Recent work
This month is mostly taken up with Drupal and jquery. Jquery is my favourite framework - its developers are at pains to make its output as accessible as possible and there are also some nifty plugins for iphone development. Below, is an accordion influenced by the 'Collapsible Content' chapter of 'Designing with Progressive enhancement' by the Filament Group. The accordion is keyboard accessible, none of the content is hidden from screenreaders, the element with focus is highlighted via CSS and, for good measure, ARIA roles and attributes are applied for screenreaders and browsers that can make sense of them. This content might be more accessible and usable as a plain page of course, albeit with some vertical scrolling. But it serves as a demo of an accessible accordion, and accordions and widgets like them are much in demand.
Below this is an example of aria-enhanced accessible tabs, again from 'Designing With Progessive enhancement'.
HTML, CSS & JavaScript.
I have resisted going native on phone apps and opted instead to go the HTML, CSS and Javascript route. This is partly sloth - do I really want to learn Objective C? It's also because of all the good stuff in HTML4, HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. I hope I don't regret this decision. So far, so good.
PHP & MySQL
My bread and butter stuff at the moment. Very impressed by the PHP PDO class in PHP5. In some ways it's harder to use than old-style code for database connections and queries. But it's more secure, makes it easier to abstract data and speeds up development even in small applications.
The Mac, testing and ipod touch
The Mac with Coda is terrific for production. And it continues to be a really good tool for browser and accessibility testing. With VMWare on my laptop running Windows XP and NVDA, JAWS, Window Eyes, Super Nova, I can test on two platforms and on various flavours of IE and Firefox, Opera and Safari. The iPod Touch is great for iPhone testing - wifi access and the same Webkit browser as the iPhone. It's not a bad music player too!
Latest Drupal
Latest jquery
My preferred option for parsing live Yahoo Weather info would be simpleXML in PHP5. This server is PHP4 though, and I don't think it's worth the pain just for this demo. So let's just say the weather is average for the season.
Toolbox:
