Greasemonkey

Hacks 67–76: Introduction I have cared about accessibility for almost 3 years, ever since I worked at AT&T as a relay operator for the deaf and hearing impaired. My manager was deaf, and I learned enough American Sign Language to communicate wi...

If you're a web developer, you should already know that web accessibility is important. One of the primary mechanisms for enabling blind and disabled users to view your pages is to provide alternate text for every image. This is so important that the...

An increasing number of sites define keyboard shortcuts, called access keys, for commonly used features. This is an accessibility aid for people who have difficulty using a mouse. For example, a site could define a shortcut to jump to the site's acce...

"Add an Access Bar with Keyboard Shortcuts" [Hack #68] introduced the concept of site-specific keyboard shortcuts (called access keys, after the attribute used to define them). Like Greasemonkey itself, access keys can be used for good or for evil. A...

In the HTML specifications, there are two attributes designed to allow text to be attached to an image: alt and title. The alt attribute is short for alternate, and it is designed to display when the image itself cannot. The title attribute is design...

I read a lot of specifications online. Not as part of my day job; I mean I do this for fun. There are good specifications, and there are bad specifications, but there is one thing you can say about virtually all of them: they are incredibly long. And...

Google does an excellent job of indexing the Web, but it does a poor job of displaying the results. By poor, I mean not semantic. Why does semantic markup matter? Well, among other things, it enables hacks such as "Add a Table of Contents to Long Pag...

In Firefox, you can make any page text larger by pressing Ctrl-equals sign (=), or make it smaller by pressing Ctrl-hyphen (-).However, this does nothing to the images on the page. If you want to enlarge or reduce an image, you're out of luck. Here...

Have you ever visited a page to find nothing but a plain list of files? If a folder has no default web page, the Apache web server autogenerates a directory listing with clickable filenames. Nothing fancy, but it works, so why complain? Because we ca...

I spend a lot of time—probably too much time—commenting on weblogs and web-based discussion forums. Despite several attempts to create some sort of universal commenting API, virtually all of these sites continue to use a simple web form with a <te...

As a class of disabilities, low-vision users are often ignored by accessibility experts. However, accessibility expert Joe Clark has recently published his research into the needs of web users with limited vision. He pioneered a technique known as th...