I got talking with Sandi Wassmer from Copious about accessibility best practices after I posted Accessibility Tips for Management last month. We had a really good exchange over Skype & have continued talking over Twitter. It's really great to hear what is happening outside of North America. Since we've been talking she was published in .NET Magazine with a great article The 10 principles of inclusive web design which I think are good guidelines for thinking about designing a site.
Best Practices
I was looking for a way to better publicize the accessibility work we've done on our own...
Accessibility
By Mike Gifford
on 03/06/2011
I was happy to see the AODA Compliance Wizard produced to make it a bit easier to determine when/where Ontario organizations need to act about accessibility issues.
The Accessibility Standard for Information and Communications for the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) was released earlier today and it's a great accomplishment that reflects the dedication of thousands of people who have worked for improved Human Rights for our fellow citizens. It is great to see this act, which was initially received Royal Assent on June 13, 2005, finally receive the clarity about what...
The Accessibility Standard for Information and Communications for the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) was released earlier today and it's a great accomplishment that reflects the dedication of thousands of people who have worked for improved Human Rights for our fellow citizens. It is great to see this act, which was initially received Royal Assent on June 13, 2005, finally receive the clarity about what...
By Mike Gifford
on 29/04/2011
Like many government agencies, the Government of Canada has a mandate to address accessibility issues. The Common Look & Feel presently is based on the 1999 accessibility standard WCAG 1.0 and will shortly require WCAG 2.0 compliance. This falls within the Management Accountability Framework, which is an incentive based system for management. Internal audits are presently being used to evaluate accessibility improvements over time.
As I noted in my last blog Accessibility Tips for Management even with this regulation, how is management supposed to know when their site is accessible or...
As I noted in my last blog Accessibility Tips for Management even with this regulation, how is management supposed to know when their site is accessible or...
By Mike Gifford
on 28/04/2011
Most accessibility articles are written for either developers or designers who need guidance on how to implement accessibility fixes. There's a lot more to write on this subject, but I was looking for articles written for the communications professionals who are overseeing web project. In most large organizations the people directing the sites development are not the same people as those who are coding it.
Without having specialized technical knowledge tied to accessibility, do managers have the skills required to assess if their sites are accessible? In my experience most managers lack...
Without having specialized technical knowledge tied to accessibility, do managers have the skills required to assess if their sites are accessible? In my experience most managers lack...
By Mike Gifford
on 27/03/2011
Here's a summary of accessibility presentations from DrupalCon San Francisco & Chicago. I've put them in an order that I hope will allow people who know nothing about web accessibility to progress through a rather complex subject. All DrupalCon videos are stored on Archive.org which now also has an option for using HTML5 video.
This is my first time using this great new HTML5 tag to embed a video. It's also a great space to highlight that there are as yet no captions available for these videos & I've yet to figure out how to make the controls accessible to keyboard only users &...
This is my first time using this great new HTML5 tag to embed a video. It's also a great space to highlight that there are as yet no captions available for these videos & I've yet to figure out how to make the controls accessible to keyboard only users &...
By Mike Gifford
on 04/03/2011
OpenConcept Consulting takes a step into the future of the web with HTML5. Witness the power of lightning fast and super stable in-page video with the stunning effects of jQuery. Accessible, mobile friendly, sleek and flexible: HTML5 is where our heart is.
We are early adopters of many new technologies so that we can test/evaluate them before implementing them for our clients. We pushed forward with an early Drupal 7 install so that we could dedicate some time to working out the remaining kinks that are holding back implementation of this great new version. We've been using social media to...
We are early adopters of many new technologies so that we can test/evaluate them before implementing them for our clients. We pushed forward with an early Drupal 7 install so that we could dedicate some time to working out the remaining kinks that are holding back implementation of this great new version. We've been using social media to...
By Mike Gifford
on 28/02/2011
I don't know where the time's gone, but next week at this time I'm going to be at DrupalCon with thousands of other users & developers. I've really enjoyed Boston, DC & San Francisco, and expect that Chicago will be just as exciting. It's interesting to reflect that it was in 2008 at the Boston Keynote that Dries set the course for Drupal 7 challenged the community to embrace RDFa. This was long before we became involved in making Drupal 7 more accessible, but making sites more machine readable will do a lot to making them more accessible to people too.
William Lawrence gave the...
William Lawrence gave the...
By Mike Gifford
on 12/02/2011
Back in November of 2010 Federal Court Justice Michael Kelen gave the Treasury Board of the Government of Canada (GoC) 15 months to make all of it's websites accessible to the blind. This is still a landmark case even though the government decided to appeal the case on Jan 10th. I'm not sure how much longer the appeal will extend the case, but the writing is on the wall, the GoC is going to need to begin the long and difficult process of ensuring that it's millions of public web pages are accessible to all Canadians.
It is unclear at this point what will come from the appeal. I would hope...
It is unclear at this point what will come from the appeal. I would hope...
By Mike Gifford
on 16/12/2010
I'm the first to admit that search engine optimization is important. I know that there is a lot to be learned about how to drive people to your site and ensure that they keep coming back to it. Two years ago it was estimated that there were 63 billion pages indexed by search engines. How will your site show up in the first pages of Google results if you don't get an edge over everyone else?
I know that there really are 'SEO Experts' out there, that know the web well and have seriously researched search engine behavior. But there are an equal number of people who have taken a course or two,...
I know that there really are 'SEO Experts' out there, that know the web well and have seriously researched search engine behavior. But there are an equal number of people who have taken a course or two,...
By Mike Gifford
on 14/12/2010
Earlier this year we agreed to sponsor the IdealWare's 2010 report comparing popular open source content management systems, and we're glad to have done so! It is so important to have a review of different systems if only to encourage discussion & debate about software use in the non-profit sector.
Why Drupal 7 is Great
Earlier this week I boasted on the NOSI discussion list about Drupal 7's accessibility enhancements. I know how much more accessible it was than Drupal 6. I have also done some work to compare it with other popular CMS systems. We've developed a frank accessibility...
Why Drupal 7 is Great
Earlier this week I boasted on the NOSI discussion list about Drupal 7's accessibility enhancements. I know how much more accessible it was than Drupal 6. I have also done some work to compare it with other popular CMS systems. We've developed a frank accessibility...