Alexander Gewessler, a co-developer and friend @ diamonddogs, has released a javascript library for "accessible rich internet application", based on the WAI-ARIA working draft from the W3C.

From his website:
Embedding Accessibility in Rich Internet Applications is of great importance for achieving the goal of Universal Design, the approach to design products that can be used by all people without the need for adaptation or specialization.

Website: www.access-see-be.net

The source is also available at github.

We finally released a new version of openSteam today.

This release introduces some major enhancements of the checkout- and order-process, like shipping-rate calculation, tax management and an ActiveMerchant integration for credit-card payments.

New Features:

• Taxes: define taxes or tax-groups for products and regions
• ActiveMerchant integration
• PaymentMethods: use implemented payment-methods or implement your own
• ShippingRate: define rates for products, regions and payment-types.
• PDF-Export for invoices (using the excellent prawnto plugin)

For a full list of changes please read the CHANGELOG, and if you're curious what to expect in future releases, please visit the Roadmap at our homepage.

In future posts we will try to describe some of the new features and their implementations in detail.