Archive for April, 2009

Friday is Blogging Against Disablism Day 2009

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Friday 1st May is Blogging Against Disablism Day:

This is the day where all around the world, disabled and non-disabled people will blog about their experiences, observations and thoughts about disability discrimination. In this way, we hope to raise awareness of inequality, promote equality and celebrate the progress we’ve made.

Diary of a Goldfish

Accordingly, I’m writing a blog post (EDIT – the post is now live) about what the term ‘disablism’ means to me, and looking at how broadly the term can be applied.

I’m also working on a post about my efforts to improve the accessibility of my organisation’s online content by providing video content in British Sign Language, with audio description and captioning (available soon).

Visit the Diary of a Goldfish site to see a list of other bloggers taking part in the day.

Blogging Against Disablism Day

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Event review – Web 2.0 in the Public Sector, 16/04/09

Monday, April 27th, 2009

On Thursday 16th April, various public sector web types converged upon the Scotsman Hotel on Edinburgh’s North Bridge for a Web 2.0 event, hosted by The Gate.

The day was an interesting and varied one, mixing high-level summaries of web 2.0 technologies with plenty of real-world examples and discussions of the opportunities, and challenges, presented by this brave new(ish) world.

The presentations from the day can be found at http://nondev.com/web_seminar – below is just a brief summary…
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Flat hunting online – a varied user experience

Friday, April 17th, 2009

I’ve recently been looking for a new flat, and have been surprised by the wild differences, in terms of basic usability, of the various agency websites I’ve visited. The experience has served as a useful reminder of the need to keep usability at the forefront of the planning stage for any website.

With these kind of websites, you’d think that such functionality would be fairly standard across the board, with most sites taking a similar approach. But far from it. Here are some examples:
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Stripping (my CSS) for web standards

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Today is CSS Naked Day.

The idea is simple – websites all over the world are stripping off their CSS for a day, leaving their sites naked and unstyled. If those sites have been designed well, according to web standards, the sites will still appear in logical order with all content perfectly accessible.

Checking a site with CSS turned off is a great way of detecting possible problems. Many assistive technologies ignore CSS, for example, so over-reliance on styling can lead to problems.

For example, imagine you use CSS to call up a background image. But then imagine that background image is actually an image of content (for example, when people put contact details on the background image of their Twitter page). Without CSS, you won’t see that image, but have you provided an alternative?

Website without CSS

The Pretty Simple website without CSS - less pretty, more simple

CSS Naked Day is a great way of flagging up the need for good web standards, and in that spirit I will be shedding my CSS over at www.prettysimple.co.uk. (EDIT: CSS now back on – it was getting too cold!)

Some fellow CSS naturists

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Google Docs and security

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

A colleague recently asked me about Google Docs, wanting to know if it would be suitable to share documents within the organisation. She had heard that other Council’s were using it, and Google Docs certainly ticks many of the boxes:

  • Free and easy to set up
  • Possible to allow multiple users to access and contribute to documents
  • Available (not blocked by our corporate filters and excellent uptime)

But the major question I wanted an answer to was around security. As soon as information leaves our internal corporate network, there are security issues which need to be considered.
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