BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Apple’s iOS, which is what iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad run, has many accessibility features built-in, but it does not correct colour blindness (which should perhaps be called colour vision deficiency instead). But now there is an iPhone app (also available for Android) that does just that.

Dan Kaminsky’s DanKam is an augmented reality app that uses the phone’s camera to filter images in real time, changing their colours to make them easier to see for colourblind people.

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Posted in Accessibility, iOS.

There are occasions when you want to fine-tune where, when, and how WordPress outputs search forms. For example you will likely want to change the default HTML used for the form, and you may want to display more than one search form on some pages.

In this post I’ll show several ways of customising the HTML of search forms, how to conditionally display a search form, and how to display more than one search form on the same page without breaking validation.

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Posted in WordPress.

Back in June last year I posted a question about Validating HTML5 in the browser, looking for a tool similar to the HTML Validator Extension for Firefox that supports HTML5.

Unfortunately no such tools seem to exist, which makes quality assurance of HTML5 a lot more time consuming than I would like it to be. Not happy with that I decided to take a look into doing something about the situation myself, and I managed to come up with a solution that satisfies my personal HTML5 validation needs for now.

The solution involved two things:

• Installing a local instance of Validator.nu (which validates many HTML variants, including HTML5) to avoid spamming the W3C or Validator.nu servers and to avoid sending potentially restricted or sensitive data to a third party server.
• Creating a Firefox extension that uses the local Validator.nu to automatically validate all pages you load in the browser (including those that are password protected, on local domains, or behind a firewall) and display the result in the status bar.

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Posted in Browsers, HTML 5, Productivity.

A common complaint users of other operating systems have about Mac OS X is its perceived lack of keyboard shortcuts. Many think you have to use the mouse for nearly everything in Mac OS X. I see many people who have switched from Windows to Mac do this while muttering about the lack of keyboard commands.

As a long-time Mac user and someone who likes to avoid touching the mouse as much as possible, I can tell you that this is about as far from the truth as you can get. You can in fact do just about anything in Mac OS X without ever touching the mouse.

Granted, some of the shortcuts are pretty obscure since they don’t appear in menus – you have to know them to use them. That is probably the main reason for people believing that they don’t exist. So to help Mac OS X users, new and old, to make better use of their keyboard I wanted to share the Mac OS X keyboard commands I find myself using the most. Some are obvious and well known, others are more obscure.

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Posted in Mac, Productivity.

In Title Junk, John Gruber brings up the usability problems that poorly designed web page titles can cause. He makes many good points – I posted similar thoughts in Document titles and title separators back in 2004.

Writing good titles for web pages is far from a new subject. A little reminder every now and then doesn’t hurt though, so here are a few simple guidelines.

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Posted in Accessibility, Usability.