Web Site Accessibility Blog

Matt Bailey, founder of the AccessibilityBlog.com, will present an Accessibility and Usability training class in London. The four-hour class will take place on February 22nd from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM at the Business Design Center, 52 Upper Street, Islington.

The class will focus on the development of accessible,yet usable websites. Many times, organizations focus on the accessibility of a website or intranets, yet overlook the aspects of usability. In some cases, programming meant to improve usability may be contradictory to user expectations. User testing, practical applications, and case studies will be presented and discussed.

The class is offered in conjunction with the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Training Classes. The Search Conference will be held from the 19th-21st, with intensives offered on the 22nd. Bailey will also be speaking on Search-Friendly Design in the Tuesday session.

Matt Bailey is president and founder of SiteLogic Marketing and an internationally recognized authority on search engine marketing, website analytics, usability, and accessibility. As a consulting and training company, SiteLogic focuses on helping organizations and site owners take control of their websites and their web marketing plans.

With over a decade in the web marketing industry, Matt excels in combining his marketing background with programming know-how to help companies create comprehensive strategies that improve internet presence and profitability.

Sought after worldwide as a seminar presenter and teacher; Matt speaks regularly for The Direct Marketing Association; Search Engine Strategies Conferences and Training; the American Advertising Federation, and private training seminars. Matt is known for his conversational, entertaining speaking style and his ability to make technical topics both understandable and practical.

Matt oversees The Direct Marketing Association’s SEO Training Program and is the trainer for the DMA’s Web Marketing Seminar. He has consulted with hundreds of companies and government agencies.

You can register and find more information at the Search Engine Strategies website.

The Accessibility Interoperability Alliance, AIA (http://www.accessinteropalliance.org) has been formed from some of the World’s biggest technology companies: Adobe, BayFirst Solutions, HP, Microsoft, and Novell. Included in the founding of this alliance are a number of specialist assistive technology companies: Claro Software, Dolphin Computer Access, GW Micro, HiSoftware, Mandentec, TextHelp Systems and Qualilife.

The new alliance plans to work together to increase interoperability between new and existing technologies, design new solutions, increase accessibility innovation, and improve developer guidelines. The initial project in this alliance is to create a standard for keyboard shortcuts so that users will have consistent behavior of AT products in any web browser.

This alliance is a key step to building a collaborative base of technologies and guidelines for development. Just this step can help increase the consistency for all users in their web and software experience. Additional development and bringing in of new companies and technologies will only help the assistive technology user, and also create a better experience as a whole.

No matter where your political feeling may lie, there is no doubt that our troops are among the finest in the world. They deserve our thanks and support for their sacrifices.

Those who suggest that these soldiers are less intelligent or unable to gain regular jobs show their ignorance. Being a veteran myself, I served with many intelligent, hard-working, and dedicated people, who just happened to be soldiers as well. These brave men and women are deserving of our respect and admiration, as they and their tradition are the reason that we have the freedoms that we enjoy.
When I found out about this organization, I had to bring it to light here at the Accessibility Blog. It is called Project Valour-IT.

Project Valour-IT stands for Voice Activated Laptops for our Injured Troops. This organization is attempting to purchase and install accessibility software for wounded troops. The majority of accessibklity software is voice recognition software, as many of the wounded have suffered hand and arm injuries, or have an amputated limb. This organization wants to get this technology to the Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors and Marines recovering at home or in military hospitals.

As of October 2006, Valour-IT has distributed nearly 600 laptops to severely wounded soldiers across the country. Here’s how it started:

Project Valour-IT began when Captain Charles “Chuck” Ziegenfuss was wounded by an IED while serving as commander of a tank company in Iraq in June 2005.As he began to recover, CPT Ziegenfuss wanted to return to writing his blog, but serious hand injuries hampered his typing. When a loyal and generous reader gave him a copy of the Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred software, other readers began to realize how important such software could be to CPT Ziegenfuss’ fellow wounded soldiers and started cast about for a way to get it to them.

A fellow blogger (blog author) who writes under the pseudonym FbL contacted Captain Ziegenfuss and the two realized they shared a vision of creating libraries of laptops with voice-controlled software that could be brought to the bedsides of wounded soldiers whose injuries prevented them from operating a standard computer. FbL contacted Soldiers’ Angels, who offered to help develop the project, and Project Valour-IT was born.

If you are interested in donating or supporting this cause, I urge you to go to the Project Valour-IT site and see some of the stories of soldiers that have been helped by this great charity.

Hello, Accessibility Blog readers! Matt has invited me to contribute to his Accessibility Blog, and today seems to be an appropriate occasion to introduce myself. I’m an accessible web designer based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Although I do keep my own blog, Accessible Design, the opportunity to work with Matt and contribute here is a great opportunity for me.

You might have noticed a small change to this site over the last few hours. Well, the site’s had a bit of a facelift. But it’s more than just a facelift: I’m actually combing over the code with an eye to making this site as web accessible as we can. Some concessions have been made, but I hope they’re forgivable. Some mistakes have probably also been made - hopefully you’ll not only forgive those, but tell me about them and give me the chance to fix them!

Here are some of the changes I’ve made to aid accessibility:

1. Skip Links

   The site now offers keyboard-accessible “Skip Links”, providing quick access to the content, sidebar, footer, and to the site’s accessibility statement.

2. Script dependencies eliminated

   Certain features of this site used to depend on JavaScript - namely, the “email this post” functionality and the “print this post” functionality. These features have been kept, but the JavaScript aspects have been eliminated.

3. Increased default font

   The site has always had a flexible font size: but now the default is noticeably larger than it once was.

4. Valid XHTML

   The template, at least, now provides valid XHTML 1.0. Although, for now, this is no real promise for each and every page and post; it’s an important first step. Over the next few days, I will be going through the site and clearing up validation errors which are embedded in the site.

5. Zoom Layout

   This was one of the more difficult decisions. This zoom layout, which is entirely built using ems for a text-size proportional layout, has a width of 60 ems. This width, at the default text width, is wider than an 800 pixel screen resolution. We agreed that this was an acceptable choice because the blog is principally targeted at a highly technical market. Statistics show that less than 1 percent of Accessibility Blog’s visitors are using a screen resolution of 800×600.

   Nonetheless, if our decision causes any of you problems, we do want to hear about it.

Simplicity was a critical factor in this redesign: Matt didn’t want anything complex. Hopefully, this redesign is sufficient to satisfy all visitors!