Access Matters - Seeking Best Practices

From Access Matters
Found on Web Standards Project

Bob Easton is the man behind Access Matters, a weblog that offers up advice regarding web accessibility and best practises. Quiz items are presented as blog or journal entries and answers by others follow in the comments or replies often offering up additional key information.

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Accessible Folksonomies: Accessibility, Usability and Web Standards

Folksonomy (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. This feature began appearing in a variety of social software in 2004. Some examples of online folksonomies being social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Jots (http://jots.com/) which are bookmark sharing sites, Flickr, for photo sharing, 43 Things, for goal sharing, GenieLab and Upto11, for music recommendations and associations, and Tagsurf (http://tagsurf.com/), for tag-based discussions. Gmail's labeling system is somewhat similar to the use of tags, but it is not a folksonomy as users cannot share their categorizations. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.

Folksonomy is currently understood somewhat narrowly as "tagging." Social sciences and anthropology have long studied "folk classifications"—how average people (non-experts) classify the world around them.

Found on alt tags
Accessible Folksonomies: Accessibility, Usability and Web Standards

The Journal of IA Failures

Found on Column Two
From LouisRosenfeld.com

Something I'd like to see: reporting on IA failures, and what was learned from the carnage. Failure stories are a literary genre in and of themselves; even the most dispassionate, technical ones are hard to put down. That's what makes them such great learning tools.

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Underused IA tools

Found on Column Two
From Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease

Us IA’s have a lot of tools at our disposal (personas, sitemaps, task analysis, …), most of them taken and adapted from other disciplines. But I have the feeling we’re somehow selective in which tools we appropriate. Here are some tools that we don’t seem to use much, even though they can be extremely useful.

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information aesthetics weblog

information aesthetics weblog

"information aesthetics form follows data - artistic ambient information visualization design weblog"

The First and Second Laws of Simplicity

Found on InfoDesign
From Maeda's SIMPLICITY blog

'(1) A complex system of many functions can be simplified by carefully grouping related functions. (2) The positive emotional response derived from a simplicity experience has less to do with utility, and more to do with saving time.' (John Maeda - Simplicity)"

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WebDevTips - Making accessible forms part 2

Found on WebDevTips

As outlined in part 1 of this article, forms are one of the most crucial parts of your website. They're used to complete important tasks such as buying products and contacting you so their accessibility is crucial. This second part of our two-part article outlines some more ways to optimise the accessibility of your forms.

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WebDevTips - Making accessible forms part 1

Found on WebDevTips

Forms are one of the most crucial parts of your website. Forms are used to:

* Buy products
* Sign up to newsletters
* Contact you

These are the goals of your website! When a web user fills out a form they're doing something you want them to do. Unless you make sure they're accessible to one and all, some of your site visitors may not be able to perform some of these crucial tasks.

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Microsoft Commits to Better Standars Support in Internet Explorer 7

Found on The Web Standards Project

Lead program manager for IE Chris Wilson has committed to improving standards support in Internet Explorer 7.

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Stylesheets for Handheld Devices

Found on The Web Standards Project
From CSS-Discuss

This document describes some of the issues concerning the use of CSS for handheld devices (using the media type 'handheld'). See also MediaStylesheets for practical media stylesheet strategies.

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WebDevTips - Increased usability

Found on WebDevTips

"Web accessibility has so many benefits that I really do wonder why such a large number of websites have such diabolically bad accessibility. One of the main benefits is increased usability, which according to usability guru, Jakob Nielson, can increase the sales/conversion rate of a website by 100% and traffic by 150%.

At which point you must surely be asking, “So if I make my website accessible its usability will increase and I'll make more money out of it?”. Well, not quite. An accessible website is not automatically more usable but there are many areas of overlap..."

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A quick way to test accessibility

Found on O-jounalism Blog

...hugely grateful to Niel Eyde for his post highlighting two great tools for testing the accessibility of your website - one for Internet Explorer and one for Firefox. On first use it seems a very quick way to see what needs improving about your website to make it more accessible - including spotting images missing alt tags, missing coding, and colour blindness. With these to hand there really is no excuse.

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WebDevTips - A higher search engine ranking

Found on WebDevTips

"An additional benefit of website accessibility is an improved performance in search engines. The more accessible it is to search engines, the more accurately they can predict what the site's about, and the higher your site will appear in the rankings."

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Developing sites for users with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties

Found on karmakars.com

SUMMARY: This post discusses some of the the points raised at tonights WebstandardsGroup meeting on “Developing sites for users with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties”. It also contains links to the presentation material and some related reading.

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Accessible Folksonomies: Accessibility, Usability and Web Standards

Found on alttags.org

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, a folksonomy is basically a taxonomy created by the people and for the people. A community of users collaborates by “tagging” various types of content with user created keywords. This concept is flourishing on a handful of community driven sites that all seem to have a certain addictive quality.

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A Concise Guide to the Major Internet Bodies

Found on The Web Standards Project
From Ubiquity: An ACM IT Magazine and Forum

The bodies responsible for the Internet's protocols and parameters can be said to steer the Internet in a significant sense. This document, by Alex Simonelis of Dawson College in Montreal, is a summary of those bodies and their most important characteristics.

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Web Site Accessibility Design for Business Blogs

Found on Land of Opportunity - Arkansas small business blog

Web site accessibility design is an after thought for most business blogs. And, that’s being generous, if you get my drift.

Few business bloggers, and even most conventional web masters with traditional websites, have given even scant attention to ensuring their sites are accessible to handicap visitors. Everyone assumes that all visitors will be able to see the flashy graphics, watch a video, hear an audio message, and then move a mouse to open additional eye and ear candy.

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Design and Strategy: Nobody Knows Anything

From peterme.com

Yesterday afternoon I attended the Institute of Design's Strategy Workshop. It was their first attempt at trying to bring their design strategy message to people outside of Chicago. They had expected about 30 people to register. They sold out at 100, and who knows how many more would have come.

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Website Design and Optimization News: AltaModal Design and Optimization Daily Update

Providing Updates and News on WebSite Design, Search Engines, Site Optimization Methods and Strategies as well as resources and tools for developing a strong internet presence.

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Use Cases Part II: Taming Scope: A List Apart

Found on A List Apart
by Norm Carr and Tim Meehan

When web projects go wrong, the cause can often be traced to misunderstanding and miscommunication about scope: what you thought your client wanted and what they thought they were getting doesn’t match. The later in a project this is discovered, the costlier for someone it can become.

To manage scope effectively, we have to define what the site must contain, what optional features would be good to have, and what features are irrelevant – and then we have to deal with newly requested or discovered needs and enhancements.

The use-case model can be a powerful tool for controlling scope throughout a project’s lifecycle. Because a simplified use-case model can be understood by all project participants, it can also serve as a framework for ongoing collaboration as well as a visual map of all agreed-upon functionality. It can, therefore, be a precious reference during later negotiations that might affect the project’s scope.

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