Access Matters

When I put this site into hiatus late last year, I set a couple of goals for when I would bring it back to activity. First, I wanted to do a proper design job and move away from a quickly adapted Wordpress theme. Second, I planned to ditch the quiz numbering scheme based on WCAG 2.0 while it was still in development stages. The number scheme has changed since I started using them, and WCAG 2.0 itself hasn’t turned out so well.

OK. So much for good intentions. You’ll see that the design hasn’t changed yet, and those silly numbers are still scattered throughout the content. I’m foregoing both so that I can publish a couple of test cases for situations I’ve read about recently.

By the way, the reasons for the hiatus, notable projects for my day job, have gone splendidly. Since these projects sit inside IBM’s firewall and are targeted to our 300,000+ employees, I will mention only brief details here. The first project is a forums facility that offers threaded discussions on about 1200 topics to over 40,000 participants in both web and netnews formats. This is the third generation of our forums in 25 years. It launched well early this year and the forums are flourishing with ever increasing use and participation. The other project is a collaborative help facility that has not yet launched, but will be the first to bring end user collaboration onto a set of Information Technology help resources that were previously very tightly edited and controlled by a central team. We’re bringing that application out of the “command and control” bunkers of the Web 1.0 era.

Next, a couple of quizzes (your participation expected) regarding (1) another subtlety of how forms are read by screen readers, and (2) a claim that screen readers are sometimes confused by unruly tabindex sequences.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at 8:57 am and is filed under About, Articles. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.