456 Berea Street is linking to a great discussion on accessibility.
But I am going to take this opportunity to re-inforce what I believe is the nature of our professionalism. We should make an effort to create accessible content, because it’s part of our job. And frankly, it doesn’t take much effort; it’s not difficult. - John “brothercake” Edwards
Nicely written, and to the point. Accessibility is the job. A lot of our clients and employers can miss the point. We aren’t making these sites for them. They know the content, they don’t need the site for that. We’re making the site for their clients, for whom accessibility may be an issue. When we worry about accessibility, we aren’t being picky, we’re doing our job.
We’ve all done it. You right click to correct the spelling of a word, and you add the misspelled word to your dictionary rather than correct it. Firefox makes it easy to add new words, but they don’t make it easy to remove them. Here’s how to do it.
I’ve started using a great functional accessibility evaluator lately. A superb tool for testing and fixing accessibility issues on websites. A very powerful tool. Register for a free account and it gets even better.
The restructuring of the VTTI website is complete. They didn’t want a redesign in the traditional sense, they wanted to update and improve what they had. I’ve updated the colors and textures, as well as improving the quality of HTML and CSS. The end result is a site with a simpler color palette, and improved overall functionality. The load time is down, and the design is now consistent across browsers and platforms. As a side benefit, it’s also much easier to maintain and expand.
More screen-shots are available if you’re interested. As you can see, it ended up looking a somewhat like the Alumni Association site, but that’s not a big surprise. The goal with VTTI, like the Alumni Association, was to put together a site that met the University’s requirements, without using their templates. They both wanted a site that was identifiably Virginia Tech, but was a little unique as well. Variations on a theme, rather than an exact match.
