We're proud to announce that the four of us here at Filament Group have written a book! Designing with Progressive Enhancement is a practical guide that both explains the principles and benefits of progressive enhancement, and explores detailed examples to teach you how, where, and when to implement specific coding and scripting approaches that embody broadly accessible development practices.

We'll be writing about topics from the book and releasing some of the exciting new progressive enhancement-based jQuery plugins we include with the book over the coming weeks and months so stay tuned.

We're proud to announce our chapter on "jQuery UI Theming," in the new jQuery Cookbook, from O'Reilly Media. The chapter covers styling jQuery UI widgets with ThemeRoller, overriding layout and theme styles, applying themes to non-jQuery UI components, and referencing multiple themes on page. If you're interested in mastering jQuery UI Theming for your own websites and applications, it's the most thorough resource you'll find on the topic. We highly recommend picking up a copy!

At the 2009 Future of Web Apps conference in London, Bruce Lawson gave a great presentation demonstrating some of the features of HTML 5 that can be used today. We were thrilled to see that Bruce demonstrated our jQuery "Visualize" table-to-canvas charting technique as a "brilliant example of accessible use of Canvas."

We were thrilled to attend and contribute to The jQuery Conference 2009 in Boston this past weekend. On Saturday afternoon, our own Todd Parker and Scott Jehl teamed up to present "The jQuery UI CSS Framework and ThemeRoller" (pdf), with a summary of our progress in the last year developing Theming in jQuery UI and tips on how to leverage the jQuery UI CSS Framework in custom widget development. On Sunday evening, Scott took part in the lively discussion Q&A panel about the direction of the jQuery and jQuery UI projects moving forward.

Filament Group's Scott Jehl will be presenting "Rich UI Design: An Access-Oriented Approach" at Delve:UI, NYC. Scott's presentation will demonstrate page enhancements with some slick jQuery and jQuery UI components and feature FG's use of progressive enhancement and capabilities testing to deliver rich experiences that work and are accessible to the widest audience possible.

Accessible data visualization in HTML has always been tricky to achieve, particularly because elements such as images allow only the most basic features for providing textual information to non-visual users. A while back, we wrote an article describing a technique we came up with to use JavaScript to scrape data from an HTML table and generate charts using the HTML 5 Canvas element. The technique is particularly useful because the data for the visualization already exists in the page in structured tabular format, making it accessible to people who browse the web with a screen reader or other assistive technology.

We've now rewritten and extended the code behind this technique and packaged it up as a new jQuery plugin called "visualize", which you can download below. The plugin provides a simple method for generating bar, line, area, and pie charts from an HTML table, and allows you to configure them in a variety of ways.

Styling checkbox and radio button inputs to match a custom design is nearly impossible because neither reliably supports basic CSS, like background colors or images; it's even a challenge to get the margins to appear consistently across browsers. To remedy this we developed a concise jQuery plugin based on progressive enhancement that leverages an input element's built-in functionality and accessibility features and works in all modern browsers without added markup or mandatory CSS classes.

We recently contributed a number of our own plugins to the jQuery UI labs repository, a new branch of the jQuery UI project dedicated to future plugin development. Our latest contribution to labs is the selectmenu plugin, which is designed to duplicate and extend the functionality of a native HTML select element, and lets you customize the look and feel, add icons, and create hierarchy within the options. Best of all, it's built with progressive enhancement and accessibility in mind, has all the native mouse and keyboard controls, and is ThemeRoller-ready.

Using em units in CSS layout allows for page components to scale in unison with a user's font-size preferences. But developing in ems within dynamically updating web apps can be very tricky. In an earlier lab article, we released a script to quickly convert pixel values to ems (and vice versa) to support page scalability throughout a web site or application. We've rewritten the plugin to better follow jQuery syntax and reduce code weight, and are now releasing an updated version for download.

We dusted off our original sliding doors button to give it a much needed update. The button now works with image sprites thanks to the CSS contributions of Louis Walch, and also works with a single block of CSS (we’ve removed the now unnecessary conditional comments for IE) in all major browsers including IE versions 6 through 8.