I have to admit that I had no idea what the hell a favelet was, so I Googled it. Smashing Magazine had this to say, it seemed relevant, so I shamelessly stole it from http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/24/bookmarklets-favelets-and-snippets/ Hopefully the copyright gods won’t strike me down:
If you’ve used them once you’ll never be able to work without them. Bookmarklets (or Favelets) are tiny Javascript-Snippets, which are stored within a bookmark and add particular functionalities to the browser you’re using. It doesn’t matter whether you browse, bookmark, look up, search, design or program – depending on your interests, bookmarklets can significantly enhance your efficiency and productivity.
Ok, got it…now this session might make some sense to me. WARNING FROM THE FUTURE: unfortunately, I was a little lost in this session until I understood that the presenters were showcasing favelets they built and use to look at and test ARIA and HTML5 elements in the browser. I must have been in the minority in this audience, ’cause pretty much everyone else seemed to know what the presenters were talking about.
Speakers
- Jim Thatcher
- Suzanne Taylor (works for Pearson)
Favelets: http://jimthatcher.com/favelets
- His favelets were inspired by web accessibility Toolbar
- Make things go faster and be more thorough
- In IE, they’re saved as bookmarklets
- Started with images
- Wanted to provide alerts and alert counts
- Text size favelets
- Skip links favelet checks for skip links and whether they will “work” or not in IE6-8
- Form labels favelet
- Presented a slide with a large list of favelets, which I won’t transcribe here
- DOM reader for HTML5 canvas objects
- Simple example: simple drawings – short text alternatives
- Fallback content is supposed to be sent to Assistive Technologies; AT tries to read whatever is displayed.
- Conditional drawings – dynamically generated text alternatives: JS draws on canvas, Writes parallel content to the DOM
OPEN ISSUES AND NEW APIS
- Tracking focus for: Magnifiers
- scrolling with text to speech
- scrolling with voice control
- support for keyboard access
- All role attributes
- All aria 1-* attributes
- Shows all of these, whether they are coded correctly or not
- Tabindex=”-1″ (with WAI-ARIA developer coes keyboard access; developer must code any changes in focus)
- Referenced elements
- Referencing based on IDs
- Make choosing numbers more user-friendly
- If there’s interactivity on the canvas, is that passed via API to the AT? No, you pass it to the DOM, which then passes it to the AT.
- Is it valid HTML to put any tag into Canvas? Yes
- Are favelets screen reader accessible? Long answer that eventually got to “yes”
- Which browsers show ARIA? All show some, but they’re not consistent.
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