Alcides Fonseca

How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary by Robert L Read, is a wonderful short book every programmer should read. You’ll get an idea of the skills you should improve in the different stages of your path through programming. And I love the fact that there is no code there, not even one programming language name mentioned! And he goes through Debugging, Unit Testing and so. And you’ll read it incredible fast!

Why Johnny Can’t Scale is a post on why Twitter can’t scale as it should and a small rant on Ruby on Rails. You should read it along with the debate in the comments between Michael Galpin and DHH himself.

Fencing in the habitat – doing things right and getting the accessibility wrong is a presentation by Christian Heilmann on accessibility on the web. And I love how you can get the idea by just reading the slides. A must for webdevelopers!

Two of the Web2.0 buzzwords are Accessibility and Usability. They both should be implemented in the websites of this new age of web. Now another buzzword, this one technical: AJAX. This technique to update only some parts of the website without reloading it all has allowed developers to increase the usability of their websites making them faster and improving the user interface to make them resemble desktop applications.

But at what cost? Most of this websites are not correctly loaded on mobile phones or javascriptless browsers. But there are a few that do the AJAX degradation well or pick the easy way (my favorite) and create a basic HTML version. I believe this last one is more effective because the user interface using Javascript with AJAX has a different structure than simple HTML and they should be made independently.

But for those who don’t like making another full website for the minority of browsers, there is now a framework for injecting “accessibility using AJAX techniques”. It’s called AxsJAX, it is being opensourced by Google (It is being used on Google Reader) and you can find out more about this on ifacethoughts.

Do outro lado do Atlântico, na terra do tio Sam, há um caso em tribunal que poderá mudar o futuro da acessibilidade web. Um cego processou a empresa Target pelo seu website não ter atributos ALT nas imagens e teclas de acesso para permitir a sua navegação por ele próprio. Um juiz aceitou em tribunal o caso e estamos a espera de novos seguimentos.

De facto faz pensar se não será ilegal discriminar as pessoas com algumas limitações, quando existem standards para o fazer correctamente. Pessoalmente acho que não deveria ser ilegal, visto que cada autor do site faz o site para o público alvo que entender. Acho de bom senso fazê-lo até porque nem custa nada, e sofro bastante com isto quando navego no meu PDA.

Claro que se esta situação acontecesse cá em Portugal, estavam os webdesigners todos tramados, tirando uns ou outros que sabem fazer sites. Aqueles que fazem sites flash-based, com tabelas, spacers em gif, IE-only, etc… estariam em maus lençois, o que até gostava de ver, para que se esmerassem no seu trabalho.

Ainda nesta área fiquei surpreendido quando a Vanessa me disse que no curso de Novas Tecnologias da Informação, na Universidade de Aveiro, incluem acessibilidade, usabilidade e standards nos programas do plano curricular.