jQuery Roundup: Chosen, jQuery.bulletGraph, ARIA Hackathon
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Chosen
Chosen (GitHub: harvesthq / chosen, License: MIT) by Patrick Filler for Harvest is a nice little library for enhancing select boxes. Like many other similar plugins, this one hides standard selects and provides an alternative using modern HTML and CSS. That means it’s possible to add behaviour that standard selects don’t support without losing support when JavaScript is turned off.
The basic usage involves adding the plugin’s source to your project and then applying the chzn-select class to select boxes.
With other similar plugins I’ve found some browsers like Internet Explorer can suffer from a very noticeable visual hiccup when the selects are rendered. I haven’t yet tested this one with a complex page with lots of selects, but I’d be interested to see how well it performs.
jQuery.bulletGraph
jQuery.bulletGraph (GitHub: johdax / jQuery.bulletGraph) by johdax helps render bullet graphs, created by Stephen Few, which are “linear and no-frills” graphs for “rich display of data in a small space”.
// bulletgraph with custom ranges & range labels
$('select#metric2').bulletGraph({
width: 200,
height: 20,
ranges: ['0%', '20%', '70%', '100%'],
rangesLabels: ['low', 'medium', 'high'],
sliderOptions: {
disabled: true
}
});
It’s always good to see graph libraries based on serious technical design instead of whatever combination of shadows and gradients is currently fashionable, so I’d bookmark this if you’re looking for ways to present data visually.
ARIA Hackathon Summary
The jQuery UI Blog has a post detailing the ARIA Hackathon which was an event designed to get jQuery UI developers and ARIA experts together to work on jQuery UI accessibility. It sounds like the jQuery UI keyboard accessibility is being improved.
If you’re interested in jQuery UI and ARIA, I found the jQuery UI Accessibility Hackathon wiki page. If you want to read up on ARIA, there are a lot of resources at the WAI-ARIA Overview.
