The CSS Design Yorkshire gallery website has been revamped to improve readability, accessibility and advertising sponsor opportunities. The website currently has over 9,000 visitors per month and still growing. an Alexa Rank of 161,335 putting it in the top 1.2% of websites and a Google PageRank of...

Dizzy is getting in a tizzy with the Number 10 website.Clearly the disabled, especially those who might be blind and using braille readers (how ironic) are not expected to look at the new Number 10 website. After all, it fails on numerous occasions to conform to accessibility compliancy which are apparently Government policy.As you can see, by way of proof, Dizzy has run the site through the W3C Markup Validator and it has returned a number of errors. There is only one problem with his analysis...The Markup Validator has almost nothing to do with Web Accessibility.Anyone who thinks that their site is Accessible simply because their markup (that is the HTML, XHML, etc.) or CSS is entirely validated is deluding themselves. If you want to ensure that your site really is Accessible, then...

Clearly the disabled, especially those who might be blind and using braille readers (how ironic) are not expected to look at the new Number 10 website. After all, it fails on numerous occasions to conform to accessibility compliancy which are apparently Government policy.And before anyone points out that this site doesn't meet compliancy guidelines, I don't make a claim too, and I;m certainly not a Government body, so let's put that argument to bed right now.The bottom line is this, the new Downing Street website may very well be "open source" (Wordpress) but it was clearly hacked up with the same attitude in mind. This is OK for a personal blog, but when you have policies on accessibility that you end up breaking you look stupid.Not mention, doing it in Wordpress is just silly. I'm...

Panda Relocation Foundation - I suspect that this is a viral site for the forthcoming Ben Stiller movie Tropic Thunder How to Create a Social Media Monitoring Strategy Trends in Japan » Ekipedia highlights train station accessibility - Really sweet accessibility mapping for public transport in Japan What Getting Buzzed Says About Yahoo! - its all about core competences, in Yahoo!’s case aggregating an audience and playing to its strengths YouTomb: where copyright-clobbered youtubes go to die - Boing Boing Beijing Apple Store in Photos Lost In Translation: Japanese Market Not Sold On iPhone Cool Factor - In Japan, like elsewhere, gadget fans lined up to be some of the first to buy the new iPhone last week. However, after the initial rush, it appears that consumers there aren’t...

What Getting Buzzed Says About Trends in Japan » Ekipedia highlights train station accessibility Really sweet accessibility mapping for public transport in Japan How to Create a Social Media Monitoring Strategy Panda Relocation Foundation - I suspect that this is a viral site for the forthcoming Ben Stiller movie Tropic......

Text accessibility hints … 1 - Designing Accessible Text—Part 2: Text Size “In print, designers are responsible for setting text size, whereas on the Web, designing text is a collaboration between designer and user.” (tags: typography design CSS size text webdev) Tags: links...

The BBC have recently opted to remove hCalendar microformats from their Programmes site, due to problems with the use of the abbr tag clashing with accessibility tools. One of the potential alternative solutions they're discussing is RDFa. The excellent John Resig, brain behind jQuery and a million other wonderful Javascript projects, comments on this development in his blog. Take the time to read his post now, it's short. Resig is someone whom I admire greatly. In particular the quality of his work and thinking, and his dedication to tidying up hairy technologies like JavaScript and Mozilla APIs into developer-accessible frameworks (jQuery, FUEL). So I was a bit disappointed, and frankly weary, to pick up on the continuation of the bogus microformats vs RDF holy war in his post. I...

Seen on a website (designed c.1999):Click on the picture for a larger version. (Do not click on the picture if you are using a text-only reader.)No, I won't identify the site – it deserves some credit for considering special needs,......

It may have been a long time coming but the transfer of London Eurostar services from Waterloo Station to St Pancras Station has resulted in a substantial increase in passenger numbers and sales revenue. In the first quarter of 2008 Eurostar carried over 2 million passengers, an increase of over 21% on the corresponding period in 2007. Taking into account some anomalies from the first quarter of 2008, such as the timing of Easter and the Six Nations Rugby, these have added to the large jump in passenger numbers which will have no doubt have had an impact on airlines operating a similar route. Eurostar has had something of a chequered past and the delay in transferring to the new high speed 1 system which links it with the Channel Tunnel and St Pancras Station has not helped. However,...

I’ve made a recording of the Open Data keynote I delivered at the Accessibility 2.0 conference last month. You can download the MP3 directly from the Internet Archive. Or you can subscribe to the articles RSS feed as a podcast. The talk (text, audio, whatever) is licenced under a Creative Commons attribution licence. Feel free to spread it ‘round, cut it up or mix it in with other stuff. One of the attendees at the Accessibility 2.0 conference floated the idea of creating slides retrospectively to go with the talk; he’s a keen photographer. If you’d like to translate the talk into other languages, go for it. It would be really great if you know ASL, BSL or some other sign language and you fancy recording a video to match the audio track. If you’d like some...

During last year’s post-@media drinks, Kath Moonan took me aside and asked me if I would be willing to talk at an accessibility conference she was planning to put together in London. Sure! I said. Well, it turned out that Kath didn’t just want me to talk at the conference, she wanted me to give the opening keynote! That’s an order of magnitude more pressure. When I heard that the conference was called Accessibility 2.0: A Million Flowers Bloom I thought, “hmmm… I reckon I could do a really pretentious talk for this one.” I decided to repeat my strategy from Reboot 8.0 and write my presentation out in its entirety to be read using my JavaScript teleprompter. I spent the last week trying to get a jumble of disparate thoughts out of my head and into writing for the keynote....

Julie Howell will be moderating this panel discussion. Before that she has a few words to say. She sees Web 2.0 as an opportunity. Everyone is saying that social network sites are going to get more “vertical” and be based around niche interests — well, the accessibility community has been dealing with niche interest groups for years. Here’s a big news announcement: PAS78 is being turned into a British Standard. Consultation on the draft will take place around September. Julie once again reiterates that Web content guidelines are becoming less important and authoring tool guidelines are more relevant. Most of all, accessibility is not an old-school attitude. We should be providing rich user experiences to everyone. Now to introduce the panelists: Mike Davies, Kath...

Ian is here to praise and to shame Web technologies. He begins with Ashley Highfield: definitely to be shamed, not praised. He just didn’t get the participation culture. We need to stop talking about just providing content. Accessibility is not a one-way street. Content will get re-used and remixed. Those possibilities should be there for everyone. Question for the audience: who considers themselves to be not disabled? Hands go up. Ian asks one of those people to read what’s written on a bottle on the stage. The person can’t read it. We all have differing levels of ability. We can’t design for everyone—just live with it. The unpredictability of the Web is there by design. Another show of hands: who knows Quechup? I put my hand up. They are infamous for...

Stephen Eisden is going to give us a case study by showing us what went into building a social network aimed specifically at disabled users, the Disability Information Portal. The idea was to create a one-stop-shop for anyone with an interest in accessibility. The aim was to combine accessible design with Web 2.0 functionality. They didn’t want to get locked into one vendor like Microsoft but they also didn’t want to get locked into one API provider either. They settled on Wordpress for the underlying technology. The accessibility of the site must extend beyond simply visual impairment. It had to work for people with learning disabilities too. They also needed to balance creativity with control to create a site design that was flexible and customisable. Simple consistent...

Jonathan Hassell is going to talk about user-generated content. He’s from the BBC. Aren’t we all, dear, aren’t we all? Specifically he’s with the User Experience and Development department. Here’s a stroll down memory lane with a brief history of accessibility at the Beeb. They spent a lot of time making television and radio accessible as well as creating content for specific audiences. Online, they had Betsy. It’s almost ten years old now. In 2002 they really started getting into web accessibility. My Web, My Way is there effort to improve the Web, not just their own site. Now they’ve just had the homepage relaunch which uses JavaScript best practices. Now onto user-generated content. He reiterates what I was saying about the importance of open content. Content must be...

Christian is up now with a talk called Fencing in the Habitat — How to do the right thing and get it wrong. He reckons that some of the things he has to say will annoy some people here. He thinks that we are selling accessibility the wrong way. Christian is assuming that most people here want to make accessible products so he doesn’t have to convince anyone here of the benefits. Genuinely usable and accessible sites and products are very rare says Christian. This is a problem because why should people care about making things accessible when most others (including the gig guns) don’t bother. People only grudgingly embrace the need for accessibility. For designers, this taps into a subconscious fear of losing the ability to see. Then there’s the numbers game: when you...

I’m at a cosy little conference in London with the grandious title of Accessibility 2.0: A Million Flowers Bloom. I’ve just finished delivering the opening keynote which I tried to make as pretentious as the conference title. Now the mighty Steve Faulkner is up to deliver a talk called Making Twitter Tweet. He’s being introduced by Robin Christopherson and is getting a round of applause for being the guy who created the Web Accessibility Toolbar. Steve begins by clarifying that the Web Accessibility Toolbar was very much a team effort. Steve will be talking about Ajax, using Twitter as a case study. But this is not an exercise in Twitter bashing. Also, remember that accessibility is not just about blind people even though that’s what Steve is focusing on today....

Segala (tags: accessibility blog mobile web2.0 WebDesign online web)...

Segala (tags: accessibility blog mobile web2.0 WebDesign online web)...

Today I was blindly surfing as normal just looking for new RSS Feeds when I came across a directory I hadn’t seen before called RSS Hugger. Its such a cute sounding name that I just had to click on it. I suppose there is a lesson there about choosing the right domain name for your web site too, but any way I digress yet again. First impression is that its a fairly small directory which concentrates on quality rather than quantity. I have yet to explore the entire site and what they have to offer, though the interface is easy to use; even without using the mouse. The accessibility is decent and I managed to read feeds without being met with the usual level of frustration of pages not being properly coded. (see later article on Web Accessibility) I am pleased to find RSS Hugger and I...

Interesting take on the...

Eight years is a long time. For me, it's almost a quarter of my life - and an eventful quarter, at that. What started as a vent for all my frustrations with my health has changed and moved and yes, even stagnated, as life and stuff has overtaken me - for both good and for bad. I've missed it, too. I've missed the joy of stringing words together and putting them out there, for people to read, respond (or not), of (on a good day) making people laugh, or think, or even think I'm an idiot. Eight years is a long time. Eight years ago, I sat at my desk, in Scotland, in the middle of the night, and hit the publish button on my first blogger post. Seven years ago, I was still in Scotland, but doing what I'd wanted to do for a long time - working as a web designer. Six years ago, I was in...

Today, I decided that I really ought to buy a book on accessibility guidelines and web usability. Eschewing the Internet bookshop options, I thought I'd venture into Manchester Central and get the book from Waterstones. I called them, and they had it in stock, so fine. The website said they ......

Today I was blindly surfing as normal just looking for new RSS Feeds when I came across a directory I hadn't seen before called RSS Hugger. Its such a cute sounding name that I just had to click on it. I suppose there is a lesson there about choosing the right domain name for your web site too, but any way I digress yet again.First impression is that its a fairly small directory which concentrates on quality rather than quantity. I have yet to explore the entire site and what they have to offer, though the interface is easy to use; even without using the mouse. The accessibility is decent and I managed to read feeds without being met with the usual level of frustration of pages not being properly coded. (see later article on Web Accessibility)I am pleased to find RSS Hugger and I really...

Some of you would know might have been interested in web accessibility for quite some time. I use voice recognition of art for example for writing many blog entries since I suffer from repetitive strain and have done in many years. I had naturally progressed into developing a more than passing interest in how the disabled accessed the Internet. It's only when you are disabled in some way yourself you begin to appreciate how difficult it it is to function in any able-bodied world where everything is designed to operate on the premise that you have two hands that worked perfectly.There are many web sites out there that are simply rubbish when it comes to Web accessibility and don't even need the most basic levels of support for people like me. I don't actually use a mouse either and so...

Got nerd? Jake at Birmingham’s MADE would like to hear from you. He posted on 15th Jan 08 that C.V.’s are currently welcomed from freelancers… Graphic/Web Designers: With a particular focus on designing website house-styles in Photoshop or Fireworks and Flash movie layouts. HTML skills not a must, but experience of doing lots of professional web layouts at a relatively high level is. HTML/CSS Developers: People who can take a Photoshop visual and turn it into valid HTML and CSS. You must understand accessibility, Flash Replacement, SiFR and Common JavaScript libraries, even if you’re not necessarily a programming whiz. Attention to detail is crucial, as is an ability to pull off layouts that don’t necessarily make sense. .Net Specialists: … We’re looking for...

Yet another example of accessibility being implemented without much thought for the end...

Computers for most people are just tools to do a job, whether that’s a paid job or something for pleasure. when you find it painful to use a computer, you are generally not looking for something for pleasure but instead a PC that is accessible to your particular needs. My particular need is that I find it difficult to do much typing and impossible to use a mouse for anything more up to a few minutes. The Windows platform provides alternative technologies, granted these are not free but they are inexpensive in comparison to the huge benefits they offer. The truth of the matter, with Linux there is no sensible accessibility available that promotes an inefficient workflow. Instead, I found for my personal experience that it takes far longer to complete tasks with the Linux interface than...

pixeldiva posted a photo: This place opened nearly a year ago and it took me this long to figure out that the stairs had been combined with the ramp. I just didn't notice. More accessibility should be like...

My contribution to the 24 Ways web standards advent...