Monthly Archives: January 2012

Jan 11

Site news

Posted on by

I like the theme I chose, called Admired. It looks best with Google fonts, which you can select from an impressive control panel, but those really only looked right on my own computer, so after a few days and a few gasps I’m sticking with Arial. What I absolutely love about this theme is the advanced section in the control panel that let me add my own CSS. I still needed to add support for my own JavaScript files, and having played extensively with a WordPress Mu server about 3 years back I knew I wanted to do it the right way from the start. Continue reading →

Jan 10

ARIA adoption

Posted on by
Updated Problem mentioned her was fixed Nov 2013. …but I still can’t do the Show/Hide example here because the WordPress editor strips important attributes from <button> and <a> elements when you toggle from Visual to HTML mode. I got my Help rollovers working, though!Updated: see this post.

I don’t remember the details, but I stumbled upon the WAI-ARIA? project when it was a hatchling, and almost no one I knew had heard of it. It’s been over 2 years, the bird has left the nest, but it still seems to be flying under many people’s radar. It really should be an important piece in the designer’s repertoire. I’ve written about this at much greater length while I was doing an independent reading in Web Usability and Accessibility as part of my graduate studies. AJAX? messes with a web page’s “DOM”? in ways that are hidden from the user of the page by design. ARIA is meant to talk to assistive technologies and keep track of all such changes, communicating them to the software, or responding to custom designed hardware to do things those of us with so-called normal abilities take for granted. To do this, ARIA defines and then makes use of roles—e.g., this is a toolbar, this is a menu item; states—this panel is folded or invisible, this one is displayed; and properties—this menu has a drop-down, this one a pop-up.

Continue reading →

Jan 08

Learn to play more, play to learn more (and may your learning be serendipitous)

Posted on by

On my other secret blog I barely mentioned attending a talk back in November on Planned Serendipity, but in terms of impact the session has turned out to be a bit of a “creeper.” At the time it reminded me how big a role serendipity, albeit usually of the unplanned variety, has played in my own life. Now, the more I notice it, well.., the more I notice it happening all the time. This past week—still reeling perhaps from the realization I’m descended from webmasters and plugin monkeys, even as I plan how to design a “Web 2.0” project involving things computer scientists inevitably do much better—three different sources contributed three new resources to the rebuilding of my self esteem by reinforcing my complete belief in the importance of play to learning*. Continue reading →

Jan 05

Getting set up

Posted on by

This is to be home base for my explorations into learning and teaching with, about, because of, and even in spite of technology. Years ago, after already investing a good chunk of my youth in my ample but ultimately less than extraordinary musical talents I set out to become a classroom teacher. But a funny thing happened on the way to the schoolhouse: the personal computer. And at 30-something I took to figuring it out in a way I hadn’t approached anything since my first electric guitar.

Of the many similarities between those approaches some things stand out: Continue reading →