Website Development » Accessibility

And it is at this time, with a heavy heart…

james — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:01:48 +0000

Greetings friends, family and distinguished colleagues,
As most all of you know, I stand gainfully employed as the VP/Development with The Karcher Group, Inc. in the Canton area. You may also know that I have grown with “my” company nearly a decade and we’ve been through many ups and downs along the way. Regardless of the times, The Karcher Group has flourished and is now celebrating a 10 year anniversary. And it is at this time, with a heavy heart, that I must disclose to you that The Karcher Group is about to go and do something completely irrational to all of it’s faithful employees?

No, it is not what you’re thinking – “I’m being fired” or “We’re closing our doors” – it’s even worse! The Karcher Group, Inc. will be changing it’s web address to a 3-letter domain!

We’ve been working for 10 d$%n years to gain the best SEO ranking, client and industry credibility building the best standards-based, accessible websites possible and then we have to go and be “fortunate” enough to obtain a 3-letter domain (tkg.com). I guess you can consider it our birthday present to ourselves. This, no doubt, is a major undertaking that will put TKG’s skills to the test to maintain all we have established in the last decade. So, in traditional TKG style, we plan on making this experience a comprehensive social case-study that we hope to share with the industry (being that this may the first instance of it’s kind). We hope that all of you will watch and become an active part of this venture.

Should you choose to accept, this is a start to where your efforts would be most beneficial?

On any media outlet you can get your hands on, promote either this message or a simple mention of the event taking place along with a link back to tkg.com. Please let us know you are becoming involved so we can personally thank you, give you a mention in the case-study and keep you in the loop as to what and when things are happening. Oh, if you have other ideas, by all means, pass them along too! If we choose to implement them, we’ll reward you handsomely for it.

So long thekarchergroup.com and hello tkg!

Thanks in advance for any and all efforts from myself and the rest of your friends here at TKG.

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CWSA to Save Aspiring Web Developers from Themselves, Others

Phil — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:19:45 +0000

In anything, it is of course easier to learn good habits early on than to unlearn a bunch of bad habits later – though it was still funny when I was two and Dad spent weeks teaching me that the word for absolutely everything was “helicopter�? (pronounced “he’we-copper�? in the vernacular of the age deficient) in preparation for Christmas dinner and the rest of my family’s amusement. For those of you who wish to learn good habits in Web development from the beginning without all the nifty soul-crushing humiliation, the Cleveland Web Standards Association is starting a regular study group for people with zero to intermediate developer knowledge (see what I did there, ending the opening paragraph with the actual topic sentence? Inverted pyramid be damned).

Once again, the CWSA has done a better job of describing their event than I can so please check here for details. I will say that the initial meeting is a two-parter, the first part of which was actually last Sunday, but you can still make it to the concluding meeting this Sunday, February 24^th at 5:00pm at Caribou Coffee in Rocky River.Why would I fail to post this before the initial meeting? Because I can’t just sit here being focused and vigilant all day on the off-chance that someone somewhere decides to schedule something. I have things to do, people. Important things. Like partaking in intense psychotherapy over the whole helicopter incident.

Beginner developers should also check out the TKG Institute, our ongoing evening program here at The Karcher Group for teaching developer basics tothe youth of Northeast Ohio that are in to that kind of thing.

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Cleveland Web Standards Get a New Home

Phil — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:44:01 +0000

The Cleveland Web Standards Association has (appropriately enough) launched their own site, which you should feel beyond compelled to check out here.

The CWSA is a group of Web developers from around the Cleveland area that meet on a monthly basis to discuss goals and methods for establishing standards in site development, both present and future – or as their site succinctly states, “In short, we’re making Cleveland suck less, one website at a time�?. First Northeast Ohio, then the Midwest, then the whole damn country, baby. The Tim Conway of Web standards organizations, you might say. But you probably wouldn’t. I already can’t believe that I just did. I probably should have gone with Michael Stanley…

Anyway, if you are a Cleveland-area Web developer who would like to learn more about current standards and help set future ones in a less-than-formal atmosphere, check out their site and then get signed up here.

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Catch Joe C’s Latest on NFB, Target, Amazon

james — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 13:24:31 +0000

I’m always compelled to see what’s happening on a web-related (industry) blog where the “F-bomb” gets dropped because you’re either going to find someone with no common sense to laugh at or someone with a pure passion for which they speak. If you’ve read Joe Clark, you know his passion for accessibility is no doubt there.

I’ve been trying not to yawn at the litigation regarding the Target case, so this read here is an interesting insight on what may be happening behind the scenes regarding the additional news of Amazon meeting minds with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB).

Enjoy.

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A Little Accessibility Snippet I Found

james — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:39:06 +0000

I recently was listening to the podcasts, finally, on the WaSP (The Web Standards Project) website and in the first one listed (created by Accesibility Task Force members Patrick Lauke and Bruce Lawson) they mention as I mentioned in an earlier post, developing for accessibility means that you’re going to get numerous beneficial side effects:

[audience comment]: We talked about visual impairments. Who is the biggest blind user on the web?

Bruce: Mister Google!

Patrick: (your mother) … have you seen her? [laughter] Ah, anyway …

[audience comment]: To sell accessibility, forget about visual impairment. Just say “If it’s not accessible, Google can’t see it.”

Bruce: Have you heard the stats that … the guy from Legal & General, the firm … the launch of PAS 78, they gave us some stats. Have you heard the stats they gave?

Patrick: They’re in the book! [laughter] Quelle surprise!

Bruce: Legal & General, with Mike Davies, who you might know as Isofarro, on accessifyforum, they made their site accessible because they were worried about the legal risk.

And they found as side effects: 30% increase in natural search engine traffic, a significant improvement in Google rankings for all their target keywords, a 75% reduction in time for pages to load, accessible to mobile devices, their time to manage content reduced from an average of five days to half a day per job, they saved £200,000 a year on site maintenance, they got a 95% increase in visitors getting a life insurance quote (which was the purpose of that site), a 90% increase in sales online, and 100% return on investment in 12 months. And that was the side effects of making the site accessible.

The podcast is full of tangent-based ranting (takes place in a pub; go figure), but at times comforting because you hear others mentioning that some ideals regarding accessibility just can’t be realistically applied in all cases.

Additionally, the point was often made that some of the browser deficiencies that we, as developers, attempt to correct for (usable ways to resize page text) really is something we should be pushing the browser manufacturers to begin being responsible for – bringing accessibility features to the surface rather than 5 levels deep under “preferences”.

Good stuff, check it out.

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The Web Standards Advent Calendar – 24 ways, 2006

james — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 13:58:10 +0000

Why have chocolates-based advent calendar again this year when you can suffice your daily craving with one that’s standards-based instead – yeh!

24 ways is brought to us by Drew McLellan – a web developer, author and no-good swindler from just outside London, England. At the Web Standards Project he works on press, strategy and tools. Drew keeps a personal weblog covering web development issues and themes.

Drew was nice enough to provide links to last year’s articles as well. These well-crafted articles are done by some of the most recognized in the industry.

On second thought, have fun with the examples while crushing a box of chocolates at the same time.

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Joe Clark’s Accessiblity Research Project – Now Open

james — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 19:04:52 +0000

From the Open & Closed Project’s homepage (Note: a few of these links do not find a valid page yet):

The Open & Closed Project is a research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We’ll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we’ll carry it out ourselves.

We’ll test the finished standards for a year in the real world and publish them. (You’ll be able to download them for free or buy them in several formats.) Then we’ll develop training and certification programs for practitioners. It will finally be possible to become a certified captioner (or audio describer or subtitler or dubbing artist).

We’ll also develop and test improved fonts for captioning and subtitling (already underway). We’ll develop a universal file format.

This is a huge undertaking and apparently has been in the works for 4 years already. I applaud the effort and hope that this will also help snowball the increased attention to accessibility in web development.

I’m going to see if my company, The Karcher Group, Inc. will consider helping fund the project as well. It seems only right to do so for such a worthy cause and I encourage you to do so as well. For now, I’ll include his banner ad for support.

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Accessibility is Making Ripples that Everyone Can See

james — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 14:29:16 +0000

I’m sure most news oriented people are up to date on the latest accessibility news concerning Target. Well, it appears that the ripple of this case has encouraged the W3C to begin making an “Accessibility for Dummies” of sorts to help everyone out.

From my latest W3C Weekly News email today:

WAI-ARIA to Address Access to Dynamic Web Content

The Protocols and Formats Working Group has released First Public Working Drafts of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). The “Roadmap” describes accessibility of dynamic Web content built with technologies such as AJAX and DHTML. “Roles” provides mappings for user interface controls and navigation APIs. “States and Properties” associates behaviors with document-level markup. Read the press release and visit the Web Accessibility Initiative home page.

http://www.w3.org/2006/09/aria-pressrelease

http://www.w3.org/WAI/

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-aria-roadmap-20060926/

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-aria-role-20060926/

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-aria-state-20060926/

For any business that builds websites, this case with Target is clear reason to shift your development model. On the plus side of that (as people groan), it looks like the by-product will be that everyone will now be in on the grand secret: that producing an accessible website naturally leads to cleanly marked up, standards compliant and highly search engine friendly webpages. I guess there’s no competition like good competition.

Let me know your thoughts and experiences on this one.

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