AFx Updates
I Like Eye Candy
From the beginning, I always wanted to be sure that Access Firefox was easy to navigate and that the main focus was put on the content that I was presenting and wanted people to have interest in so I would for the most part suppress the design and graphics and make it compliment the content not steal away focus. That seemed to work pretty well but I felt that the site was too dry looking and lacked character and energy. From what I’ve seen over the past 9+ years on the Internet, accessibility has always been presented without much flare. Why is that? I have a visual impairment and I love eye candy so I’ve created new full color graphics including cool new icons for the home page and have begun a minor revamp to the entire site.
I really enjoy the CSS layout that Michael Buckley wrote for Access Firefox so that is staying intact but some elements have been changed such as the hover and active background colors stand out more and appear to be more animated now. Also a lot of content has been rearranged, added, removed, cleaned up.
They’ll always be some sort of tweaking going on to the site whether it is design related, content updates needed, washing the windows, taking out the trash etc. Feel free to pitch in.
Check out the latest updates to AccessFirefox.org’s home page.
Firefox 3 Accessibility Features Page
Frank Hecker and Marco Zehe put together a great Firefox 3 accessibility features brochure for the upcoming CSUN conference. I contacted Mr. Hecker with a request to be able to use the content in the brochure and he has kindly released his and Marco’s work under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
That content is now available on Access Firefox as the Firefox 3 Accessibility Features page and it is also available for download in PDF or ODT formats. It is a listing of some of the new accessibility features and options that have already been implemented into Firefox 3 beta 4. The page will continue to be updated as needed and it will eventually be merged with the current Firefox accessibility features page.
View the Firefox 3 Accessibility Features Page
Thanks for reading
Ken
Access Firefox on Download.com
I’m very pleased to have discovered a mention of Access Firefox on download.com in their feature Top 11 Firefox themes. Peter Butler writes about HiVisGnome Jumbo and describes it “as part of the Access Firefox project” and provides a link to the site.
It is indeed true that Ed Hume created HiVisGnome Jumbo and HiVisGnome Big for Access Firefox per my request back in October of 2005 making them the very first Firefox themes created specifically for persons with disabilities.
Now the article goes back to November 29, 2007, but I just discovered it in my StatEye (free and open source web site traffic analysis software) report as a referring URL to AccessFirefox.org. Download.com is sending us visitors and we greatly appreciate that.
If you have a blog or web site, please help us out by mentioning AccessFirefox.org or by linking to the site via a button or text link. You’ll be promoting both Firefox and Firefox accessibility at the same time.
Feel free to hotlink to our promotional graphics that can found on the Helping Others page.
We’ve provided copy and paste code to make that easy for you.
Thanks for reading.
Access Firefox Logo Gets Tweaked
All in all I’m pretty happy with the design of Access Firefox that was created by Michael Buckley who is also responsible for the site’s coding. However I’ve never really been content with the Access Firefox logo that I created, but it’s been extremely difficult to come up with a logo that represents Firefox accessibility. For the original Access Firefox logo, I used the standard symbol for accessibility which is the white wheelchair graphic. The site will eventually provide content for different disabilities, but for now and currently, the content is mostly for persons with visual impairments so I went with the eye logo. I was fairly happy when I originally created it but it lacked depth and character and it had to be changed. Today I finished tweaking the eye logo. I feel that it now has more dimension to it and I’ll stick with this one until something better comes along and you can help with that.
Contact me if you have any ideas for a logo for Access Firefox that represents Firefox accessibility.
This is really tough because legally, we cannot use the Firefox logo as part of a logo of our own.
We can use the Firefox globe without the fox on it.
So maybe you have an idea that represents access to something like a key, an open door, something, see I’m stuck.
Ken
