Hi Asa, not sure if you read the comments from days past. I wanted to clue you into a pretty amazing website: http://del.icio.us I know how much of a newshound you are and I think you'll really dig this site. It's basically a way for you to share your bookmarks with others, and see the highest "linked to" links on an hourly basis -- In other words, it's a fantastically addictive site, which usually has the most interesting links up to a week before the regular "blogosphere".

> A cool boxes demo (via dealmeida.net)

Extend it a little, and get Mozilla into a paint program. <g>

did you see this mozilla extension that was linked to from the talkback on the topographic bookmarklet? Pretty cool..

http://chrispederick.myacen.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/

Jeff, yeah. I use that extension a lot. It's great.

Andreww, yeah, that's a great site/tool. I need to spend some more time using it.

--Asa

BTW, those css boxes don't work in IE. :) (isn't IE 100% standards compliant??....not)

I found writing IE plugins far more easier than writing for mozilla. Specifically, mozilla modifies some APIs and things break whenever mozilla releases a new version. For example Adobe's SVG plugin. You can use C# and .net for IE plugins which make the whole experience a lot easier. In addition, you can use visual studio .net which is really the best development tool out there. In fact, there is a company which makes it possible for companies to use visual studio .net to develop products for Unix. Mozilla needs something like c# (java?) and a tool like visual studio .net (eclipse) to seriously compete with IE on these issues. Javascript is good for simple plugins, but it doesn't scale to large projects. Probably I would get flamed for these comments, but that's not my problem.

Hey, Asa. Chris W. from Google here. We know. It's unclear what I can say until there's a different press effort...but accessibility in Gmail is definitely being addressed behind the scenes. (I'm just responding 'cuz I know you might be interested and given that you've dealt at times with various challenges at the vertices of beta development/user testing/code branching/etc, etc.)

Chris, thanks for the note! It's good to hear that folks are "workin' on it" :-)

Is accessibility for visually impaired a real user concern or just a public relations or legal concern?

Does anyone out there have any statistics on the number of visually impaired internet users? Are there more than, say, 70 million of them (my rough guess at the number of Mozilla, Opera, and Safari users)? Do all of the major websites (say, the top 1000 most visited) cater to visually impaired?

The reason I ask is because sites that redesign their layout to cater to some fairly small fraction of the market because they want those users (as opposed to doing it because they're afraid of the PR or legal fallout) should be prime targets for a Mozilla and standards evangelism.

If a company can be convinced that it's in their best interest, and worth the cost of redesign, to cater to (I'm guessing) less than 1% of internet users, then we really need to hit them up with stats showing that Mozilla, Opera, and Safari make up something close to 10% of internet users and let them know that there's a really nice sub-set of the w3c standards that these three browsers support quite well.