed or whatever the content is you want to track. If you are tracking a static page with no RSS feed, it takes a bit of extra work on your part to create a feed for it. The FairShare Help files explain how to do this. Select the Creative Commons License that you want to apply to your work.
Finally, create an account. You provide your email address, create a password, and complete a CAPTCHA form to get started. Your email address is what FairShare uses to notify you when your text or images are found published by someone else. You must agree to the unreadably formatted terms of service, as well.
There is a paid subscription service with additional features. Once you have an account set up, you can add more sites for FairShare to monitor.
A fun Twitter app, a good explanation of RDFa and the semantic web, and a simplified checklist to use with WCAG 2.0 specs. More . . .
There’s another fun web app to use with Twitter. It’s called Twitter Grader. It isn’t quite as useful as some of the apps growing up around Twitter, but it’s fun to play with and get your “grade.”
RDFa, Drupal and a Practical Semantic Web at CMS Wire is a terrific piece in clear language that explains what a sematic web is and how RDFa fits into that concept. It also will help RDFa newbies grasp what it’s all about.
WebAIM’s WCAG 2.0 Checklist. WebAIM has simplified and organized the WCAG specs into an easy to use format with simplified explanations of how you can meet the standards. This would make a great handout or required reading assignment to add to your students’ reading lists. It could also be useful as a grading rubric for assignments that are required to be accessible.
Thanks to Laura Scott from rare pattern for telling me about Wordle. Here’s what I’ve been talking about lately on this blog.
Laura also mentioned TweetStats, which I tried out, too. Here’s a vision of what I’m Tweeting about (or to).
Two interesting examples of helpful online tools that are free and highly useful. WEB APPS!