Google Developer Podcast Ep 9 QuickCap
September 27th, 2007 by tim
I got some time today to listen to this Podcast today on the way to and from one of our other buildings today uptown. I was attending SAS training which is a pretty cool data mining / report generation tool.
This episode was an interview with T.V. Raman and his seeing eye dog Hubbell on accessibility in a developer’s world. Quick recap:
- Why care about accessibility? (As a developer)
- You DON’T know your user
- try to build for the widest range of abilities
- Think about how people with different abilities will use the app
- FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Konquerer. Browser specifics are a problem
- Generic browsers out of the box do not help vision, does not enhance views, or help the motion impaired
- you have to add on to the browser
- There is too much “slop”, you need to take a step back and not assume what your user will use
- CSS is good for getting developer / user balance
- There are very good FireFox accessibility addons
- Google results page is an html mess so it can work in all browsers
- The standard GMail interface is an accessibility nightmare but this is remedied by using the mobile version
- A year from now Ajax accessibility will get much better with FireFox 3
- Bottom Lines:
- What is it that you are using for accessibility? Is it the base platform? Does it come with tools
- What is the focus?
- What platform are you on?
- Google books scan and OCR to voice is decent
- The mobile calendar is also good.
