As announced yesterday in the W3C News:

Unlike many W3C documents, these are actually quite readable and useable right away. They make some great points, some of which surprised me a bit. Web accessibility is often reduced to screen-reader functionality. This document goes quite a bit outside that narrow view and ensures that the web is fully accessible to users with a wide range of disabilities. These includes learning difficulties, cognitive limitations, speech difficulties and others.

As a result, following the advice in these documents seems like it would enhance the usability of the web for all users, even those without disabilities. Here are some of the more interesting points I noticed in these documents.

• Guideline 2.5 - Help users avoid mistakes and make it easy to correct them. This is really great, general advice. It suggests validating input, providing context-sensitive help, and offering users a chance to review or possibly undo actions.
• Guideline 3.1 - Make text content readable and understandable. Again, very useful and general advice that improves usability for all users. It suggests avoiding the use of jargon or words used in an unusual way. Also, the use of simple language summaries or diagrams to explain complex concepts to users with reading ability less advanced than "lower secondary education".
• H46: Using null alternative text and no title attribute on img elements for spacer or purely decorative images. This makes perfect sense once I read it, but I had never given much thought to this being a real problem. I always thought about empty alt and title tags as a kind of work around. However, putting things like "side" or "blue bar" in alt tags on pure display images would just be annoying and unneccessary to a user with a screen reader.

If you haven't yet, I suggest giving these documents (at least the guidelines and techniques) a quick read. It's good to be reminded now and then of the simple ways we can make the web accessible and usable to everyone.

If you find yourself with a Clone CD set of files (.CCD, .CUE, .IMG & .SUB), and you're using OSX, you'll probably realise quickly that you can't burn these files. This is because CloneCD is unfortunately only available for Windows.

Luckily, there is still a way around this. Here's the steps I had to follow:

1. Download Firestarter FX. You can also use any program that can burn .BIN/.CUE files
2. Install Firestarter. For me, this wasn't so straightforward. StuffIt crashed when I tried to open the ZIP file, so I had to unzip it from the command line. If the ZIP file is on the Desktop, just open Terminal and type "cd Desktop" and then "unzip FireStarter*.zip". This created a folder on the desktop containing the program.
3. Rename your .IMG file to .BIN. This is the hack: CloneCD .IMG files are really normal .BIN files in disguise. It's just the file extension that confuses cd burning programs. By renaming, Firestarter will be able to open it.
4. Open Firestarter, drag the .BIN and .CUE files onto the Firestarter window, and burn.

That's it! Now you should have a perfect burnt CD without having to copy the files over to a Windows computer!

I have started using Feedburner for The Future Of The Web's RSS feed. If you have already subscribed to the old RSS feed, I highly recommend you change your RSS reader to point to:

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, or if you haven't yet subscribed to the RSS feed of this page, you should definitely check out an RSS feed aggregator. I use Bloglines. It's exactly what I need. It lets me see what's I've read or haven't read across the 30 or so web sites I like to read, and it's a very nice interface that stays out of my way. There are dozens of other ways to subscribe to RSS feeds, so there is definitely one out there that would be perfect for you.

People have started using some of the tools I put up lately, so I thought I'd take a few minutes and add a couple more common ones. I'm open to suggestions, if you think of anything else that would be useful.

• Metres to Feet
• Feet to Metres
• Centimetres to Inches
• Inches to Centimetres
• Millimetres to Inches
• Inches to Millimetres

I started using Chitika eMiniMalls a few days ago on Free Horoscope Daily, as well as on the tools pages of this site. So far so good, it seems like a very promising ad service. The ads can be contextual like Google Adsense, but I suspect you can get them to perform better by specifying keywords to bring up the product you want.

Very recently, Chitika added a JavaScript variable to allow for Channels, ch_sid. Instead of having a Channel management area on the website, where you set up channels and get a numeric ID to use for the channel, they allow you to specify any string at all. This makes testing out different ad styles and keywords very easy.

To test out keywords, that is, to see which keywords bring up products people are actually buying, we can create the Channel name dynamically using Javascript:

ch_queries = new Array("ipod", "camera", "dvd player", "etc.");
ch_query = ch_queries[Math.floor((Math.random()*ch_queries.length))];
ch_sid = 'Channel Prefix ' + ch_query;

This will give you channel names like "Channel Prefix camera" or "Channel Prefix ipod", etc. Of course, you can change Channel Prefix to include more information on the type of ad or location of the ad.

You could also experiment with different ad colors or sizes in a similar way, and build up the ch_sid variable to include all the variables. For example:

ch_colors = new Array("red", "blue", "green");
ch_color = ch_colors[Math.floor((Math.random()*ch_queries.length))];
ch_sid = 'My Website ' + ch_color + ' ' + ch_query;

You get the picture. Of course you can do all this with Adsense too, you would just have to set up a channel manually for every color / size / location combination, then dynamically associate the combination with it's channel ID. Quite a bit more painful though.

Chitika also allows you to test out searches on their website. They actually recommend you go to Amazon or Shopping.com and find best selling products, then try to create keywords that bring up that specific product. And with this Javascript, you can determine what the best selling products really are for your visitors.

Have fun optimizing your ads!