By Brigitte Simard on 3 March 2010
We often get asked about by clients, so I thought I’d also share some thoughts on this matter in this blog post.
Accessible PDFs
PDF files have always been embedded in web pages and that’s not likely to change in the near future. The real challenge here is making sure that the information in the PDF can be accessed by all users, as screen reader and screen magnifier users have traditionally had problems with PDFs. However, screen readers can now read aloud PDF files and they can be magnified by screen magnifiers.
Creating a new PDF
Firstly, you’ll need to make your Word document accessible through the following steps:
To create the PDF you then need to select the toolbar icon:
The alternative way of creating PDFs, that is, printing to Adobe PDF should not be used. This latter method does not tag the PDF document, meaning that all heading information is lost.
After the PDF has been created, you must then check that the document is properly tagged and bookmarked.
Converting existing PDFs
With Acrobat Writer, it’s possible to modify an existing PDF through the following steps:
- Add new tag
- View, Re-order, Rename, Modify, Delete or Create tags
- Update the reading order
- Add alternative text to images
- Convert a scanned PDF with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
We will follow this post up with a more substantial article in the next couple of months, but let us know in the meantime what your thoughts are on the accessibility of PDFs.
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By Brigitte Simard on 4 February 2010
The debate has been going on over the last year or so about the continual support for Internet Explorer 6 – Should it stop or shouldn’t it. Finally this weekend, Google announced that it will begin to phase out support for IE6 as it identified the browser as vulnerable in the recent cyber attacks on Google in China. So it seems we have these attacks to thank for this.
Let me explain – As a developer, IE6 can cause all manner of issues and extra work, and when Microsoft announced last year that it would support it for at least another 5 years, I’m sure I wasn’t the only developer whose heart sank! To support IE6 when developing websites means a lot of extra effort, not to mention the fact that we can’t implement more up-to-date techniques without providing an alternative version for IE6 users.
Aside from this, IE6 has security flaws which haven’t gone unnoticed and it seems hackers made the most of these and were confident enough to attack Google.
So, this announcement from Google is welcomed by me and the rest if the developer community I’m sure, and it seems that now pressure is mounting for the browser to be phased out completely. Can we finally hope that that IE6 will be a thing of the past?
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By Brigitte Simard on 19 January 2010
Forms are common on a wide variety of websites and it’s important that they’re well designed and laid-out. There are many tools and extensions to help with this and one I came across recently is a free CSS form designer extension for Dreamweaver from DMXzone.
It allows you to create forms visually, using a simple drag and drop interface and a variety of CSS styles. It’s very useful for creating short simple forms and allows you to populate fields with default values such as days of the week or with dynamic values from a Dreamweaver record set.
There are however, a few things that could be improved with this extension. Firstly, the HTML mark-up isn’t 100% accessible as labels aren’t properly assigned to checkboxes and radio buttons (they have been implemented following an out-of-date w3c recommendation). It would also be difficult to manage a form with a complex layout with this extension, as the HTML mark-up is not really flexible and when new field elements are added, they’re automatically added at the end of the form (not within context) and have to be dragged and dropped into position. Also, the CSS produced by this tool isn’t cross-browser compatible.
So in summary, this is a useful free tool for creating short, simple forms, but to really be suitable for longer, more complex forms, the extension requires a few modifications. You can try it yourself by downloading the CSS form designer extension for free from DMXzone.
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By Brigitte Simard on 22 December 2009
We’ve been a bit light on web development tips on the blog of late, but I had some thoughts on the !important CSS declaration that I thought I’d share.
The declaration’s been valid since CSS1 but it seems to have acquired a bad reputation over the years. But, it can be a useful and powerful command if used properly. The declaration is a keyword that can be added at the end of any CSS pair of property/value. For example:
p {margin-left: 5px !important}
It assigns a weight to each rule depending on the specificity of its selector and its position in the source. This determines which style is applied to an HTML element. When the !important declaration is used on a pair of property/value, that value becomes the most important for that property and overrides any others.
The !important declaration can be used for other things such as overriding inline styles and print stylesheets. It has its downsides but, if used carefully, it can save time and effort.
If this is of interest then look out for a much more in-depth article on this command, with examples, which will be published on our website in January 2010.
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