Today is election day in Canada. I went to the polling place and, as I have done in every election in living memory, quizzed everybody in sight about accessibility.

First question was blind/visually-impaired voters. The poll clerk said they give them a template with Braille. The clerk reads the candidates in order, and the elector steps behind the screen to mark the ballot. Later, the polling supervisor and I looked at the template. It is unlike my memory from last time, which was of a black-plastic-backed template with a hinge at the top and Plexiglas around the holes. I distinctly recall that and recall being shown that it fits tightly around the ballot.

The polling supervisor admitted that this election’s template is different from the last one, but she couldn’t recall the characteristics of the last one. Nor was there actual Braille – I looked and felt all over the surface – but there were rather small and not-very-raised raised numerals in nobody’s favourite font, Arial. There were, if I recall, 16 holes. The supervisor nonchalantly pulled the template out of my hands before I could snap a picture, but somebody else got one.

The poll clerk could think of no occasion in which the room would be cleared, which is different from last time, as I was told that the room would be cleared if a blind person had to have the candidate names read to them.

Next, deaf-blind. Neither of them had received any training on deaf-blind people. Their answers on how they would be dealt with were identical to those for a blind person. I (anonymously) explained another person’s experience as recounted on a mailing list and thereby taught the supervisor the word “intervenor.” She admitted that she wished they had been given the fullest information (putting it in my terms) and that they had been taught words like “intervenor.”

Deaf people: The supervisor had no knowledge at all about practices for sign-language interpreters. Three deaf people had already been in that day, one of them illiterate; one of his friends helped him out, and the supervisor assisted him in teaching him how to sign his name and write “January 23, 2006.” I found this odd, but rather than engage in subject creep and branch off into the new topic of illiterate electors, I left it at that. One of the other clerks was alleged to “speak sign language,” but the supervisor admitted she was not a certified interpreter.

Mobility impairment: The elector can bring a person and vouch for that person, or the supervisor can assist in marking the ballot, or both.

I asked for any other details or interesting facts they were trained on and there were none.

I thanked the supervisor. “And if we get a minority government,” I said, “I’ll see you again in 14 months.”

At least this one wasn’t seen during the blazing heat of summer.

CSS is easy, right? We tell people that, even though the principles involved in tables for layout can be learned in half an hour and never need to be upgraded.

As I tell my not-infrequent critics, if you don’t like some part of the appearance of my Web “properties,” it’s almost certainly because I don’t know how to do any better. I am sometimes embarrassed by that, but most of the time I live with this damning self-indictment reasonably well. I’m an expert in enough obscure fields. Do I also need Bowmanesque facility with CSS, too?

No. I don’t. And these sites are proof of it.

Nevertheless, shit happens. I’ve made a resolution to “transition,” rather like a confused male on hormones, to HTML 4.01 Strict for ’06. I’m going for markup purity and exempting myself from the XHTML discussion altogether. Hot, right? So very, very hot.

I’m putting together basic all-purpose stylesheets for the little text-only documents I have sitting around (by the hundreds, in fact). Yes, my shit is unexciting to look at, so what I want is a nice new CSS that respects such a reality. I do want a cute little graphical header here and there:

And I want that to be a link back to the homepage. Obviously I don’t want borders or underlines or any of that nonsense. Simple, right? a img { border: none; text-decoration: none; }.

But of course that doesn’t work. Because of my pluperfect link specifications (:link and :visited and :hover and :active and usually also :focus), I kept getting an underline or a blue background on hover. (Just the whole discussion of fine-tuning hover effects blows IE6 out of the water anyway, given that it all but fails to understand the concept.)

Anyway, that’s also simple, right? Just add !important. Well, that didn’t work, either.

Add classes to things? Like .headerimage-left a:link img, perhaps. Oh, but if I’m doing that, I also have to do the other link pseudoclasses. So that’s six or eight entries right there if I include not only *-left but *-centre.

And that didn’t work, either.

So at this point I get Rohgare Johansson on the line. And we can’t get it totally right, either. This is causing me agitation.

joeclark

I keep telling you this is not easy to fix.

RogerJohansson

and I’m not going to give up

Admirable, certainly. But later we do give up. On a lark I ping Featherstone, who discovers that you just can’t trust specificity these days and you have to declare every last thing: div.headerimage-left a.nothing:hover { background-color: #fff; }.

Yeah. So that was like an hour and a half working on something that’s supposed to be rudimentary. And the result? Well, it’s my reading list, and it looks just like a text-only page circa 1999, except maybe with nicer fonts.

(Incidentally, this personal Weblog will remain XHTML Transitional into the indefinite future, as that is a WordPress default that is too difficult to change. It would be interesting for someone to develop a plug-in to migrate Transitional to Strict markup, which, in homage to Brian Eno, could be named the Before and After Science plug-in.)

I have about 630 RSS subscriptions and I read them all through Kinja. In making that admission, I become a Kids in the Hall punchline: “I have A GOOD ATTITUDE TOWARDS MENSTRUATION. That’s right, I’m the guy!”

Either I’m just terribly avant-garde or something is seriously wrong, because I know all you A-listers use NetNewsWire and swear by it. (One-third of my hits are from newsreaders.) Well, nearly two years ago I started adding blogs (short for “Web logs”) to Kinja and simply adapted to its approach of using a single-page Web site to list RSS excerpts with links. I can read blogs from my friend’s place or any of my computers. It’s actually convenient, though this approach is unimaginable without tabbed browsing. [continue with: In defence of Kinja →]

Longtime readers will be aware of my interest in PDF accessibility. In furtherance of that interest, I work with the PDF/UA Committee – very much a happy ship, in stark contrast to a comparable working group. We are presently dealing with the issue of tables in accessible PDF. As our esteemed leader Duff Johnson (no relation) puts it,

The Committee requests that interested parties submit examples of “absurdly complex” tables to the Committee for review. In particular, we are interested in tables that cannot be adequately described using the current 1.6 Specification elements and attributes.

Yes, this is your chance to VENT about hideously complex tables you have been stuck with. But cast your net wide, please: Any source will do, including print, where we often find tables that simply cannot be rendered in HTML. PDF’s table tags and attributes are similar to, but not as extensive as, HTML’s. It is my intention to make the PDF spec for table accessibility better than reality and assuredly better than HTML’s.

To do this, we need to account for worst-case scenarios and for different uses of tables. For the latter, several come to mind:

1. Zebra tables
2. Tables with show/hide functions (so that only some rows are displayed on command)
3. Tables with embedded headers (e.g., many columns of scientific results broken up by years, each of which year is a header spanning all or most of the columns)
4. Mixed-writing-direction languages. (Actually, getting everything to work just as well in right-to-left and vertical writing systems is half a lifetime’s work right there)
5. Images as headers (previously disputed as even possible by another working group; I guess they never read Spy)
6. Character alignment, as with financial tables, where decimal points, parentheses, and dashes have to occur in certain columns
7. Enumeration of list items (including the use of specific start points and jumping over certain numbers)

You can also write in with what you want a table specification to do even if nothing you know of does it already. You can leave a comment on the PDF/UA blog (short for “Web log”), mail things in to Duff, and preferably write your own posts and tag them with complextable.

Perhaps interestingly, I have a table up with nearly every known HTML accessibility feature, all of which added 27K to the file size with no demonstrable benefit. (And I dearly needed enumerated table rows.)

Update

(2006.01.27)   I produced a list of examples of stupendous HTML tables. I also found some relevant PDF examples.

Where exactly do you get a pickup body made of corrugated steel?

Could better paint on the Body & Paint Shop’s sign be in order?

Oh, never mind. We like the weathered look.