Technical Happenings

Accessibility and Flash – Make sure you add a HTML version of the Site

Here are some of the  usability and data accessibility issues with Flash.

• You can’t select, copy, or paste  text
• Your browser’s font override features won’t work, so you can’t adjust the font or its size
• Your browser’s built-in in-page search won’t work
• You can’t use the keyboard to scroll through the text
• You can’t parse or scrape the data in any way
• The design is fixed-width, so it’s not going to work well on different screen sizes
• Browser plugins, like Greasemonkey, can’t adjust anything to augment the content
• SEO is near non-existent
• Tracking takes more effort

So, if you are going to create a flash site, make sure you create an HTML alternative.  This will please both Accessibility aficionados and your users, who contrary to some peoples views, really do like the choice. It will also provide much better SEO for your site.

2 Billion applications downloaded from 40 million Iphones

While iPhone is only about 3% of the handset penetration it is responsible for a huge amounts of activity

• 1.3B Internet users
• 1.8B Fixed line telephones
• 2.9B Mobile Phones
• 4B Mobile users

But out of  4B mobile users there are only 40M iPhones (inc about 20M iPod touch). Howver these 40M  have downloaded 2B apps from the app store. I looked at mine and i have 142, which was a bit if a shock and shows i was above the avergae amount of apps downloaded.  take a look at an app store statistics article here.

Flash IE6 and SSL Issues

Flash or data within flash not loading in IE6? Just change the following headers in code

<%
Response.AddHeader(“Cache-Control”, “cache, must-revalidate”);
Response.AddHeader(“Pragma”, “public”);
%>

or add into IIS via the Header Tab:

header(“Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate”);
header(“Pragma: public”);

Then you will be relaxed once more.