Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
The video of Emily Lewis and I co-presenting about accessibility and standards in Dreamweaver is now on Viddler.
You can see that we meet in the back room of an Albuquerque bar for the Webuquerque meets, so it’s noisy and a bit dark.
Related posts: Standards and Accessibility with Dreamweaver, where you will find a link to the slides for Emily’s part of the talk.
Participating in the second annual Women Who Tech TeleSummit was easy and fascinating. I signed in to three sessions. These will mostly be available as poscasts at the Women Who Tech site, so I’m not going to attempt liveblogging. I’ll give you a few highlights that I found particularly worthy or fascinating or just plain quotable.
The conference used phone-in conference calls for audio, and web features that provided a view of slides and a chat window. Over 600 women participated. The stature and accomplishments of the women on the panels was impressive. These are women who are making things happen in the world.
This panel featured Leslie Hawthorn from Google, Joan Blades from Moveon.org and Moms Rising, Tracy Viselli from Reno Fabulous Media. The moderator was Holly Ross from NTEN.
Holly: We are building an industry in which women are equal. Embrace your nurturing as an asset.
Tracy: What or who do you think about when you hear the word “expert?” Women approach the idea of expertise to their own detriment. Women think they have to know everything before using the label expert. Embrace your expertise. Jump in whenever you have a chance and don’t worry about not knowing everything. Women need to change the way they think about expertise.
Leslie: Teams and groups rely on women to have ‘soft’ skills, yet this is viewed as not quantifiable/valuable and so less valuable. The ‘soft’ skills are often the one factor that means success for teams and groups, yet the skills remain undervalued.
Discussion on Leslie’s comments concluded that women who don’t play the nurturing role and are all business get called the B word. Yet all women aren’t comfortable in the role and shouldn’t be expected to be.
Social media is changing the way technology is discussed because it’s about community building.
Joan: A bias against mothers exists in hiring and career advancement. Women who are mothers are 79% less likely to get a job in tech with an identical resume to a non-mother. Modern, virtual work has opened up the opportunity for women to succeed.
Work has to have the flexibility for both parents to be able to share caregiving. Changes in attitudes about fathers being caregivers while working might create helpful changes in the attitude about women as workers while parenting. Policy issues such as child care, health care and other work culture factors like number of vacation days all need to change, too.
Changes in culture around work and parenting are changes that would make the workplace better for everyone, including non-parents. It would also help the people who are intelligent and creative but not 80-hours-a-week-workers rise to the top. Glorifying extreme work is not healthy. Everyone should not have to aspire to it.
This panel included Natalie Foster from DNC, Rebecca Moore from Google Earth Outreach, Laura Quinn from Idealware. The moderator was Amy Sample Ward from NetSquared.
Laura: Your website is the base of your online communication. What does it say about you? You need content management tools. Email is still critical for almost every organization to reach out and keep in touch, call for action, or whatever. The details in an email are critical: subject line, from line, graphic design, clear communication. Two good standalone broadcast email tools: verticalresponse.com and networkforgood.org. Don’t forget your constituent database.
Natalie: When creating social media campaigns, know what you want to get out of it. Then prioritize the tools so you get the best return on investment. Networks of trust that come from social networks are powerful. Watch the people who are successful on Facebook or MySpace and see how they do it. She also talked about Twitter.
Rebecca: She talked about Google’s mapping tools. Neo-geography. Google earth can create audio narrated presentations about many topics. Google earth presents complex information in vivid ways that are easy to comprehend. Can illustrate logging and mountain-top-removal coal mining in ways that make the implications of obscure proposals understandable. Resulted in legislative action based on Google earth presentation. Also connected people to their personal environmental impact by connecting a zip code from anywhere in the country to the particular mountain top in Appalachia that was being destroyed to provide power. She also talked about the genocide in Darfur visuals on Google earth. If you can use an Excel spreadsheet, you can create a compelling visualization on Google earth.
When thinking about tools to add to your toolkit, start by asking what it is you are trying to accomplish.
This panel featured Christine Adzich from Big Picture Productions, Sheryl Chamberlain from EMC, Megan Fitzgerald from Career By Choice, and Nancy Wheeler from Intel. The moderator was Dee McCrorey from Risktaking for Success.
Christine: When changing fields, come in as a student and open yourself up to growth. You can still contribute a great deal, even as a student. Be willing to make a lot of mistakes.
Nancy: Take failure as an opportunity to learn. When you are a manager, try not to limit your expectations of what people can do.
Megan: 80% of skills we take with us to any position are related to emotional intelligence: initiative, optimism, adaptability, etc. Not job specific competencies, therefore competencies you can bring with you to a new job. Reflect on your qualities and strengths. Skills are related to these things. Your value to an organization is related to these qualities and strengths. She is @expatcoachmegan on Twitter.
Think about portable assets and then look for projects that play to your skills. Develop a list of questions or a metric that will let you evealuate potential projects based on your skills and work style and the working environment. Set yourself up for success by choosing projects that fit your profile.
Sheryl: EMC has created internal communities using social media as well as external communities. She’s created leadership tools to share both internally and externally. Recognize your vision then build a community around it.
Megan: Understand your personal brand and unique value. Does the information online about you right now support your vision for yourself? Create a professional bio picture. Be active in the right space.
Sheryl: Leave behind the negative things and move on.
Christine: When transferring influence to others, ask questions rather than always giving information. Get a sense of what people are looking for before you try to work with them.
Nancy: When transferring influence, begin deferring publicly to the new mentee.
Some technical asides on the conference: I used TweetGrid to follow the Twitter stream and ran three simultaneous searches: women who tech, #womenwhotech, and #WWT. I like the real time refresh rate on TweetGrid and found it a helpful tool. The audio conference ran on Ready Talk, which worked fairly well. There were glitches, but mostly things went as they should. I called into the audio lines using Skype. Skype sometimes breaks up a bit, and it did during this conference, but no more than usual with concalls on Skype.
The biggest difficulty people had with the sessions was that the same numbers and entry codes were used repeatedly. If you logged on or called in a minute or two early, you got the tail end of a previous session instead of the beginning of the session you were attending. This meant logging out, waiting a bit, then coming back in.
I’m the proud owner to two new Twitter accounts. Both of them are meant to be nothing but an RSS feed. . . .
I’m the proud owner to two new Twitter accounts. Both of them are meant to be nothing but an RSS feed. One is for eHow articles and the other is for TGB Elder Geek articles. Neither site has a handy way to create a feed for just one individual’s articles, and Twitter is a great solution.
There’s a new Grazr widget in the sidebar today. It’s a feed reader widget that provides access to the feed from every site where I normally post things in the course of a week. Because of Twitter, I’m able to provide a useful URL on Grazr to create this handy RSS widget.
Thanks to Twitter for having feeds.
Women Who Tech is a telesummit. In its second year (the first year was a big hit), the telesummit uses the Internet and plain old phone conferencing to pull together a diverse group of women in a format that allows them to talk tech. More . . .
Women Who Tech is a telesummit. In its second year (the first year was a big hit), the telesummit uses the Internet and plain old phone conferencing to pull together a diverse group of women in a format that allows them to talk tech. The date for the telesummit is Tuesday, May 12 (right, that’s tomorrow). Registration is still open for some of the panels. It’s not to late to get in on the excitement.
You pay a mere $10 to register for your first panel. After that, you receive an email that allows you entry to two more panels. The panels begin at 11AM Eastern time and the final one is at 5PM Eastern Time. Where else can you attend a major conference for $10?
The wide ranging possibilities for learning and growing from year’s panels include:
Each panel lasts 50 minutes. I signed up for one at 11AM, 1PM and 3PM, which gives me plenty of time between panels to keep up with the rest of the things going on in my day. Maybe even get out of my pjs and go outside to water the tomatoes.
I’ve given you the what, when, where, and how. That leaves the topics of who and why.
There are two parts to the who: who created this and who is on the panels. You can see the founders bios at the site. Among them are Allyson Kapin, Eve Fox, Judity Freeman, Rosalyn Lemieux, Jen Moseley, Kelly O’Neal, Holly Ross, and Katrin Verclas. This group came together with the goals of giving women in technology greater representation, breaking down barriers for women in tech, and collecting information about women in tech for networking and conferencing purposes.
Who are the panelists leading each of the sessions?
Amazing panels, amazing panelists, ten bucks—go register!
The podcasts from the 2008 telesummit are all online. While you are exploring the website, don’t overlook the excellent collection of articles and information in the Resources section.
Follow on Twitter: #womenwhotech and Women Who Tech.
Cross posted at BlogHer.
I just finished the first book I’ve read on my iPhone. I used the free Kindle reader app. I read The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.
I just finished the first book I’ve read on my iPhone. I used the free Kindle reader app. I read The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.
I loved the experience. It was a relief to my often achy hands and thumbs to not have a heavy book to hold. The screen resolution is so crisp that I had no problem seeing it, even with my crap-for-eyes.
It went amazingly fast. The line length is so short than you can almost read down the page line by line without having to refocus your eyes again and again to scan across the lines. It’s speed reading without even trying.
I have a feeling that I’ll be buying all books that are available for Kindle in this way from now on.
Jim Thatcher runs accessibility tests on Recovery.gov.
A while back I linked to an article at Jim Thatcher’s site that showed his accessibility test results on whitehouse.gov. He recently ran some checks on Accessibility of Recovery.gov and got quite a few accessibility errors at that site, too. As he explains in A Postscript on Recovery.gov the official response to his article was a bit “disappointing.”
Since Section 508 Accessibility Standards requires government web sites to comply with accessibility standards, it’s surprising that the results are so blatantly bad. They include missing alt text and lack of proper heading semantics.
The surprising thing about this story and the response to it is that we have watched this administration use technology so well and show an understanding of technology issues. This business of getting it wrong in terms of accessibility is a bit odd.
I, for one, expect this administration to get it right.
There’s a draft version of an article at the W3C about Contacting Organizations with Inaccessible Websites. Here are some ideas from the section on how to approach such organizations.
There are several ways you can let an organization know that there are accessibility problems with their website, including:
- Contacting them directly
- Seeking assistance from a local or national disability or older peoples’ organization
- Taking a more public approach via the press or through online platforms after contacting the organization without resolution
Regardless of the approach you take, you will need to clearly describe the problem being experienced:
- Which page; which part of the site
- What the problem is; what you were trying to do
- If possible, tell them about your computer and software
My approach is obviously to take the public route. I hope people using the technology to access the site who can list the problems error by error will take some time to contact them with specific errors.
It isn’t enough to expect them to get it right. We need to insist it be done right.
Yesterday Emily Lewis and I gave a talk for Webuquerque. Here’s the presentation: Standards and Accessibility with Dreamweaver.
The slides are posted on Emily’s blog, A Blog Not Limited. Emily explained the principles and goals of developing with web standards and best practices, then I gave some demos in Dreamweaver to show how to implement the standards in that software environment.
Emily shares the leadership of Webuquerque this year with Jason Nakai, who made a video of the presentation. The video will provide some extra context for the slides and show the live demos in Dreamweaver, as opposted to the screen grabs you see in the slides. I’ll let you know when the video is ready.