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Content Tagged with accessibility + JavaScript

This is the first edition of the monthly post that collects not to be missed articles from around the web that relates to web development. The amount of articles may vary from month to month but the quality will never. This month we cover topics such a

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We’ve covered the YouTube JavaScript API here before and especially the chance to write your own players in HTML and JavaScript with it. Especially the ext.js based one to one copy of the YouTube interface was of interest.

At the Accessibility2.0 conference in London earlier this year, Antonia Hyde of United Response gave a talk about rich media and web apps for people with learning disabilities and outlined a perfect media player for the needs of this group of disabled web users.

Whilst not ticking all the boxes, I took the YouTube API and created an easy interface for YouTube videos that has big friendly buttons and easy to use volume controls:

You can just add a YouTube URL to the end of the player URL to play the video or download the whole player to host it yourself and style it any way you want.

Check out the blog post about Easy YouTube player to get all the information and try it out.

What I found was that neither mine, nor the extJS nor the demo pages on the YouTube API page work in Opera, which means there is a bug in the API itself.

I've just come across a solution for badges on web sites that makes it terribly easy for implementers. The idea is that the implementer could add a badge wherever they want in an HTML document, choose the look and feel and add a message to be shown. The implementation code is the following:

The badge script then replaces the script node with the badge using the settings defined for each script include. Clever, right? Well, almost. Security concerns and invalid HTML aside (the attributes - content inside a script is valid and should be ignored according to the W3C when a src attribute is present) there are many more issues with this:

• you need to loop through all script nodes, read the info and create the correct badge - this can get slow
• the badge.js script gets called over and over again, even if it is only needed once (granted, it will be cached)
• every script inside a body makes the rendering engine stop, pull the src and try to execute either that or the content of the node - this makes for terrible performance.

I've written up an example of how the above works and three alternative solutions that work around these issues.

What do you think? Should the ease of implementation be the success factor or the performance for the end user?

This is the start of a project by Michael Anthony Chacon. Follow his blog and progress. A Good Deed!