I stumbled upon two relatively new and interesting sites today pertaining to open some new free resources for usability and accessibility help. The first is WAT-C (Web Accessibility Tools Consortium). It’s a group that has banded together to help develop free tools to assist in testing accessibility issues with web sites. I’ve mentioned some of [...]
We all know that Bush Hates Black people now thanks to Kanye. Now, it turns out FEMA hates Mac people. And you linux folks too. Ah yes, the US government. For the people, by the people. Provided you aren’t poor, black, or a Mac user. ;o)
The WebAIM list had a recent discussion on how to use Firefox to test for accessibility issues. Patrick Lauke had posted a link to his article on using FireFox and the Web Developer Extension to test for accessibility. If you haven’t used this extension yet, or haven’t taken full advantage of it’s features, this is [...]
I was talking to one of my colleagues today about the frustrations with design by committee. This is nothing new, but now that I work in government, I’ve found it’s a bit easier to fall into that habit. As happens with these internal conversations, we obviously end up poking a bit of fun at the [...]
I was watching Blind Justice the other night. (Why? Well, I was sick. really sick. And couldn’t find the remote. I swear.) As the show opened, a mini-ad/blurb popped up explaining that the show was available with descriptive audio. That was nice, I thought, because–you know–other blind people can really relate to blind TV cops. [...]
One of the must frustrating parts of our home-grown CMS we’ve been building is looking for a text-area replacement to allow folks to edit basic HTML via their web browser. There are as many inline HTML editors as there are CMSs. And, just like CMSs, 99% of them appear to be crap. I went through [...]
Nicole Tollefson and Phil Kragnes are recognized as experts in the field of accessibility. They will be sharing some of the highlights from a day-long tutorial they’ll be conducting at the Montreal UPA International Conference in July. For the chapter meeting we’ll only be able to scratch the surface of the topic, but the information [...]
Some quick odds and ends I’ve come across this week: What to do with skip links Hickdesign has done a commendable job of creating a very visually pleasing, unobtrusive, yet easily findable ‘skip to content’ link on his page design. It seems like a simple thing, but you rarely see it, and the debate on [...]
It’s shocking that, in 2005, I still run across all sorts of companies doing business online that don’t actually try to accomodate a paying customer. They just assume you are a Windows user using Internet Explorer with javascript turned on. You’re not? Oh…well…umm…gee…that thought never occurred to us. What’s worse is that you usually don’t [...]
Alt Tags has a nice article on selecting a CMS. It’s geared mainly towards the decision makers…not necessarily the implementers, but there’s plenty of valuable information to be gleaned from it. The key points to take from it are that an organization must first focus on its content before it even attempts to figure out [...]