Creating accessible bar charts (in HTML/CSS)

Pete Giraffe has written about "
Creating Accessible Bar Charts" in his "Standards-Schmandards" BLOG on 6 February 2005. To quote:-

A lot of chart data is tabular by nature. One of the most common chart types used to present tabular data is the bar chart. On the web we use the table element to present tabular data (and avoid using it for layout!).

Here is what we would like to achieve:

• Present data in an accessible and browsable way for as many users as possible.


• Not give up visual pizzazz for sighted users.


• Stay compatible with server side creation of the chart from dynamic data.

A proposed solution

I would have preferred to make a chart in SVG but we have to accept that SVG is not here yet. So, let's try to make a bar chart by doing some minor modifications to a plain html table. If we keep data in a table we maintain accessibility for screen reader software that allows the user to navigate back and forth between cells.

Validating an entire (web) site

Pete Giraffe has written about "Validating an entire (web) site" in his "Standards-Schmandards"
BLOG on 10 April 2005. To quote:-

Recently I had a siutation where I wanted to validate a large collection of pages. A customer has a rather large site and more than 100 editors are invloved in content creation. Since it is possible to create invalid html in their CMS tool there is a need to check the site regularly. This code could also be the foundation for a continuous testing framework in a GUI development project. In short it includes:

1. Installing the W3C validator on a local machine.


2. Modifying the validator to output XML.


3. Writing a script to collect validator result for all URLs in a text file.


4. Writing a script to crawl a web site and log all page URLs (which will be used as input to the script above).

The modified validator code and the Python scrips are available at the end of this article.

HOW-TO: Make Your Own Annotated Multi-Media Google Map

Barb Dybwad has written about "HOW-TO: Make Your Own Annotated Multi-Media Google Map" in "enGadget" on 8th March 2005. To quote:-

One of the great things about Google maps is it has its roots in XML. To translate for the non-web developers out there, it basically means Google maps are user hackable. This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you’ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map. We’ll walk you through the steps we took to generate an annotated map of a walk we took recently through our hometown, now that it’s actually starting to get warm enough to want to walk about!