Ajax Girl

California may require websites to provide access to visually impaired users under ruling made in the long running case of the National Federation of the Blind vs Target.

The case centers on Target not providing basic accessibility to vision impaired users via the use of alt tags for images, keyboard options for navigation and missing navigation headers.

US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in the Court for the Northern District of California had previously found that “the inaccessibility of Target.com impeded full and equal enjoyment of goods and services offered in Target stores” and has now ruled that the case is eligible for class action status, despite attempts by Target to have the case thrown out.

The result of the case will have far broader implications for the many startups and Web 2.0 companies operating in California, with many sites having to factor access into their services and sites or risk the prospect of legal sanctions.

Whilst the basics as easy enough: tagging images and making sure that sites can be accessed through text based browsers, the use of Ajax and other means of scripting sites means that the traditional html tagging may not either be available, or more difficult to implement.

There is some suggestion from the court case that accessibility may also be required under the Americans with Disabilities Act as well, meaning that although the ruling is currently focused on California law, it could extend to the rest of the United States.

More information on making websites accessible to those with visual impairments can be found at the American Foundation for the Blind.

(via El Reg)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/169617206/

Facebook may be used for professional networking (particularly in Silicon Valley), but it sure isn’t set up to be. People’s profiles are all about their dating status, pictures, videos and other very personal information. It’s perfect for college dorm networking, but not so much for job or business development hunting.

LinkedIn, by contrast, is set up perfectly to network. You can see your extended network many levels deep, so you can quickly find out if you are connected to a person even with a few degrees of separation. With Facebook, you can go to your friends’ profiles and see who they are friends with, but you can’t go deeper into the social graph than that.

But that’s changing, fast. First, we noted that Facebook is creating friend grouping last month. By specifying certain friends as professional contacts, a whole different set of content can be shown to them (sans the dating status and pictures of you getting drunk).

And now Facebook is quietly making changes to their data structure to allow for the concept of “networking.” Currently on Facebook, users can say they are looking for friendship, dating, a relationship, random play or “whatever I can get.” But networking was recently added as a desired relationship type to the API (note that it is not yet an option on Facebook itself yet).

This is newly added, according to people who are familiar with the API. It’s so new it hasn’t yet been added to the Wiki that documents the API. This means that the official API documentation is ahead of the Wiki documentation for the same functionality (the wiki was last updated two weeks ago by Facebook engineers). And it means Facebook is likely preparing to launch this new feature but isn’t quite ready yet.

Once launched, Facebook (or third party developers) could add a lot of functionality around networking. Applications could be developed that show a social graph for users who’ve said they want to network that goes much deeper than one level of friends. You could, for example, use Facebook’s people search (which is now public) to not only find people, but see exactly how you are connected to them. In effect, Facebook could build a LinkedIn-type networking application within the overall Facebook network. And that could be very bad for LinkedIn in the long run.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/169538643/

eXpresso is an online collaboration tool around Excel spreadsheets. While a bit late to the game, they have plans to expand to other productivity tools as well. They will be announcing a new $2 million round of financing from Novus and Rocket Ventures on Monday, with the target of raising another $2 million soon. This is on top another couple million they’ve made off the sale of their original product, Smart DB, to Rocket Software (no relation to the venture group). The money will be put towards expanding their current Excel product and building a online Powerpoint application due out next Summer as well.

However, eXpresso isn’t the usual AJAX online spreadsheet competitor. Rather, it’s a series of collaboration tools and back-end database secret sauce wrapped around Microsoft’s own online spreadsheet editor, Microsoft Excel Web Component. This avoids a lot of the compatibility issues faced by other editors when they try to import Excel documents on to their platforms. The company seems oddly positioned by leaning heavily on Microsoft’s technology, but CEO George Langan assures me that they can continue to develop the component without Microsoft’s support and have a great deal of patented IP in the database system they run on. Microsoft has abandoned the technology themselves, announcing an end to development of the Office Web Components. Instead, they are focusing on developing new technologies around Microsoft Sharepoint.

The spreadsheet editor works smoothly, provides a familiar interface, and exposes a great deal of Excel’s desktop functionality online. You can edit cells, add formulas, sort, filter, and format. Google and Zoho have been aggressively adding a lot of these features themselves, but support auto-fill and charts as well. They also offer more applications. You can create a new file from within the program or sync one directly from Excel using their plug-in. eXpresso also offers file permissions (down to cell ranges), enables real time chat, and file management (version control, spreadsheet comparison). It’s currently free in beta, but will cost $10 or less per seat when it’s finally released into production.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/169253093/