As we glide gracefully out of the noughties, here are some of the best retrospectives of the past year on the web.
Posts Tagged ‘web 2.0’
Software Engineering and Web 2.0 Accessibility
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009The blog has been a little quiet recently, but will certainly fire up again after next week’s Accessibility 2.0 conference in London, which I plan to live-tweet (#millionflowers) and blog about afterwards here.
Engineering Software for Accessibility
In the meantime, here’s some useful reading courtesy of Microsft Press – Engineering Software and Accessibility. This is a free 100-page download, covering three key questions:
- How do you plan for accessibility?
- How do you design your software for accessibility?
- How can you implement and test to your software to confirm it meets the accessible design?
Also worth a visit is IBM’s technical library, which has a new section on Accessibility in Web 2.0 technologies, introducing WAI-ARIA and looking at accessible Web 2.0 design principles.
Happy reading, and I hope to see some of you in London next week…
Event review – Web 2.0 in Libraries, Edinburgh, 2nd July 2009
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
The National Library of Scotland - image courtesy of yellow book ltd*
I avoided today’s heatwave by sitting in the relatively cool setting of the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh for an event put on by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland (CILIPS) – Enterprise, engagement and new communications: Web 2.0 in the Library.
I decided to live-tweet the event (or the morning session, at least, as my N95, which I was using as a modem, ran out of battery during the lunch break). Accordingly, here’s my coverage of the event. I used the hashtag #web2libraryevent so you can also see the Twitter results for that term.
Read the rest of my coverage of the Web 2.0 in Libraries event
Tales of a Web 2.0 city
Thursday, May 21st, 2009I’ve recently been made aware of a really interesting project that Edinburgh Council’s libraries service has been involved in. It’s a bold venture into Web 2.0 waters, under the umbrella brand of Tales of One City.
The whole thing is brought together by a public page on Netvibes (a personalised web portal, similar to iGoogle). You can find it at www.netvibes.com/talesofonecity.
Tales of One City Netvibes page
The page has a customised theme (with an image of books as the header) and an embedded Google Search bar. It then serves up 12 widgets, pulling in information from various sources.
Read more about Tales of One City and the benefits and risks of Web 2.0 in local government
ATAG – ignore it at your peril
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009A brief history
Most web developers will have heard of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), especially since the launch of version 2 in December 2008. Perhaps less well known, but just as important, are the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG).
The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) documents define how authoring tools should help Web developers produce Web content that is accessible and conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The ATAG documents also explain how to make authoring tools accessible so that people with disabilities can use the tools.
Version 1 of ATAG was approved in 2000, so the guidelines are certainly in need of revision. Last week W3C announced a call for review of version 2 of the guidelines, with comments invited until 16th March.
There are two distinct parts to ATAG 2.0:
- Part A: Making the authoring tool user interface accessible – which includes “principles and associated guidelines that are related to ensuring accessibility of the authoring tool user interface to authors with disabilities“.
- Part B: Support the production of accessible content – which includes “principles and guidelines related to ensuring support by authoring tools for the creation of accessible Web content by any author (not just those with disabilities) to end users with disabilities“.
Why should we care about ATAG?
I’m currently trying to get my organisation to realise how important ATAG is when it procures a new web CMS later this year. There has been lots of lovely talk of WCAG but we really can’t afford to neglect ATAG in our specifications or we could end up with a product which prevents some of our own staff from publishing content. In such a scenario the cost of making reasonable adjustments later, in accordance with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), would be horrendous. We’d potentially be stuck with something that is not fit for purpose.
But there is a far wider significance, brought about by the rise of Web 2.0 which has given everyone the power to be an author. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and WordPress are all examples of authoring tools – they allow the user to publish content. If such tools are developed in the spirit of ATAG, they will be far more accessible to users who wish to publish to these platforms. Equally, they will assist everyone else in making sure their content is accessible, regardless of their technical knowledge.
ATAG goes hand in hand with WCAG, and both are going to be crucial in the drive towards an inclusive web. ATAG may have once been of interest only to a small audience of software developers, but it now finds itself a vital ingredient in the brave new world of Web 2.0. As the importance of producing accessible content becomes ever clearer, those who ignore ATAG could well find that they are being shunned not only by certain disabled users, by but everyone else too.
Related links
- This post was inspired by an article by iheni (AKA Henny Swan) – Put in a good word for ATAG 2.0
- Also see the ATAG 2.0 Working Draft
- The ‘Other’ Accessibility Guidelines (Powerpoint) – presentation by David Sloan to the Scottish Usability Professionals’ Association
Staying alert – who’s talking about your site?
Monday, December 15th, 2008I’ve recently started using Google Alerts:
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:
- monitoring a developing news story
- keeping current on a competitor or industry
- getting the latest on a celebrity or event
- keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams
I set up a number of alerts based on various topics of interest and the emails started coming thick and fast (I opted for ‘as-it-happens’ alert frequency in most cases, but you can also specify daily or weekly digests).
What has been most useful is hearing about the various blogs which are talking about the organisation and its website, as well as seeing which sites are linking to us. A large proportion of the alerts come from news sources too, so I can also keep tabs on the media. Not only is this an important Comms issue, but it is also a crucial step in becoming proactive with Web 2.0 technologies in general
Company Buzz is another interesting application, this time for users of Linkedin. Powered by Twitter, this application pulls in links to sites that are talking about your company (for better or for worse!). It also gives you a list of Buzz Words.
With these sorts of tools, as well as through monitoring prominent local and national blogs, I’m hoping to build up a robust ‘early-warning system’ to help us react to the conversations that are taking place. Once this is well established, I’ll be looking to see how we can work it into our strategies for more effectively engaging with web technologies across the board.
After all, if we wish to engage with the conversations taking place, we need to know where they are and what people are saying.