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One has to wonder after reading these articles from yesterday’s ZDNet…

In their article, Report: Malicious PDF files comprised 80% of all exploits for 2009, ZDNet reports:

A newly released report shows that based on more than a trillion Web requests processed in 2009, the use of malicious PDF files exploiting flaws in Adobe Reader/Adobe Acrobat not only outpaced the use of Flash exploits, but also, grew to 80% of all exploits the company encountered throughout the year.

The other blog, Adobe plugs more gaping holes in PDF Reader, ZDNet reports that Adobe has released a new patch for the Adobe Reader yesterday.

This morning, both of my Windows XP machines lit up with an announcement that there was a new version of Flash Player available and urged me to install. I did despite the fact that I manually updated them all last week when the first stories appeared that the patch was released.

Perhaps the scariest conclusion noted in the ZDNet article about report from ScanSafe was that:

Therefore, the increasing use of malicious PDFs can also be interpreted as the direct result of the millions of users using outdated and exploitable Adobe products (emphasis mine), with the only preference a malicious attacker could have in this case remaining the incentive based on the 99% penetration of Adobe Flash on Internet-enabled PCs.

I guess the adage, “you have no one to blame but yourself” comes to mind, but clearly, people have come to expect that the people who make the stuff that they run on their computers ensure that their stuff is safe.

So the message here folks is: when you get a notice that there is a new version of your software available, drop everything and install it.

The good folks over at WebAIM have announced the availability of a new Dreamweaver extension that tests for the accessibility of web pages while still under construction. Using the architecture of their popular WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool, the WAVE Dreamweaver extension is installed inside of the Dreamweaver application and resides as a toolbar. When activated, the extension will review the currently opened file for basic accessibility errors but does not provide an explanation of the errors or necessarily how to fix them. Some knowledge of accessible web design is thus required.

I have been using the WAVE tool for years to do quick and dirty reviews of web pages for others and always use it to check my own work once it has been published to the web. The advantage of this new extension is that I will now be able to check the accessibility of my pages before publishing them live on the web.

The WAVE Dreamweaver extension (still in Beta) is free and works with Dreamweaver CS3+.

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Under the “in the works” category is none other than Microsoft’s Office 2010 purported to be release sometime in June of this year. Already out in Beta, one of the features garnering my attention is the inclusion of a new “document Accessibility Checker.”

Direct from Microsoft’s Office Engineering blog they state:

To solve this problem in Office 2010 we created a document Accessibility Checker (like a spell checker, but for accessibility issues) as a core feature of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

We started by examining the most common accessibility problems in Office documents and bucketing them in terms of their severity – we ended up with three categories:

• Issues where content is unreadable. For example, a picture missing alternative text (alt text provides a text based representation of an image) is unreadable to a person who is blind.
• Issues where content is difficult to read. In general, these issues are less severe than unreadable content – for example, if an author has created a data table and used complex formatting to alter its presentation (i.e. using blank rows or columns, or merged and split cells), then a person with a disability might have difficulty understanding content in the table.
• Issues that may or may not make content difficult to read. In our explorations, there were a set of issues that potentially cause users with disabilities difficulty for which we don’t have a high confidence, automatic way to determine whether the issue is really a problem. For example, knowing whether or not the reading order of objects on a slide or cells in a layout table is optimal for a particular reader falls into this bucket.

Based on these three categories, we came up with a set of issues our checker looks for (described in more detail below) – when presented to the user, they are bucketed into “Errors”, “Warnings”, and “Tips” – these buckets correspond to the above three descriptions.

As you know from reading this blog, the best solution to ensuring all documents on the web are accessible is to ensure that ALL documents – wherever they are – are accessible. This includes all word processor, spreadsheet, presentational and desk-top-publishing documents. PDF documents, often the most controversial of all web documents – in terms of accessibility – are best made from documents that are already accessible. This new tool will be a big step – I hope – in making that happen.

From the description provided by Microsoft, it appears the new document Accessibility Checker will be a “voluntary” wizard that users must choose to activate and use. It is not clear if it can be made to be “involuntary” and require authors to review and fix their documents before saving them. But that’s probably asking too much. Microsoft’s angle on this is:

For organizations that are concerned about compliance for employees, we’ve provided several group policy settings that can be used to customize exactly which accessibility violations are checked. Administrators can also increase the visibility and emphasis of the Prepare for Sharing information when there are errors or warnings. Finally, IT departments can leverage Office 2010’s UI extensibility to enforce a workflow that requires users to run the checker – this will help many corporations reduce the risk of employees creating inaccessible content and increase the amount of accessible information available to people with disabilities.

I’ll be interested in seeing this feature when it comes out. Stay tuned.

I’ve gotten tired of my Joomla! template for jebswebs.com and had contemplated getting a new one. I’m in the market because one of my clients needs a new one, but I decided to see if there was a way to tweak this one. The current template is called Weblogic from JoomlaShack, and while I was looking over the JS site, I realized that there were a number of ways I could tweak Weblogic to make it look – almost – new.

The easiest thing to do was to simply change the font-family style element from Georgian/serif to a san-serif. That has made a tremendous difference. Let that be a lesson to you; a simple font change can make your whole site look completely different.

There are still some font elements I don’t like, but I gotta search out the code to find where the CSS for that particular code is hiding. Always fun trying to crack someone else’s code.

Next, I need to work on getting/creating some new graphics for the site. With my new HP Pavilion Elite, crunching graphics is a breeze. So, stay tuned.

It may not be spring (look at the photos I just posted of the New Years Storm of 2010), but it is the New Year and change is in the air.

~j

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Image licensed by Creative Commons

It seems this is a controversial subject…

A client of mine asked about this topic and, in doing my homework, I am learning that this is something where there are no easy answers. It seems that there are general issues with most if not all of the standard (free) WordPress (WP) themes and there may even be some issues under the hood. A Google search leads to a couple of folks who are claiming their theme meets the standards.

Our friend and colleague Dennis Lembree, of @AccessibleTwitter fame, is apparently also seeking the Holy Grail and wrote about his quest this past summer on his blog. In the responses to his query, there were several free WP themes suggested. I have just switched to one of those and am testing it out. Until I have reviewed it completely, that’s all I’ll say on the topic.

But this is a good time to again mention something I am fond of repeating. You can build the best content management system in the world – one that is completely accessible out of the box – and one user can ruin the accessibility with one simple action like failing to add ALT text to an image or creating a hyperlink using the words “click here.” You simply cannot rely on the software to ensure accessibility. Vigilance is the key.

As I continue my search, I’ll keep you posted. Feel free to comment.

This is primarily intended for my clients who are using WordPress on the websites….you know who you are, right? Ahem…

Anyway, three exciting changes found in the new version of WordPress are “the Trash Can,”  “image editing” and “video embedding.”

The Trash Can now adds a step between removing a blog entry or page and permanently deleting. When you “delete” something in WordPress 2.9 it automatically goes into a trash can (just like in Windows or Mac OS). You can go to the Trash Can tab and permanently delete the items then, or simply wait and WordPress will automatically delete the item permanently in 30 days.

An even more exciting addition to WordPress 2.9 are new image editing tools that will pop up when you insert an image into a post or page. The editing tool features a cropping tool as well as some basic flipping and spinning features.

The third new feature may come in handy for some clients and I will be trying this one out myself. This has to do with embedding video clips. In the past, to embed a video like a YouTube clip, you had to grab the embedding code from YouTube, then open a page or post and click on the HTML version of the editor, then find the location where you wanted your video clip to appear, and then paste the code. It wasn’t always a smooth process. Well, apparently – and I haven’t tried this yet – all you have to do now is grab the embedding code and place it where you want the clip to appear right on your page, then simply paste the code right into the page (using the standard Visual editor) and voila! The video will magically appear…or so I believe. I’ll check that one and get back to you.

To “embed” a video in either a page or a post on WordPress, you actually have to use the URL link code NOT the Embed code. Your code with be the one with the “http://….”  NOT the one with the “<object width=…>” This might be a little confusing. But it works – see the embedded video at the bottom of this post.

To learn more about these new features, go to the Official WordPress blog where there is a short video explaining and demonstrating these new features.

Here is the sample of one of my You Tube videos