accessibility Archives - Page 42 of 60

Useful Links: 456 Berea St, Free Site Validator, video in edu, CalWAC

In the good news department, 456 Berea Street, which has been quiet for a while, is back. I picked up a link from there to a site that will validate your entire web site, not just a page. And it’s free, which explains why it’s the Free Site Validator.

We all Stream for Video. My grandkids put movies on YouTube. OK, they aren’t Fred, but still. (If you aren’t aware of the pre-adolescent YouTube hero, Fred, find out about him on YouTube.) You want to communicate with kids, think about using video in the classroom. This article is from the TechLEARNING web site, which is worthy exploring for more gems. A sister site is Digital Learning Environment.

California Web Accessiblity Conference or CalWAC from Knowbility is a great chance to get superb accessibility training in Long Beach. Jan. 12.

Digital Web Interview with Aarron Walter. Aarron’s the findability guy I wrote about a couple of times.

Findability: Is your blog as findable as possible?

Everyone has heard of search engine optimization, right? But have you heard of findability? I hadn’t, until recently.

The term “findability” seems to originate with Peter Morville, who published a book called Ambient Findability in 2002. Blogger DonnaM wrote about it in 2004 in Usability testing for findability. Jakob Neilsen wrote about it in 2006 in Use Old Words When Writing for Findability. In 2008, I happened to read Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aarron Walter and I got very excited about how simple changes to my blog might make it more successful.

In fact, when I wrote Review: Building Findable Websites on my blog, I said,

Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aarron Walter (New Riders, 2008) is one of those rare books that is so full of good ideas, it makes me enthusiastic about what I can do when I put the book down and go work on my blog or website.

As Walter defines it, findability includes accessibility, usability, information architecture, development, marketing, copywriting, design, and, oh yeah, search engine optimization. Walter continues to try to popularize the concepts, and recently published Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry at A List Apart. He starts right off with the orphan metaphor and works it all the way through:

Once upon a time in a web design agency, there lived a sad little boy named Findability. He was a very good boy with a big heart for helping people…

* find the websites they seek,
* find content within websites, and
* rediscover valuable content they’d found.

He used his arsenal of talent for planning, writing, coding, and analysis to create websites that could connect with a target audience.

A bit later in the article he sums up findability as,

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

What are some of specific techniques for findability discussed in the book? The book talks about markup strategies, which include web standards, accessbility, and microformats.

In terms of web standards, that means to separate stucture (the (X)HTML) from presentation (the CSS) from behavior (the JavaScript) to create sites that are accessible both humans and machines. Use modern code that follows the rules and check how you’re doing with a validator. Use alt attributes with images, encode characters, use tags that communicate semantically by making page hierarchy clear. There are a number of other markup tips such as which tags are essential and whether or not to use meta tags. Regarding images, get rid of image maps, and if you replace headings with snappy looking images make sure you do it accessibly. Microformats include hCalendar, hCard, hReview, hResume and others. These are nothing more than standardized ways to present certain information with HTML and CSS that the search engines (and a lot of other apps) recognize. I’ve been using hReview on Web Teacher for some time now. I can verify that reviews I write this way make the search engines very happy.

In terms of server-side strategies, the book talks about building file structure, 404 pages, URLS, and server optimization for speed. It discusses naming everything from the domain name to files, folders, and URLs. There’s advice for moving pages or whole domains and how to use redirects and custom file-not-found pages to keep them findable in the new location.

Creating content that drives traffic is another important aspect of findability. Walter says quality content is on topic, fills a niche, conveys passionate interest, is trustworthy, appealing, original and appropriate. There are also many types of content beyond the blog post. You could consider other types of publications such as white papers or articles, links, reviews, recommendations, syndication, and user generated content in comments and forums as part of your content. You can also add RSS feeds from other sources such as Last.fm, Flickr, job sites, events and other worthy feeds to your content.

Of course, most of us here are concerned with blog findability. The strategies include regular posting, linking and trackbacks, original templates, post titles, archives, topics, and special sections on the blog for things like popular posts and recent posts.

Be sure your site has a search feature. If you use Ajax, Flash, audio and video be sure you are not locking out some of your potential readers. If you have a normal web site and not a blog, try to build a mailing list so that you can contact readers and lure them back to the site regularly.

Merely summarizing the high points here created quite an imposing list of things to do. Fortunately, Walter thought through which actions are the most important and beneficial for you. The final chapter in the book tells you how to prioritize the changes you may need to make and helps you tackle them starting with the most useful first.

I happen to know Aarron Walter. We work together on a curriculum project for the Web Standards Project. I contacted him about this article and asked him to identify the two most important things a blogger could do to improve findability. Here’s his response:

1. Customize your permalink structure to include keywords in your URLs. Many blog platforms make it easy to define the structure of each blog post URL. Ideally you want each URL to contain the same keywords as those in your post title.

2. Define your update services. When you publish on your blog, it automatically notifies (called a ping) many tracking services instantly so your content gets indexed by search engines and various other services. Be sure to define which update services your blog should notify. WordPress keeps a comprehensive list of the top updates services at http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services.

Helpful resources for making your blog more findable:
– Aarron Walter’s site: free download of Findability Strategy Checklist
– Findability Checklist
– A Blog Not Limited: Getting Semantic With Microformats, Part 1 the first of a series on microformats by Emily Lewis
– SEO Blog: 10 Coding Guidelines for Perfect Findability and Web Standards
– SEO Blog: The 10 Worst Findability Crimes Committed by Web Designers & Developers
– BlogHer: Melanie Nelson’s Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tactics

Cross posted at BlogHer.

Useful Links: AEGIS, CSS Tables, Validation Report, the state of education

AEGIS (Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards) is a new group focused on accessibility in Europe. On Peter Korn’s blog, he explains,

Today I am more than pleased to share with you news of the AEGIS project, a €12.6m investment in accessibility, with the vast majority of it focused on open source solutions. It is a major research and development investment in building accessibility into future mainstream Information & Communication Technologies.

Everything you know about CSS is wrong at Digital Web Magazine explains what you will be able to (finally) do with the CSS display:table property when IE8 is released. The article introduces a book by the same name by Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank from Sitepoint. I’m trying to figure out how to get a copy so I can review it here.

MAMA: Markup validation report: Opera did a study on web standards adoption. The results clearly show the need for a change in the way we teach.

As part of MAMA’s overall analysis process, it ran every URL in its database through the W3C’s markup validator. MAMA was able to validate 3,509,180 URLs in 3,011,661 domains, and only 4.13% of the URL set passed validation (with 4.33% of the domains having at least 1 URL that passed validation).

This is a huge study, there’s lots more information to sift through; please check it out on your own. I remind you that Opera published a standards-based curriculum and the Web Standards Project will soon make public its months of effort in creating a standards-based curriculum. The WaSP curriculum should be publicly available in March 09. If teachers don’t teach standards, students will never understand the importance or use the techniques.

One teaching area that clearly shows up in the study as needing major improvement is the way Dreamweaver is taught. Only 3.4% of sites created with Dreamweaver passed validation. With proper instruction, people can learn to use Dreamweaver to create standards-based code. It’s all in how you use the tool, which depends on how you were taught to use it. Here’s an old (but still valid) presentation of mine on this topic: Achieve Accessibility with Dreamweaver. This book (a new CS4 version will be out soon) does it right: Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3. And the upcoming version of Dreamweaver CS4 Classroom in a Book will take a standards-based approach to Dreamweaver.

On the other hand, sites made with Apple iWeb passed validation with a whopping 89% success rate. Maybe we should forget about teaching with Dreamweaver and move en masse to iWeb.

Accessible Video and a training event

Laura Carlson’s Web Design Update newsletter was crammed with resource links to posts about accessible video today. I decided to list them all again here. It’s a great list.

The event I mentioned is a WebAIM accessibility training in Logan, Utah in Feb. 09. It isn’t aimed at video in particular, but accessibility in all its glory.

Useful links: Palin, ARIA, Open Office, CSS Systems

Palin’s experience in just 12 minutes. An analysis from Lawrence Lessig.

ARIA on the fast track. Ian Lloyd’s thoughts on the Web Accessiblity Initiative’s Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite and what it might do to validation.

Open Office for Aqua. Burningbird puts the open source office suite through its paces and finds it a good substitute for the office suite from that big corporation (you know the one).

CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS. A presentation about “CSS Systems” with links to slides and notes. The author describes CSS Systems as,

A CSS System is a reusable set of content-oriented markup patterns and associated CSS created to express a site’s individual design. It is the end result of a process that emphasizes up-front planning, loose coupling between CSS and markup, pre-empting browser bugs and overall robustness. It also incorporates a shared vocabulary for developers to communicate the intent of the code.

OneWebDay

Today is OneWebDay. It’s a day to think about issues that are important to the future of the Internet. Here is the list of ideas for how you can help with OneWebDay from the organization’s web site.

How can you help the Web on OneWebDay?

1. If you’re a Web user, use a standards-compliant Web browser like Firefox or Opera. They’re free, faster, and more protective of your privacy. And because they conform to Web development standards, they make things easier for people who make Web sites. If you’re a Web developer, test your sites with the w3c’s Markup Validation Service.

2. Edit a Wikipedia article. Teach people what you know, and in so doing, help create free universal knowledge.

3. Learn about an Internet policy issue from the Center for Democracy and Technology, and teach five other people about it. There are real legal threats that could drastically change the way the Internet works. We should all be aware of them.

4. Take steps to ensure that your computer can’t be treated like a zombie. Computer viruses can steal your personal information. They can also cause major network outages on the Web, slowing things down and making sites inaccessible. Vint Cerf estimates that more than 150 million PCs have already been zombified, and are now awaiting their next order. To learn more about the threat of zombie computers, read this article.

5. Join an Internet rights advocacy group:

Become a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights, from privacy to free speech to Internet service.

Join the Internet Society. ISOC is dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world, particularly by establishing Internet infrastructure standards.

Support Creative Commons by donating and by using their licenses to copyright your work. If you’re outside the U.S., help support their counterpart, iCommons.

6. Help promote public Internet access. If you live in a city, there is likely an organization dedicated to providing free wireless access in public spaces.

7. Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation supports not only Wikipedia, but several other projects to create free knowledge: textbooks, news, learning tools, and more.

8. Donate a computer. You can donate a new $100 laptop to children in impoverished countries, or donate your used computer to Goodwill or a school.

9. Write your OneWebDay story. Talk about what the Internet means to you and why One WebDay matters at http://onewebday.org/stories

10. If your city is hosting a OneWebDay event, show up on September 22 and participate.

I think the concept of net neutrality is the key issue for me. Equal access for all, equal bandwidth for all. A neutral technology that supports a level playing field. Some of what I’ve said before about it is available in the related posts.

Useful Links

It’s still an early draft, but the W3C is working on something called Experiences Shared by People with Disabilities and People Using Mobile Devices.

Ars technica reported on IBM makes web accessibility for blind users a social effort. This should be an interesting project to watch.

Find an Undervalued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. (Now It’s Web Sites, Not Houses) I found this new niche for money making on the web fascinating. Check out the fact that web sites being sold on eBay. Is there a new career description as a Site Flipper in your future?