News from Other

Who came out ahead in the Microsoft-Yahoo deal?

MSFT and Yahoo announced their deal earlier today. I’m curious what you think--who did better in the deal? Let me know what you think.
Publication date: 2009-07-30 more

Good workout music?

Okay, so I registered for a sprint triathlon (400m swim, 11 mile bike, 3.1 mile run) in August. Maybe that will turn out to be a really stupid idea, but I’m going to see if I can at least finish. So I need some good workout music, because my current tunes are getting tired. [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-27 more

Summer Book Reviews

I’ve been doing some summer reading recently. Here are a few books I’ve read: Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazell. Bazell introduces us to Peter Brown, an overworked doctor at a Manhattan hospital. A patient at the hospital sees Peter and believes him to be a hit man who disappeared into the witness protection program. This [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-17 more

Submit video questions for July 2009

This Thursday afternoon I’ll record some new videos, so I created a Google Moderator page where you can post suggested topics and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every question, but I’ll tackle several popular questions and a few interesting questions. Please suggest topics that lots of people would be [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-15 more

Opinion poll: do you like webmaster videos?

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you might not know that for the last few months we’ve been posting daily free webmaster videos on our webmaster video channel. That YouTube channel has over 100 videos on it now. We just finished up the most recent round of videos, and now the question is whether to [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-14 more

Why Googlers should read Anil Dash

Anil Dash wrote a great piece about Google recently, and I think all Googlers should read it. Anil makes several good points, including this one: I doubt Google’s internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. “We’re not like some giant company with flashy TV ads
Publication date: 2009-07-13 more

Making a John Q Public account on Google

One of the advantages of working at Google is that you get to see neat products and features before the rest of the world does. But that can also be a disadvantage. Sometimes I’d like to talk about a fun Gmail Lab or a new Calendar feature but I’m honestly not sure whether the outside [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-04 more

30 day challenge begins: biking to work

The overwhelming winner in my 30 day poll was “Bike to work” so that’s what I’m doing during the month of July. In the third week of July I’ll be out in Boston to speak at SIGIR, but any time I’m heading into the Googleplex during July, I’m planning to bike there. Is there something good [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-01 more

Funny spam email, June 2009

I enjoy posting some of the funny emails that I get. This one made me laugh: You don
Publication date: 2009-07-01 more

Natural links are better than non-natural

I got a spam email that I thought about blogging about, but decided not to. Then they spammed me *again*. Sheesh. So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like “Affordable Link Building Outsourcing,” think twice. Any email that starts out Make your links appear Natural Link Building is one of the most significant [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-24 more

30 days

30 days is enough time to build a habit. Last month, I started trying to walk 10,000 steps a day for 30 days. I didn’t walk 10K steps every day, but I did keep at it until I’d walked over 10K steps for at least 30 days. In the process, I discovered that walking [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-23 more

My review of the iPhone 3GS

Disclaimer: This post is entirely my personal opinion. I also own an HTC T-Mobile G1, which runs Google’s Android operating system. I picked up the new iPhone 3G S this Friday and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts: The Good: - The iPhone 3GS is considerably faster than the iPhone 3G. Especially in the browser, you’ll [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-22 more

Break

It
Publication date: 2009-06-19 more

How to read Persian (Farsi)

Google just added machine-translation of Persian (Farsi): This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian
Publication date: 2009-06-19 more

Page zoom does not mean the end of flexibility

The latest versions of most browsers support
Publication date: 2009-06-18 more

Accessibility improvements in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Apple recently announced that Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. Snow Leopard, will ship in September this year. I
Publication date: 2009-06-17 more

Do you think a WCAG 2.0 technique can be improved? Let the W3C know.

While going through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, I have noted that some of the Techniques for WCAG 2.0 could be improved, at least in my opinion. In some cases it
Publication date: 2009-06-17 more

PageRank sculpting

People think about PageRank in lots of different ways. People have compared PageRank to a “random surfer” model in which PageRank is the probability that a random surfer clicking on links lands on a page. Other people think of the web as an link matrix in which the value at position (i,j) indicates the presence [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

Watch my site review session from Google I/O

At Google I/O a few weeks ago I did a site review session with fellow Google colleagues Brian White and Greg Grothaus. The video from that session is live now and I’ll include it below: About 38 minutes in, the session morphed into a general Q&A. So even if you don’t care about site reviews, the [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

Using the Web with a refreshable Braille display

Chances are that you have either seen someone use a screen reader to access the Web. You may even have tried one yourself. Braille displays, however, are not as commonly seen, and since you need more than just software to use one it just isn
Publication date: 2009-06-12 more

Add Custom Search to any site in two minutes

By the way, you might have missed it at Google I/O, but the Custom Search Engine team has made it really easy to add custom search to any site. Google recently introduced Web Elements, which are simple snippets of code you can copy/paste into your site’s HTML. From the Custom Search Element web page, I copied [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-11 more

Android barcode scanner in 6 lines of Python code

After my last video about using a barcode scanner to add and search books in your library, I was feeling pretty happy. Bar code scanners are pretty cheap--mine cost about $65. But then Google released the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) and it turns out that you don’t even need a bar code scanner. Instead, you [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-10 more

Enabling keyboard navigation in Mac OS X Web browsers

I like using the keyboard to navigate websites. It is often more efficient and comfortable than having to reach for the mouse and position the cursor just right. Another reason I have for using the keyboard is that it lets me check that aspect of accessibility on the sites we build at work. One problem is that, for some strange reason, Mac OS X web browsers do not have full keyboard navigation enabled by default. They do support keyboard navigation, but you need to enable it. In some cases it
Publication date: 2009-06-09 more

Search your bookshelf with a $65 barcode scanner

(Okay, if TechCrunch wrote about my video then I should probably at least do a blog post too.) Last year I suggested potential Summer of Code projects and one of my favorite suggestions was “How about a good open-source program to manage your book library? Something like the Delicious Library program, but that works with Linux?” [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-07 more

Help screen reader users by giving data tables a summary

When sighted users encounter a data table, they can scan it to get an understanding of the data it contains. They can quickly skip from the first row to the last and from one column to another and so on. For people using a screen reader or other non-visual browser, this is a much more time-consuming task since they read the table cell by cell, row by row, and have to more or less keep all of it in memory. To help users of non-visual browsers understand and navigate data tables, you can use the summary attribute to provide a description of the purpose of the table and describe its structure. The summary attribute is not displayed in graphical browsers, so the information you put there should be written for non-visual users. Describing a table with a summary attribute is particularly useful for more complex tables. For simple tables it may not be necessary as enough info may be provided in the caption element. Further reading: Accessible Data Tables, summary for Table Purpose WCAG 2.0, H73: Using the summary attribute of the table element to give an overview of data tables This post is a Quick Tip. Background info is available in Quick Tips for web developers and web designers.Posted in Accessibility, Quick Tips.
Publication date: 2009-06-05 more

Find and highlight HTML elements with FireFinder for FireBug

A Firefox extension (for Firebug) that I
Publication date: 2009-06-01 more

Straight from Google: What You Need to Know

I just gave a talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic folks for a great time! I think there will be a video up soon, but if you want to browse the slides in the mean time, here they are: You can also download the talk in PowerPoint format.
Publication date: 2009-05-30 more

Cufón and screen readers

Cufón has been talked about a lot recently, and it looks like a potential alternative to static images or sIFR in situations when you absolutely must use a typeface that is not
Publication date: 2009-05-28 more

W3C online course: An Introduction to W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices

If you
Publication date: 2009-05-26 more

Use a Wii Balance Board with Linux

In this post you’ll learn how to make a working Bluetooth weight sensor + fast real-time graphical display with about 200 lines of Python code. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/linux_unix/Talking_to_a_Wii_Balanceboard_in_Ubuntu/'; You can code any Nintendo Wii-like video game for Ubuntu/Linux and the Nintendo Balance Board very easily. Here’s a video demonstration: This post assumes that you can already [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-23 more

Building accessible forms with WCAG 2.0

Recently I
Publication date: 2009-05-22 more

What you should do next week

Next week is going to be a humdinger. If you’re in the Bay Area, here’s what I think you should do: - Attend Google I/O. If you’re a developer, trust me, I think you’ll get something out of the conference. Just check out the list of sessions, for one thing. The price is $400, but if [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-22 more

Letter to a young journalist

Don’t conclude from my previous post that I dislike journalism. All through middle and high school I woke up early to read the local newspaper each morning. I was the editor of our newspaper in high school. My mother wanted me to be a journalist. I’ve been thinking of the issues confronting journalism for a [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-20 more

The mysterious sideways jump, a.k.a. scrollbar present or not present

Just in the last couple of weeks, several clients have asked why their sites appear to jump a few pixels sideways when they navigate from one page to another. The sideways jump appears on sites with horizontally centered layouts and is caused by the browser displaying a vertical scrollbar or not, depending on the height of the page. If you move from a short page that doesn
Publication date: 2009-05-20 more

Recent piece by Sanford and Brown

(I work for Google, but this is my personal opinion.) Last week I was on vacation down in Florida and I had a chance to tour Thomas Edison’s winter vacation home. The tour guide told us that Edison wired his house and switched on electrical lighting in 1887. Then the tour guide leaned in and quietly [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-20 more

Line wrapping text in legend elements

In some cases you should Use the fieldset and legend elements to group HTML form controls. One problem that may lead to though is when the legend text is too long to fit the width of its containing fieldset element. It could be because the legend text is simply too long, because a long text is needed, or because the fieldset is in a narrow column. The end result is the same
Publication date: 2009-05-19 more

Do not remove the outline from links and form controls

An addition to my post Don
Publication date: 2009-05-15 more

What was new at Searchology?

Google launched 3-4 new features at Searchology today. You can read about Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets, or Sky Map in my previous post. But I also pay attention to the small things that Google said. I noticed several tidbits that I don’t think we’ve said in public before. - Pat Riley mentioned a couple [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-13 more

Google Searchology 2009: Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets

Google just finished its Searchology 2009 event. In previous years, Google has used Searchology to introduce Universal Search and Personalized Search. So what was new this year? Several things: Google Search Options. Marissa Mayer referred to this as a handy “toolbelt” that lets you slice and dice your search results. You can do a search such [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-13 more

On vacation for a week or so

Just to let you know, I’m on vacation for a week or so. If you send me email or tweet in my direction, don’t expect a reply for a while.
Publication date: 2009-05-08 more

CSS background images cannot and should not have alternate text

I sometimes see people asking how they can provide alternate text for CSS background images. The answer is that you can
Publication date: 2009-05-07 more

Hiding with CSS: Problems and solutions

Many CSS and JavaScript tutorials suggest using display:none to hide elements. It may be temporarily, for example when using JavaScript to hide or show parts of a page depending on the user's actions, or permanently, for example in image replacement techniques, skip links, or structural headings. In most cases, using display:none to hide an element is a bad choice that reduces accessibility. I thought this was a well-known fact, but apparently there are many who are not aware of it being a problem. For that reason, here is a quick explanation of the problem and a suggestion for an alternative technique (that I also thought was well-known). display:none really means do not display or speak What many do not seem to realise is that display:none really means "Pretend that this element doesn't exist. Do not display it, print it, or speak its contents." Perhaps the most obvious example of how that can cause problems is when a person using a screen reader visits a site that uses display:none to hide something from sighted users. Since most screen readers ignore anything hidden with display:none, using display:none to hide things like skip links, text, navigational links, or structural headings is a terrible idea. An alternative technique that is much less likely to cause problems is the "off-left" technique (described in ScreenreaderVisibility at the css-discuss Wiki), which involves absolutely positioning the hidden element outside the viewport. Here's the CSS I normally use for that: .structural { position:absolute; left:-9999px; } The visual effect will be the same as using display:none, but now screen readers will be able to speak the contents of the hidden elements. Hiding with CSS, showing with JavaScript Another case where you need to think carefully before using CSS to hide something is when you intend to display it when the user performs a certain action, for example dynamic menus or help text in forms. If you are using JavaScript to show something, you should also use JavaScript to hide it. Otherwise, people with CSS enabled and JavaScript disabled will never be able to see the hidden content. The solution is simple. Instead of using an id or a class name that is in the markup to apply the hiding CSS, use JavaScript to add a class name to the elements you want to hide. Then create a CSS rule that hides any elements with that class name. If CSS and JavaScript are both available, your script works as expected. If CSS in on but not JavaScript, well, the script obviously won't work, but at least the content will be available to everybody.Posted in Accessibility, CSS, JavaScript.
Publication date: 2009-05-04 more

5 things you (probably) don

(I was rooting around and found this leftover post from 2006 and figured I’d throw it out here.) It looks like blog tag has come to the search bloggers. I’ve been tagged by so many people that I yield and surrender obscure facts about me. When I was growing up in Eastern Kentucky, there wasn’t always a [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-03 more

Thinking about thunder

I read an interesting blog post by Mike Markson, VP of Marketing for Blekko, which is the working name for a new search engine planned to launch to the public in a few months. The title of Mike’s post was “Google Likes To Steal Other’s Thunder,” and he mentions several anecdotes to back up that idea. [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-03 more

Use the fieldset and legend elements to group HTML form controls

The fieldset and legend elements, which should always be used together, allow you to create and name groups of related input fields in HTML forms. By doing this you help users understand how the input fields are related. How the grouping is conveyed to the user depends mainly on whether the user is sighted or not. Most graphical web browsers draw a border around fieldset elements and render the legend element on top of the border, while screen readers may speak the legend text at the start of each fieldset or before each form control within a fieldset. Since some screen readers will announce the legend text before each form control, it is important to keep the legend text concise and consider how the legend and label texts will work when put together. Here is a simple example of a fieldset element used to group related radio buttons: <fieldset> <legend>Favourite colour</legend> <input type="radio" name="fav-col" id="fav-col-1" value="red"> <label for="fav-col-1">Red</label> <input type="radio" name="fav-col" id="fav-col-2" value="green"> <label for="fav-col-2">Green</label> <input type="radio" name="fav-col" id="fav-col-3" value="blue"> <label for="fav-col-3">Blue</label> </fieldset> In summary: Do not use the fieldset and legend elements if all you want to do is create a graphical border around some content on a page. Only use them within forms, only to group logically related form controls, always use both elements together, and keep legend texts short. Further reading: Fieldsets, Legends and Screen Readers Too much accessibility - FIELDSET LEGENDS WCAG 2.0, H71: Providing a description for groups of form controls using fieldset and legend elements This post is a Quick Tip. Background info is available in Quick Tips for web developers and web designers.Posted in (X)HTML, Accessibility, Quick Tips.
Publication date: 2009-04-30 more

Using an XML declaration triggers Quirks mode in IE 6

If you use an XHTML doctype in your documents, do not include an XML declaration unless you want Internet Explorer 6 to use its Quirks mode. An XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype with an XML declaration looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> IE 7 and later are not affected and will use Standards mode. Neither are other browsers (except for old versions of Opera). The most obvious effect of IE 6 using Quirks mode is probably that it will use a broken CSS box model. More info on that can be found in Internet Explorer and the CSS box model. The XML declaration is optional if you use UTF-8 or UTF-16, so my recommendation is to simply remove it and use the following: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> This post is a Quick Tip. Background info is available in Quick Tips for web developers and web designers.Posted in (X)HTML, CSS, Quick Tips.
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Switching things around

This weekend I decided to mix things up on my blog. So I switched things around: - I took one of my domains, dullest.com, and moved it to TigerTech from pair Networks. - I installed the latest version of WordPress on dullest.com and copied the MySQL database from mattcutts.com to dullest.com. - I changed my blog layout to [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-27 more

Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 7.83 seconds!

Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips. I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-26 more

Grabbag questions, April 2009

I scheduled some time today to record video, so I opened up a thread for questions. Post your questions over on Google Moderator so that I can see which questions are popular. I
Publication date: 2009-04-23 more

Let your links look like links

One of the strongest conventions on the Web is that links should be underlined and that underlined text is linked. I don
Publication date: 2009-04-22 more

Professional front-end engineering explained

It can often be hard to explain what it is you do as a front-end web developer, interface developer, or whatever you like calling yourself if you work with the code that gets delivered to web browsers. Sadly it can also be hard for others to understand and respect how difficult this job can be, and how important it is to the health of the web and the success of any web site. Fortunately Chris Heilmann recently posted a link to a video where Nate Koechley at Yahoo! does a great job of explaining all this. The talk is titled Professional Frontend Engineering, and you can choose to watch it online, download it in m4v-format, or
Publication date: 2009-04-22 more

My 8.7M pixel display

A while ago I wrote about Synergy and showed a picture of my desktop as of July 2007: That’s two 24″ Dell monitors (one for a Windows computer, the other for a Linux computer). I’ve had that setup for a couple years and I recently decided it was time to upgrade. So I bought a 30″ [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

Do not create empty links

Whenever you put a link on a web page, make sure that it has text content. This may seem incredibly obvious, but it is actually not all that uncommon to find links that do not contain any text at all. These links usually come in one of the following shapes: <a href="http://example.com/" accesskey="0"></a> <a href="http://example.com/"><img src="image.gif" alt=""></a> In the first case, the link is invisible to everybody, but can be triggered through a keyboard shortcut if you happen to know it and it doesn
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Making accessibility more real

To some web professionals, accessiility means nothing because they aren
Publication date: 2009-04-15 more

Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 17.5 seconds!

Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips. I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-13 more

Accessibility is more than

When those of us who care about accessibility try to make the web sites or web applications we build accessible, we sometimes forget to think beyond making them possible to access. Of course making sure that people with disabilities can
Publication date: 2009-04-09 more

W3C web site redesign in beta

A couple of weeks ago on March 20, the W3C launched a beta of a new design for the W3C site. Actually it
Publication date: 2009-04-06 more

Happy 4.04 Day!

Today is April 4th, which means that it’s 4.04 day — even in Europe where they switch their months and days around. That means it’s a perfect day to learn what a 404 status code is. Essentially, a 404 is a way for web server to return a “Page Not Found” error when a browser [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-04 more

Chrome marketshare for March 2009

Google Chrome continued its upward marketshare march in March. I was looking at my browser breakdown tonight. Here’s what I’ve got from the last 30 days in Google Analytics: Some different browser marketshare numbers: - Net Applications says that Chrome went from 1.15% to 1.23% in the last ~30 days. - StatCounter says that Chrome topped 2% recently. [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-03 more

MySQL and Perl trouble when moving from a PowerPC to an Intel Mac

The Migration Assistant utility in Mac OS X can be a huge time saver when you buy a new Mac and want to move all your stuff from the old machine to the new one. However, there are a few things to watch out for. One issue I ran into when using Migration Assistant to move from a PowerPC-based Mac to an Intel-based one is that it will copy MySQL and Perl. In my case that meant mysql-standard-4.1.21-apple-darwin8.6.0-powerpc and Perl 5.8.6. Depending on how you use MySQL and Perl this may or may not be a problem. I
Publication date: 2009-04-03 more

Looking into latest live metrics

(Doing the “type up a quick blog post” thing. Let me know if I had any typos.) Thanks to everyone that contacted me in the last few minutes and hours about changes in our search products and quality; we’re seeing the impact in our metrics as well. I hear your feedback loud and clear–no need to [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-02 more

Hacking Google: Retro Links Revives Old Google Feature

Google sometimes turns off features. One such feature that I remember fondly is that at the bottom of Google’s search results, we offered nine other search engine suggestions. The idea was if you didn’t find what you were searching for on Google, you could click on the other links and easily run the same search [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

NVDA

Testing your work with a screen reader, especially if you
Publication date: 2009-03-26 more

WCAG 2.0 Checklist by WebAIM

The more I read up on WCAG 2.0, the more I think it is a huge improvement over WCAG 1.0. The main problem is its size, which makes it hard to get an overview of and likely is a barrier to entry for many. I posted links to a few places to start reading up on WCAG 2.0 in Going from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0, and those are well worth reading. But an even more compact summary of the guidelines in WCAG 2.0 is WebAIM
Publication date: 2009-03-25 more

Wordle for Nancy Grace TV Show

I recently completed a huge “Media and Journalism” project: I transcribed over 500 hours of the Nancy Grace TV show on CNN. It took a long time, but here is an exhaustive Wordle tag cloud of all the words used in those 500+ hours of television: It appears that all 500+ hours consist of those six [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-22 more

How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps

I just installed a “hello world” Chrome extension from this Chrome Extension HOWTO page. When you surf to www.google.com, the Google logo is replaced with a Lolcat: Here’s how to write your own Google Chrome extension in three steps: 1. Install the developer-channel version of Google Chrome. I don’t know if this is 100% necessary, but new [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-19 more

Pointing a Subversion working copy to a moved repository

When I recently bought a new Mac I ran into a problem with Subversion, which I use for version control. I use local repositories, and after moving to the new Mac they ended up in a new location in the file system. This made my SVN client (Cornerstone) lose track of the repositories, and the checked out working copies still pointed to their respective repository
Publication date: 2009-03-18 more

The evolution and future of HTML

I don
Publication date: 2009-03-17 more

Use the p element to create paragraphs

When creating paragraphs of text in HTML, some WYSIWYG editors and people use double br (line break) elements to separate the paragraphs visually: This text is the first paragraph. <br> <br> This text is the second paragraph. While this method often provides the desired visual result there is a better way
Publication date: 2009-03-16 more

FileVault can cause default applications to reset in Mac OS X 10.5

For quite some time I
Publication date: 2009-03-12 more

Gone to PubCon and SXSW + Lots of Videos!

Expect light blogging for a week or so because I’m traveling. I posted my 2009 travel schedule, but I’m doing a keynote at PubCon in Austin and then I’ll stick around for South by Southwest. It’s my first time at SXSW, so if you see me, say howdy! For the PubCon keynote, we’re going to try [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-11 more

Clickable transcript of my Canonical Link Element talk

Recently I’ve been playing with linking to specific parts of a video and incorporating YouTube subtitles. Then I realized that you could do a neat trick. YouTube allows you to create closed captioning with a simple text file that looks like this: 00:00:07.000 Hi everybody. Welcome back to another video. We’re doing this thing where when we [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-11 more

Screen reader testing

Though as a sighted user I find it very difficult to fully grasp what it
Publication date: 2009-03-10 more

How many links per page?

I’m about to publish a blog post with a ton of links in it — almost two hundred of them. So before I did that, it seemed like a good time to talk about Google’s recommendation to “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).” Why do we provide [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-10 more

European Accessibility Forum Frankfurt

An interesting conference that is coming up soon is the European Accessibility Forum Frankfurt that will take place in Frankfurt, Germany on 27 March 2009. There are many well-known accessibility names among the speakers who will discuss the following topics: Accessible Web Applications Mobile Access
Publication date: 2009-03-10 more

DroboCare from Drobo: bleah

I bought a Drobo about a year ago. Recently I got this pop-up window: Wait a second — I bought this storage device, and now want me to extend my license “to continue to receive the latest updates”? If you go to the url mentioned in the pop-up, you see that for $49 for a year’s [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-09 more

People I would pay to life stream

I’ve been listening to the Penny Arcade podcast and it started me thinking about lifestreaming. There’s at least a few people I would pay if I could watch them stream their day over the net, either because they’re funny or interesting somehow. I thought about it a little bit, and here’s the list that I [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-09 more

Show and Translate YouTube Captions

Video captions are interesting. For example, if you subtitle a video in the same language as the video, you can help people with low literacy improve their reading skills. Or if you’re in a meeting, you could watch a video silently and read the captions. The TED conference is also thinking about subtitles. I think they’ve [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-06 more

Safari 4 public beta with WAI-ARIA support. Or not?

As most people reading this will already know, Apple announced a public beta of Safari 4 last week. There are many new features in this version of the browser, but the one I am most interested in trying out is the addition of support for WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). However, I can
Publication date: 2009-03-05 more

Link to a specific part of a YouTube video

If you want to link to a specific part of a video on YouTube, you can. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s Notice the “#t=31m08s” on the end of the url? That link will take you 31 minutes and 8 seconds into that video. Linking to a particular minute and second can be really helpful — for example, that link [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-05 more

Why Google won

(This is just a post from my personal perspective, but I hope it’s helpful.) Every few weeks or so, someone contacts me and says “Hey Matt, there’s page out on the web about me that I really don’t like. Is there any way to remove it from Google’s index?” People don’t usually say it like that. [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Paid posts should not affect search engines

Normally I wouldn’t weigh in on “sponsored conversations,” because I’ve talked about similar subjects before, but it’s worth reiterating Google’s position on paid posts that pass PageRank and why we feel that way. Here’s the short version as a comment that I left on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog: Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Book Review: Anathem

I have a sneaking suspicion that hanging out on Twitter is causing my attention span to grow shorter and shorter and … wait, what was I talking about? Oh, short attention span, right. So as penance for all that microblogging, I decided to set myself a thick book to read. I chose Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I’ve [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Check your design with text size increased to 200 percent

A basic accessibility guideline is that users should be able to increase text size when viewing your site without content disappearing or otherwise becoming unreadable. That
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Top 5 signs you are anal-retentive

You keep large redundant amounts of all your sundries such as laundry detergent so that you never risk running out. You don’t just sort the money in your wallet by $1, $5, $10, or $20, but also sort the bills by wear-and-tear so that you get rid of the bills in the worst shape first. You look [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-02 more

Grab bag questions

I have some extra time in my calendar today, so I thought I’d open up a thread for questions. Post your questions over on Google Moderator so that I can see which questions are popular. I’ve only got 45-60 minutes, so I can’t answer every question, but I’ll try to answer at least a few [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-26 more

Learn More about the Canonical Link Element

A week or so ago I did a post about the canonical link tag, including a pointer to a 3-4 minute video about the tag. If you enjoyed that video but wanted to learn more, last week I sat down and recreated the presentation that I did at SMX West. You can watch the “director’s cut” [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-25 more

WAI-ARIA 1.0 Last Call Working Draft

Today the W3C announced that WAI-ARIA has reached Last Call Working Draft, and invites comments on the WAI-ARIA specification as well as the related WAI-ARIA User Agent Implementation Guide and WAI-ARIA Best Practices documents. Anyone who takes an interest in Web accessibility (which you all should) should make themselves familiar with WAI-ARIA. Now is a good time to study the documents and send any comments you might have to public-pfwg-comments@w3.org by March 24, 2009. If you don't know where to start, Henny Swan has posted a few questions that the W3C is looking for answers to in WAI-ARIA, last call for comments and what you think counts.Posted in Accessibility, Web Standards.
Publication date: 2009-02-25 more

IE 8 still does not resize text sized in pixels

As most accessibility and usability aware web professionals know, Internet Explorer does not by default allow the user to increase the size of text whose size has been specified in CSS pixels. Some believe that is in fact the correct behaviour, while others (me included) think IE should do what all other browsers do
Publication date: 2009-02-24 more

Last call for

This is the last call for “noresult” pages. If you want to mention examples, please send them to us this week. Here’s how to do it.
Publication date: 2009-02-24 more

Do you get these emails?

Every so often I get emails to my old school account that begin Dear Professor Dr. M. Cutts Taking in mind your valuated achievements in mathematics, it is a pleasure for us to invite you to publish a work in “International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics”. I never finished my Ph.D. because I stopped working on it to join [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-23 more

Pointers for Google Japan paid-post story

I just did a joint post about the Google Japan issue on Google’s Japanese webmaster blog. There’s also a post on Google’s main Japanese blog. If you don’t read Japanese, you can also watch the video where I recently talked about this. To the extent that I can speak on behalf of Google, I apologize [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-19 more

WCAG 2.0 recommends using luminosity contrast ratio to check colour contrast

A little over three years ago I posted Luminosity contrast ratio, in which I mentioned that WCAG 2.0 recommends a different algorithm for calculating colour contrast than the one suggested by WCAG 1.0. Since WCAG 2.0 is now a W3C Recommendation I think it
Publication date: 2009-02-18 more

The alt attribute is for images only

The alt attribute is used to provide alternate text for HTML elements that use images. The alternate text is used when an image cannot be seen (because the user can
Publication date: 2009-02-17 more

Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes

Last week Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following: <link rel=”canonical” value=”http://example.com/page.html”/> That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-16 more

No more pixel perfectionism in IE 6

The other day Robert Nyman asked web developers to Stop Developing For Internet Explorer 6. I fully agree with what he
Publication date: 2009-02-12 more

Write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script

Suppose you want to write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script. Here’s an example spreadsheet that you might want to update from a script: I did some searching and found this page, which quickly led me to the Python Developer’s Guide for the Google Spreadsheet API. There’s a simple “Getting started with Gdata and Python” [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-11 more

Results from the WebAIM screen reader survey

A few weeks ago I mentioned a screen reader user survey that was being conducted by WebAIM. The survey is now closed and a first look at the results is presented in Survey of Preferences of Screen Readers Users. Most of the results are more or less in line with what I would have expected. The result that surprised me the most is that the majority (74.6 %) of the respondents upgrade their screen readers to the newest version within a year after it has been released. It surprised me because it is often said that screen reader users are very slow to upgrade, but apparently most of those who participated in the survey upgrade quite quickly. Obviously this could be because the participants are self-selected and don
Publication date: 2009-02-10 more

WAI-ARIA support in IE8 RC no longer non-standard

One of the good things about Internet Explorer 8, apart from its improved support for CSS 2.1, is the addition of support for WAI-ARIA. If you
Publication date: 2009-02-10 more

Where to find me, first half of 2009

Here’s the speaking/travel that I’m expecting to do in early 2009: January 17-22, 2009: My wife and I journeyed to Washington D.C. to see the Presidential inauguration. It was very cold. February 4-7, 2009: I just attended the TED conference down in Long Beach. It was pretty amazing. I got to pick Bill Gates’ brain on his [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-10 more

Use CSS Diagnostics with Stylish to find bad HTML

A while ago I mentioned Obtrusive JavaScript Checker and Inline Code Finder as useful quality assurance tools that will help you find potentially obtrusive JavaScript and CSS. A similar approach to checking HTML quality is using CSS to highlight invalid or deprecated code, which I talked about in Helping your client maintain markup quality. In that post I mentioned Marco Battilana
Publication date: 2009-02-06 more

Google and Big Ideas

I love Om Malik and respect him greatly. I’m hoping to corner him for lunch sometime to pick his brain on ways that Google could improve. But today he happened to do a tweet that caught my attention just as my morning caffeine was kicking in. Om said “I think google has no big ideas. [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-04 more

Validating WAI-ARIA in HTML and XHTML

WAI-ARIA has great potential to help developers make the Web more accessible to people with disabilities, especially those who are vision impaired or cannot use a mouse. There is currently a problem with adding WAI-ARIA attributes to your HTML or XHTML markup though: the attributes are not defined in the DTDs for HTML or XHTML and will cause validation errors. Since WAI-ARIA improves accessibility I could actually live with having some validation errors in my HTML. However, having to manually filter out certain errors to catch the real errors really reduces the value of validation as a quality assurance tool. Like Steve Faulkner says in How Can I Validate (X)HTML + ARIA?, what I want validation to do is check that: any WAI-ARIA attributes and attribute values I use are valid the rest of my markup is valid HTML or XHTML Custom DTDs to the rescue? Steve has had some success while experimenting with custom DTDs that contain all WAI-ARIA attributes and their allowed values. The main drawback is that you need to manually validate each page. It
Publication date: 2009-02-04 more

Creating valid names with the id attribute

When using the id attribute to create a
Publication date: 2009-02-03 more

Good books to read?

Here’s my current “to-read” books: Are there any other great/recommended books to read that you would suggest adding to the list?
Publication date: 2009-02-02 more

State of the Web 2008 findings

In the beginning of January the report from the State of the Web Survey 2008 was published. The survey is not strictly scientific since those who participated are people who happen to monitor the sites that linked to the survey, which was open during the first three weeks of December. Regardless of their validity, statistics can be entertaining. Here are some highlights from the report: The number of Mac and Windows users are almost equal
Publication date: 2009-01-30 more

Webspam in 2009?

It’s the beginning of the year, so I just wanted to get some outside opinions: what would you like to see Google’s webspam team tackle in 2009? Here’s how I asked for suggestions in 2006: Based on your experiences, close your eyes and think about what area(s) you wish Google would work on. You probably want [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Ideal conference badge

I don’t even know how many conferences I’ve been to in the last decade, but it’s probably 30-40. In that time, maybe 2-3 conferences have really nailed the conference badge for attendees. Here’s what the ideal conference badge should look like, in my opinion: I’ll walk you through the important features of this badge: - Each attendee’s [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Some fun links

I caught up on some of my non-search feed reading this weekend. Normally I’d drop some of these links in my Twitter stream, but I ended up with a ton of links. So I thought I’d drop them here. In case you missed it, Google’s webmaster console launched a new Webmaster Tools API a few weeks [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Video of my

If you need a search fix, we just posted a video on the official Google webmaster blog. Essentially I recreated a talk I did for Web 2.0 and posted it online. You can also watch it below if you’d prefer: and you can also view the presentation slides I used or watch the slides directly below: I’m [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Give Google feedback on

I recently posted asking what issues the Google webspam team should tackle in 2009. Getting this outside feedback is really handy, because it’s helpful to compare our internal perceptions against what annoys hundreds of people outside Google. After the first 150 or so comments I did a very rough tally of suggestions to see what [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Talking to a Wiimote in Ubuntu 8.10

To add Wiimote support on Ubuntu 8.10, start by running the command “sudo apt-get install wminput wmgui lswm” to install the CWiid library and associated software. If you’re using a desktop machine, you probably don’t have Bluetooth capability. If you run the program “lswm” and see the message “No Bluetooth interface found” then you need to [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

In DC for the inauguration

My wife and I decided to head to Washington D.C. for the inauguration, and I’m already glad that I did. On the way out of a party, I spotted Minnesota Senator-elect Al Franken (Update: he’s not a Senator-elect yet, as the results haven’t been certified). Someone asked him to do a short “Hi kids, stay [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

How Not To Launch A Twitter Account

Recently someone registered a Twitter account name “mattcuttsmapxl,” which is very similar to my Twitter account name. The account was following many of the same people I follow, which is pretty annoying because people had to check whether it was me or not (it wasn’t). The account got suspended, but someone made a new account [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Detecting Googlebombs

I recently did a Googlebomb post over on the Google Public Policy Blog. I’ve talked about Googlebomb phenomenon before (also see more Googlebomb background here). Just as a reminder, a Googlebomb is a prank where a group of people on the web try to push someone else’s site to rank for a query that it [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Four Things You Need To Know About Knol

Recently Google mentioned that 100,000 different articles have been posted to Google Knol. I’ve been meaning to talk about Google Knol for a while, because there’s a few things you need to know. It seemed especially relevant after I saw the Silicon Alley Insider article about Knol on Techmeme, so I figured that I would [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Reveal new window links and links to non-HTML files with a user stylesheet

As I stated in Make Safari open targeted links in new tabs instead of new windows I find links that open in new windows highly annoying. One reason that new windows can be so intrusive is that most browsers don
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Find inline CSS and JavaScript with Inline Code Finder

A few weeks ago I posted Find nasty JavaScript with the Obtrusive JavaScript Checker, talking about Robert Nyman
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Christmas break

When I started blogging again in September after my three-month parental leave I wasn
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Back, now with comments partially open

As always, time seems to accelerate when I
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Sign the petition to save the Swedish National Guidelines for Public Sector Websites

As I mentioned in Swedish National Guidelines for Public Sector Websites in danger?, the Swedish Administrative Development Agency (Verva) was closed down on 31 December 2008. As far as I know there is still no information available on which government agency, if any, will be responsible for maintaining and keeping these guidelines up to date in the future. It would be very sad if this means the end of the official version (there is an unofficial version available at eutveckling.se) of these guidelines that help improve the accessibility and usability of Swedish public sector websites. To show the powers that be that many people who work with public sector websites in Sweden consider these guidelines useful and important, Jens Wedin has created a petition to save the guidelines: 24-timmarswebbens framtid. If you design, develop, maintain, or commission Swedish public sector websites and think the guidelines are important, please sign the petition and spread the word.Posted in Accessibility, Usability, Web Standards.
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Take part in WebAIM

Most designers and developers who care about accessibility are not regular users of screen reader software. Yes, screen reader users only make up one group of people with disabilities. However they are one of the trickiest groups to cater for, especially when you use JavaScript and Ajax. There are many recommendations about what to do and what not to do when you develop a website in order for it to be usable by people who rely on screen readers. But do those recommendations really help screen reader users? To hopefully find an answer to that question, WebAIM is conducting a survey for screen reader users. The intention is to find out more about how screen reader users use the Web and what their preferences are. If you use screen readers, either full-time or for testing only, please consider spending some time reading the Screen Reader Survey blog post and taking the Survey of Preferences of Screen Reader Users. If enough people who use screen readers participate in this survey, the results should provide us with valuable information to base our decisions on when developing accessible websites.Posted in Accessibility.
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Reformat and repartition hard drives before using them with Time Machine

A month or so ago I bought an external hard drive to use as a backup disk with Apple
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

JavaScript Tools bundle for Textmate

In my post about TextMate productivity tips I didn
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Specify each HTML document

Always specify which natural language (spoken, written or signed human language) is used for a document
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Headings, heading hierarchy, and document outlines

Recently my coworkers and I have been discussing HTML headings and heading hierarchy. This may not sound like something you need to spend a lot of time discussing, but there are some situations when it seems very difficult to find a solution without compromises. The importance of headings First a little detour about the function and importance of headings in HTML. If you already know why headings are important, feel free to skip to the next section. HTML headings, created with the h1-h6 elements, are very useful and should be used for anything that visually looks or acts like a heading. This is partly because it is the semantically right choice, partly because it may help your search engine rankings. But the most important reason is that using real headings improves accessibility. Screen reader users, for instance, can use keyboard shortcuts to skip from heading to heading in a document. To see this in action, check out Importance of HTML Headings for Accessibility, a video showing how a screen reader user navigates a document by skipping from one heading to another. Likewise, some browsers allow keyboard-only users to use shortcuts to skip from heading to heading, speeding up navigation through a document. So there are several reasons to use headings, and to use them properly. Requirements for a good document structure The outcome of the discussions we
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Make HTML messages readable in Apple Mail

Long time readers may have noticed that I dislike receiving email in HTML format. It
Publication date: 2008-11-28 more

Browser Market Share?

I hadn’t looked at my browser marketshare in a while, so I fired up Google Analytics: Rough browser numbers are Firefox 57.58% IE 26.07% Safari 6.48% Chrome 5.11% Opera 2.35% Mozilla 1.44% SeaMonkey 0.48% Mozilla Compatible 0.18% Konqueror 0.13% Camino 0.04% OneStat says that they see 0.54% share for Google Chrome. Net Applications provides an hour-by-hour graph, which is nice, but they hardwired it to look for the string “Chrome 0.2″ when Chrome is on version 0.3 [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-26 more

TextMate productivity tips

If you saw my post about the DOMAssistant bundle for TextMate, you will already know that my favourite coding tool at the moment is TextMate. If you missed that post, well, now you know. For anyone who is new to TextMate or considering trying it out, I thought I
Publication date: 2008-11-26 more

Dissecting the Web with Opera

The people at Opera have created a tool called MAMA. MAMA is short for
Publication date: 2008-11-25 more

Where did udevmonitor go?

In case you’re looking for the “udevmonitor” program on the Intrepid Ibex version of Ubuntu, it’s changed; use “udevadm monitor” now: $ udevadm help Usage: udevadm COMMAND [OPTIONS] info query sysfs or the udev database trigger request events from the kernel [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

Trying (and failing) to get Ubuntu to work

I really want to run Ubuntu, but it shouldn’t be this hard. Plugging in an SD card reader that I picked up from Best Buy shouldn’t cause a hard freeze of my system (on both Gutsy Gibbon and Intrepid Ibex): The card reader works fine in Windows. At this point, I’m honestly thinking about crashing the [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

Virtual terminals not working? Check your keyboard.

(This is a boring post that I’m writing for people that have this same problem in the future. Just skip it.) Every good Linux user knows that if you want to drop from X down into a text-based virtual terminal, you can press control-alt-F1 (or any other key up to F6), and control-alt-F7 returns you to [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

Reindeer Car Antlers are a Great Holiday Present

Last year I got these reindeer car antlers for my wife. This year she let me have them for my car. They look like this: (Note: this is the picture from the catalog, not one of our cars.) Tons of people stop, stare, and then break out in a smile or start pointing out my car to [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

The order of link pseudo-classes matters

Common knowledge to most who have been working with CSS for a few years, but perhaps not something that relative newcomers have come across yet: the order in which you define the different link states affects the end result. I prefer the following order: :link, :visited, :hover, :focus, :active. Eric Meyer explains why the order matters and why he also prefers defining the states in this order in Link Specificity, Ordering the Link States, and Who Ordered the Link States?.Posted in CSS.
Publication date: 2008-11-19 more

9 tips for the Google Mobile App for iPhone

Here are some tips to help you get the most out of Google’s new Mobile Application for the iPhone. To get Google Mobile App on your iPhone, go to the App Store and search for “Google Mobile App,” or click on this link to install from a computer. If you have an older version of Google [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-19 more

Google Adds Voice Recognition to iPhone App

I have a very good feeling about Google’s new iPhone app that does voice recognition. I’ve been playing with this voice recognition application for several weeks and I have to say that I’m really impressed. First and foremost, the voice recognition works really well. Crazy long-tail specialized vocabulary is tricky (more on that later), but [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-18 more

Dyslexia and accessibility

One large group of people with special needs that is often overlooked
Publication date: 2008-11-18 more

A word about metrics, part III: market share of Google Docs?

I’m not sure what Google Docs market share is, but I thought it would be interesting to mention a couple data points and add a new data point. Data point #1: Compete. Compete just estimated that 4.4M visitors stopped by Google Docs in September, which is just a hair below 2.4% of the U.S. online population, [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-17 more

Remember to specify a background colour

Jeffrey Zeldman recently posted Is your (website
Publication date: 2008-11-14 more

Pubcon/WebmasterWorld conference, here I come!

I arrive Wednesday afternoon for the 2008 Pubcon conference, and I’ll be staying until after the networking event on the last day, which is the heart of the event. It’s the heart because the networking event is held at a pub, and the original idea of Pubcon was that some of the best parts of [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-12 more

Writing good alt text

I do quite a bit of quality assurance work, specifically looking at the accessibility and web standards use of websites. In many cases I make remarks about the use of alternative text for images and other graphic elements. It is, not surprisingly, common for alternative text to be completely absent, but it is probably even more common to see inappropriate use of the alt attribute. In most cases this is caused by well-meaning people using the alt attribute to describe the image itself instead of the function it has or the content it presents. Two rules of thumb I use when writing alt text for images are these: If you were to describe the document to someone over the phone, would you mention the image or its content? If you would, the image probably needs an alternative text. If not, it should probably have an empty alt attribute. Does the alternative text of any images in the document make sense if you turn off the display of images in your web browser? If not, change the alternative text so it does make sense and does not provide redundant information. These are just rules of thumb and there are exceptions, but as a general rule I have found that they work well. In practice this means that images should often have empty alt text, alt="". Be aware though that if the image is within a link that does not also contain descriptive text, the image needs an alt text that describes the link. Much more detailed instructions for writing alt text are available in an article at WebAIM called Appropriate Use of Alternative Text.Posted in (X)HTML, Accessibility.
Publication date: 2008-11-12 more

Find nasty JavaScript with the Obtrusive JavaScript Checker

When reviewing websites to find areas that may be improved, one of the things I look for is whether any JavaScript has been implemented in an unobtrusive way or not. I normally do that by turning JavaScript on and off, and viewing the source code. It can be a bit tedious. But now there is a quicker way to find obtrusive JavaScript: Robert Nyman
Publication date: 2008-11-11 more

Fun email

Every so often I get an email like this: Dear Webmaster, I have browsed your site and I’m interested in purchasing advertising space in it. I am mainly interested in placing a new page on your site with content and links that I will supply. Please let me know if you would like to discuss this further or if [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-08 more

Going from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 is currently in W3C Proposed Recommendation status and may be advanced to W3C Recommendation status before the end of this year. To prepare for this it
Publication date: 2008-11-07 more

Character encoding

Character encoding can be wickedly difficult to get right, especially when you want to start using UTF-8. It seems there is always at least one part of the chain from your brain to the end user
Publication date: 2008-11-05 more

Vote vote vote!

The polls will be closed by this time tomorrow, so don’t forget to vote, everyone.
Publication date: 2008-11-04 more

Reading up on WAI-ARIA

One of the more problematic areas of web accessibility is how to handle the custom widgets and dynamic changes to content used in most web applications and on many content-based websites. Using JavaScript to add custom behaviour and update content can cause problems for people who rely on assistive technology (AT) such as screen readers. The problems often consist of the AT not being aware that content on the page has changed, the user not noticing that something has changed, or the user being aware that something changed but not what. These problems can be tricky to solve, but there is hope in the form of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). From the WAI-ARIA Overview: WAI-ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. I have only just started reading up on WAI-ARIA, but it looks very promising. It is also time to start using it to improve the accessibility of web applications that make heavy use of JavaScript. Since I
Publication date: 2008-11-04 more

Halloween 2008 wrap-up

I missed a few Halloween tidbits: - Our Halloween post on the Google webmaster blog gives you a feel for Halloween at Google. The dog dressed up as a lion was pretty awesome. There was also a guy dressed as the Android from Google’s mobile phone OS. - What happens when a witch accidentally collides with a [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-03 more

My Halloween 2008 Costume: Rick Astley

digg_url = 'http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/my-halloween-2008-costume/'; For Halloween this year, I decided to be Rick Astley. With a little bit of hair spray, spray-on hair color, and some make-up for a widow’s peak, it looks like this: What fun. To make the costume complete, I took my Android G1 phone and bought a copy of Never Gonna Give You [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-01 more

Halloween easter egg: Google protects itself from zombies

You probably saw Google’s Halloween logo today: But you may not have noticed that Google made another change for Halloween. Check out Google’s robots.txt file today: That’s right. Zombies are disallowed from accessing /brains on Google today. You can never be too safe! Hat-tip to Google Blogoscoped spotting it first and to Search Engine Land for [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-01 more

My Halloween 2008 Costume

For Halloween this year, I decided to be Rick Astley. With a little bit of hair spray, spray-on hair color, and some make-up for a widow’s peak, it looks like this: What fun. To make the costume complete, I took my Android G1 phone and bought a copy of Never Gonna Give You Up from Amazon [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-01 more

Happy Diwali!

A little late, but I hope everyone had a good Diwali! I enjoyed some good Indian food and I hope you did the same.
Publication date: 2008-10-31 more

Validate an entire site with the Free Site Validator

Validating the markup of a single page is quick and easy
Publication date: 2008-10-31 more

How (a couple of) screen readers handle JavaScript events

Screen readers don
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Moving the locked top panel in Ubuntu/GNOME

A new version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) is coming out this week, so I’m trying out the release candidate. Here’s an annoyance I hit and how to solve it. I keep a list of steps to perform after installing Ubuntu, and one of my steps is Drag the bottommost taskbar/panel to the right and the topmost [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-29 more

Scroll Magazine puts web stuff on paper

As you might guess from the number of book reviews I have posted here, I like reading things printed on paper. Yeah I know, that
Publication date: 2008-10-28 more

Signs of Los Angeles

I have a pet theory that you can tell a lot about a city by paying attention to its signage. So I like to keep my eyes open when I’m in a new place and take pictures of things that strike me as especially interesting. When I was down in Los Angeles, here are a [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-27 more

noindex test

Pay no attention this to page with a noindex tag. I just want to check on how Yahoo/Live/Ask treat pages with noindex meta tags.
Publication date: 2008-10-27 more

Join the webmaster chat today!

At 9 a.m. Pacific time (noon Eastern) today, we’re going to do our third Google webmaster chat. People will be able to ask questions via Google moderator and we’ll answer a bunch either in Google moderator or over the audio portion of the chat. There will also be several Googlers doing short presentations. I hope [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-23 more

The WebKit/Safari Web Inspector is getting even better

A few weeks ago the WebKit team posted an update about the Web Inspector Redesign. I
Publication date: 2008-10-23 more

Upgraded to Movable Type 4.21

It's been almost five years since Movable Type 2.65 was released . Currently the latest version of Movable Type is 4.21. Yet version 2.65 is what I've been using to run this site up until a week or so ago. I delayed upgrading partly because I did not feel like dealing with the unavoidable upgrade breakage, partly because MT 2.65 actually has been working pretty well for me - it does the job it's supposed to do. Nevertheless I did not want to feel like an IE 6 holdout anymore. It was time to clean up the cruft that's been building up in my Movable Type installation over the years, take the plunge, and upgrade to Movable Type 4.21. And
Publication date: 2008-10-21 more

Hidden text on a television

I was thinking of taking a few days and doing some photo blogging of various pictures I’ve collected in the last few months. For example, lots of people know what hidden text is on the web. What would hidden text look like on a television? I think it would look something like this: That’s some tiny [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-20 more

NoScript for Firefox

The other day I mentioned a few Firefox add-ons that I have recently discovered. One add-on that I forgot to mention is NoScript, which I have been using for a few months now. As the name indicates, NoScript blocks the execution of JavaScript in Firefox. But it isn't the same as simply turning off JavaScript support. NoScript gives you control over which sites are allowed to run scripts, Flash and other active content, and has tons of settings that will let you configure it to your liking. NoScript is very popular - at the time of this writing it has been downloaded over 29 million times, so surfing the web with it installed (and thus JavaScript at least semi-disabled) is hardly a fringe case. Many people download and use NoScript primarily for security reasons, but my main reason for using it is that it makes many sites that normally are a pain to visit (mostly newspaper websites) much more responsive, quicker loading, and less intrusive. Surfing the web with NoScript installed also makes it quite obvious which sites have not been built with progressive enhancement and unobtrusive JavaScript in mind. I don't know about other NoScript users, but I tend to leave sites that don't work pretty quickly unless they offer something I really need.Posted in Browsers, JavaScript.
Publication date: 2008-10-18 more

Alerting webmasters to webserver vulnerabilities

I’m really happy about a new experiment that we’re trying that has the potential to help a ton of site owners. A new blog post on the Google webmaster blog (you are subscribed to the webmaster blog, right? You’ll find at least as much good SEO and search-related info on that blog as on my [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-17 more

Authentic Jobs October 2008 promo: 30% off

Looking to hire some web talent? Need a designer or a developer who keeps track of what's going on in the web world? In case you haven't already, give Authentic Jobs a try. Right now there is a promotion that lasts until October 31 (this year ;-)) and will give you 30% off on both full-time and freelance listings if you use the promotion code BEREA31 when you create your job listing. Should you not find the talent you are looking for there is a money-back guarantee that applies even if you use the promo code. In other words you have nothing to lose. Not hiring but looking for a job? Check out the listings or subscribe to an Authentic Jobs listing feed to make sure you don't miss any of the opportunities that are posted.Posted in Job openings.
Publication date: 2008-10-17 more

Recently discovered web developer-related Firefox add-ons

I have recently discovered a few Firefox extensions that can be quite useful when building websites. They are likely old news to many, but I figure there are at least a few others who have not come across them. ColorZilla is a handy extension that makes it easy to grab colours from the web page that is currently open in the browser. It sure beats having to open a screen shot in Photoshop just to find a colour code for something. ColorZilla does some other useful things as well, so it is not just a colour picker. Firefox Accessibility Extension adds features that are useful to people with disabilities and helps developers evaluate accessibility. Screengrab! among other things lets you take screen shots of what is inside the browser viewport, without the browser chrome. I could have used this recently when I was taking a whole bunch of screen shots of various websites for an upcoming course on web development. Unfortunately I didn't know about it then so I used the built in screen shot functionality in Mac OS X and cropped the images to get only the browser viewport. Oh well. WAVE Toolbar lets you run the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool inside Firefox, without sending any information to the WAVE server. Perfect if you're like me and spend a lot of time working on password-protected sites. Posted in Accessibility, Browsers.
Publication date: 2008-10-15 more

Free links to your site

I can’t believe a new feature from Google isn’t getting more notice, because it converts already-existing links to your site into much higher quality links, for free. The Google webmaster blog just announced that you can find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site. Let me back up and give you a little [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-14 more

Stupid Digg + a kitten

Sorry that the blog was down for a few hours. Yesterday I did a throwaway post that somehow ended up getting 3800+ diggs or so. I didn’t have WP-Cache or Supercache turned on, so my blog melted to a little puddle of fail. “Matt, you idiot! How you could run a modern WordPress blog [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-11 more

YouTube adds

A couple weeks ago, xkcd ran this funny comic: Randall Monroe, the creator of xkcd, suggested that if YouTube commenters had to listen to their comments read back to them aloud, it might lead to better discussion on YouTube. Some Googlers thought that was a pretty fun suggestion, so they did it. YouTube now has an [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-09 more

Halloween costume for 2008?

I think I know what I’m doing for Halloween this year, but if anyone wants to throw out suggestions, I’d be delighted to hear them.
Publication date: 2008-10-08 more

Google to webmasters: Write clean HTML and consider accessibility

I suspect that the recent release of Google Chrome, based on Webkit, has at least something to do with the Google Webmaster Central Blog post Workin' it on all browsers. In the post webmasters are encouraged to make sure their sites work regardless of what browser their visitors use, and Google is likely interested in websites working properly in their own browser. The blog post points to an article in the Webmaster Help Center called Making sure your site appears properly in different browsers. That article contains four main tips: Test your site in as many browsers as possible Write good, clean HTML Specify your character encoding Consider accessibility All good advice of course, though obviously there is a lot more to be said about good HTML and accessibility than what is brought up in the article. Nevertheless it's good to see this kind of information on Google where it may reach people who would not otherwise bother writing proper HTML and CSS or consider accessibility at all.Posted in Accessibility, Web Standards.
Publication date: 2008-10-08 more

My Five Months With Google Chrome

Om Malik wrote an interesting post about Google Chrome one month after the public launch. While I was reading Om’s post, I realized that I wrote a post for the Google Chrome release that I never published. I’ll include it here, and then let’s meet at the bottom and compare notes. Like many Google [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-06 more

Quick comment for pixelrn

I tried to leave a comment on pixelrn.com but the problem with talking about hacked sites is that you often end up using language that gets flagged as spammy. Here’s what I tried to say but the WordPress installation over on pixelrn wouldn’t let me: Hi Beth, I checked and it doesn’t look like you have [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-04 more

Google Blogsearch and Techmeme

More and more people are spending free time (and work time) online and lots of those people want to discover interesting things on the web. Google Blogsearch’s new home page applies that insight with a browsable version of what’s going on in the blogosphere. The UI design is a little reminiscent of Google News, but [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-03 more

New meme: Tag five friends to register to vote

Okay, I’ll help on this. A Google blog post and the corresponding video ask people to register to vote (find out how at http://maps.google.com/vote ) and/or send this video to five of their friends. I’m game for that, mainly because Jonah Hill is the funniest man in the world and he says to do it. [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-03 more

Multiple form labels and screen readers

Just about every website needs some forms. Sometimes there are many of them, sometimes just a single contact form. Regardless of their number, they need to be usable and accessible, which can sometimes be a little more work than it would be if theory and practice aligned a little better. Say you have a simple form with an input field whose value needs to be validated, either by a JavaScript running in the browser or by a script on the server (preferably both). When the data entered by the user does not match what is expected, you need to notify the user somehow. For sighted users this is generally not a problem. If you output some text stating what the problem is and highlight it visually, most people will notice it. For screen reader users it's a little more tricky though. To make sure that the screen reader associates the message with the correct input field, the text should be in a label element that is explicitly connected to the field. No problem so far actually, but then the designer tells you that it has to look differently. The validation message should be below the input field instead of next to the label text. Or it should be next to the input field, or some other location not directly adjacent to the label text. You start fiddling with extra markup, absolute positioning, negative margins, and end up with something that seems to work reasonably well. Until you resize the text, at which point things get misaligned. You may be able to find a half-good solution that works within certain constraints, but if you've been down this road you probably get the point. Positioning error messages this way is fragile. It would be so much easier if you could just put the error message in a second label element associated with the input field. Well, it turns out you can do that. From The LABEL element in the HTML 4.01 specification: The LABEL element may be used to attach information to controls. Each LABEL element is associated with exactly one form control. The for attribute associates a label with another control explicitly: the value of the for attribute must be the same as the value of the id attribute of the associated control element. More than one LABEL may be associated with the same control by creating multiple references via the for attribute. Sounds great, doesn't it? A quick check in graphical web browsers shows that they associate multiple labels with the input field (as evidenced by the input field gaining focus when either label is clicked). But what about screen readers? It would be so useful if this would work... Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it looks like it doesn't quite work as well as you'd hope. I mentioned this briefly in Use the label element to make your HTML forms accessible, but I think it's worth bringing up again since full support for multiple labels would help us make forms more accessible to screen reader users while keeping visual designers happy. I am far from an expert user when it comes to screen readers, but I've done some limited testing with mostly disappointing results. Apple VoiceOver does not recognise more than one label element associated with a form control and reads only the label that comes first in the document's source order. JAWS and Window-Eyes both do the opposite and read only the last label when an input field gains focus. The only screen reader of those that I tested that does handle multiple labels is Fire Vox. The exact results may obviously depend on user configuration and reading modes, and there may be other screen readers that get it right, but these results indicate that screen reader behaviour is too inconsistent for multiple labels to be a reliable technique. A couple of years ago, Bob Easton set up a multiple label test case that reveals similar results, discussed in Speaking form labels - Summary. Sorry to write at such length about something that appears to have no practical use. I just wanted to highlight a case where I think screen readers following the HTML specification more closely would help web developers to increase the accessibility of HTML forms they don't have full visual control of.Posted in (X)HTML, Accessibility.
Publication date: 2008-10-01 more

Five fun smartphone tips

Tip #1: See what you’re ordering. You’re at a restaurant and looking over the menu. But you don’t know the difference between a turkey bolognese and a turkey piccata. What to do? Fire up your iPhone, Android, or other smartphone and go to images.google.com and do a search for turkey bolognese. In just a few [...]
Publication date: 2008-09-29 more

Where to submit Chrome feedback?

The best place to submit Chrome feedback is at http://groups.google.com/group/google-chrome-help Not here (I’m going to disable comments on this post) and not over at Search Engine Roundtable. I still see a comment a day or so trickling in over there, probably because the post ranks highly for “Chrome feedback.” Just to repeat, if you want a Chrome [...]
Publication date: 2008-09-28 more

Traveling => Light posting

I’m not-in-California for a few days, so expect light posting. If you want to try to guess where I’m visiting, I may start posting “Where is Matt?” hints on my Twitter stream for people that want to play along. While I’m gone, enjoy the Android coverage. Even though I love my iPhone, I think lots of [...]
Publication date: 2008-09-25 more