James Gregory

As reported by BBC News, a new set of accessibility guidelines have been developed for UK websites.

Although this certainly isn’t anything new — being as a law was passed in 1999 for compliance — and it isn’t even legally binding, it may be used in court if a case arises. This is just one more little pebble added to the mounting landslide that will occur when a disabled user finally does the american thing and sues a company for not providing sufficient means to access their website.

This was a task and a half! As I mentioned earlier I somehow managed to get my Trust Wireless Scroll Tablet working on a dual monitor system, mapped to only the primary monitor; so here’s my little guide on how I managed it.

Recently, while working on my website I’ve become exposed to the Behaviour JavaScript library, which I may say is absolutely wonderful. Very simple and straight forward, completely removes the need for those cursed script tags appended to the bottom of a page; something which I’ve never liked doing but became a bit of a necessary burden! In short it allows you to execute arbitrary code on elements in the DOM using CSS selectors; so, for example, you can apply an onclick event only to elements which match form fieldset div#items a.add¹, very handy indeed!

¹ Any anchors with a class of “add”, within a div with an ID of “items” that itself is within a fieldset in a form tag.

Once again the guys at Mozilla have broken quite possibly the best plug-in for Firefox: the Venkman Javascript Debugger. This is becoming quite commonplace, with every update for firefox disabling the debugger until a fix is released.

Anyway, even though both the extensions manager and Venkmans official website both say there aren’t any updates available, Joe Walker from Getahead has created and update that contains some bug fixes from Bugzilla, but most importantly Venkman now works with Firefox 1.5.0.1!

Source: Venkman for Firefox 1.5

The weekend just past was my first that I’ve had to work since I left Tesco. Not an entirely unpleasant experience, although I would have much rather had my weekend.

The reason we had to work the weekend was down to us launching (re-launching actually) a product for a customer’s extranet, something that a lot of people had been rather worried about. Mainly because, apparently, the previous time this product was launched it corrupted important data for six months without anyone noticing. Wonderful.