Webinar on Planning an Accessible Website

Everett Zufelt & I have agreed to present a webinar entitled Introduction to Accessibility and Planning for an Accessible Website . We'll be posting links to the archive when it's up, but wanted to ensure that the presentations were available online (along with a PDF version) before it went live in case people wanted to follow along this way. This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license so please feel free to enhance/distribute it. For those that missed it there is now a video archive of the presentation available. Questions from the end of the presentation. I'm going...

Using Drupal as a Prototyping Tool

This article was republished in GovFresh . I was really happy to have Patrick Lajeunesse present about Agriculture Canada's experience using Drupal as a prototyping tool. As you can see from his presentation, with a small team of communications staff they were able to set up both a Drupal and WordPress prototype to explore their needed functionality. I wanted to focus a bit more on why this makes so much sense for so many organizations, but especially government agencies. The implementation of web tools has improved significantly over the last decade and it is no longer something that needs to...

Just Vision

Just Vision is an organization that, through award-winning media, community outreach and an array of educational tools, informs, connects and engages people in Palestinian-Israeli civilian efforts to resolve the conflict nonviolently. OpenConcept was lucky enough to work with this passionate organization to help them develop a truly unique Drupal-based website. Just Vision had previously implemented another CMS solution and as such, had an existent, complex database that linked interviews from a diverse selection of 'peacebuilders' on a variety of themes. Developing the appropriate taxonomies and linking interviews with themes, footnotes, glossary terms and profiles was challenging but something that Drupal...

Drupal in Government Ottawa Showcase - A Great Success

The Drupal Showcase that we organized on June 15th was a great success. This event was organized & sponsored by OpenConcept and we were able to bring together over 75 people to learn about how and why public servants are using Drupal effectively to communicate. We had representatives from 15 government departments including: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB), Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (FAIT), Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Department...

Organizing for Drupal in Government in Ottawa

For the last month we've been actively organizing to set up a showcase of Drupal sites in Government here in Ottawa. There are a lot of departments that are using this great CMS and this is the first event of it's kind working to get the public sector together and talk about the work they've done. We've already got more than 50 people signed up for the event on Tuesday, June 15th. We are quite happy with our list of speakers and know this will be a great opportunity for people to hear about the variety of ways this tool...

Building Better Lists of Country Data

One of our most popular pages is the Text List of All Countries in the World . Strangely this little piece of data has gotten over 60k hits since we posted it and has received a wide range of very positive reactions from around the world. What started as just something that annoyed me personally (how to get an updated list of all of the World's countries in on easy to copy/paste location) proved to be something that a lot of other people were looking for too. Now, when I first did this I didn't expect that generating a list...

Changing government standards and ‘Common Look and Feel’

This is a reprint of the post I wrote for GovFresh . It's mostly a re-write of the earlier blog post I wrote specifically for the Canadian government . Most western governments have in the last decade developed an accessibility strategy for their websites, often based on WCAG 1.0. At the end of 2008, the WC3 announced the final version of WCAG 2.0 and the public sector is now struggling to keep up. In Canada there was a recent announcement about a revised Common Look and Feel (CLF) . In the USA the Section 508 is in its first of...

Ada Lovelace Day Celebration of Angie Byron's Conributions to Open Source

Earlier this year I found out about Ada Lovelace Day (March 24th), and decided that I would pledge along with 1600+ others to blog about women who have contributed to science and technology. Fortunately, I am a Drupal developer, so there are lots of great examples of women taking leadership roles. I'm called to blog about the contributions of Angie Byron , known in the community as webchick . Now Angie's been a Drupal user for 4 years 41 weeks (six weeks longer than I have), but according to Ohloh (a free public directory of open source software and people),...

Changing Standards in Government

Very recently Canada's Treasury Board announced that the Common Look and Feel (CLF) for the Internet 2.0 Standard is being updated . Now, for those folks who don't spend a lot of time on Government of Canada websites it's not something that you are likely to notice. However for both people with disabilities & the Canadian tax payer at large it could be a very big deal. Improved Design I want to first point out some of the good work done rethinking the CLF. Thomas Bradley's Proposal for CLF3.0 predated the public announcement for the update and presents a neat...

OpenConcept White Paper on CMS Accessibility

OpenConcept is pleased to announce the release of an Accessibility White Paper . We have been actively promoting accessibility in Content Management Systems for the last two years and are happy to be able to provide some insights. This document is especially relevant if you are involved in web communications for government agencies or for organizations within the province of Ontario. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at accessibility@openconcept.ca .