Wikipedia has been a great inspiration to me. It gives me hope that this giant wave of activity that is the Internet will help carry humanity to new and better places. Wikipedia gives me this hope because it is a collaborative effort of regular people, and it is an enormous collaboration. I use Wikipedia all […]
For the Want of a Training Manual Sink or swim? Trial by fire? You may have used these expressions to describe seeing a new hire flail about because no one had the time to train him or her properly. Heck, you may have been that new hire on an occasion or two. Oh, but for […]
I miss pizza night. Pizza night was every other Friday. Halfway through a three-hour class, we’d break for pizza that was ordered by the school: part of my tuition, as I figured it. What made it so enjoyable wasn’t just the pizza, it was the chance to talk and relax with the instructor and the […]
The Task You are tasked with developing an educational Web site that includes podcasts, video, and Flash presentations while complying with Section 508. (http://www.access-board.gov/508.htm). Think “details” because government funding of this Web site is at stake. What follows is a rough checklist of considerations when incorporating multimedia into your site. Challenges The biggest challenges in […]
What follows is a rough outline for conducting an accessibility audit for a client. Strategy and scope Clarify the goals of the organization requesting the audit. Why are they doing the audit? What level of accessibility do they want to achieve? What level of accessibility is required for them to achieve if any? Do they […]
Entering some text in the alt attribute (not alt tag, as it is commonly referred to) always made me feel a little better about the site I was building. There would always be, however, that apprehensive feeling of wondering just what I should be entering as alt text. That nagging feeling would intensify as I […]
Academics mimic life: building site accessibility in the real world This is a good topic to be analyzing while on the cusp of building a new set of list-based horizontal and vertical navigation schemes. I made sure to do my research on accessibility before starting the nav menus that are on my deliverables list, and […]
First, some really helpful resources for getting the finer points of Voice Over: (http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/downloads.html) (http://images.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/pdf/VoiceOver_Getting_Started_Leopard_10.5a.pdf) There’s a lot more to VoiceOver than I thought. It seems to be quite controllable, but there are many, many keyboard shortcuts to learn. I downloaded an eval document that helped me narrow down the keystrokes for the following tasks. […]
Thinking about Web accessibility, even as briefly as I have been, opens up a large chapter in my understanding of Web technology and how well or not well it is working for all of us. While many of us comment on what information overload is doing to our lives, there are many people for whom […]
This is now my third installation of Joomla. The first was on my Macintosh and was preceded by an installation of MAMP so that Joomla! could run on my Mac. I used that site to tool around a bit in Joomla! and practice the process before installing on an actual Web server. My second installation […]