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Go to CAST website.

I googled. Do you mean:
Center for Applied Special Technology, something for people with disabilities?
Google Cast, now called Chromecast?
Cast software, something for SQL?
CAST LA, a group trying to end slavery?
Council for agricultural science and technology, which also has nothing to do with space propulsion systems?

In short, what are you talking about?

LICK MY BALLS, DOUCHEBAG. ARE YOU REALLY THAT STUPID?
 
How can you REALLY have ZERO reading comprehension?
 
Let me spell this out for you.
 
By the way, please suck my nuts. You are that which is wrong with society.
 
(This one's going to go way over his head, too, despite the flying fragments of brain going everywhere as the bullets of double and triple irony make their marks.)

I mentioned this in my journal almost 2 years ago (yet another rejected submission:) All links are still good, mostly covering the e-book and fair access for the blind.

There are over 10 million visually impaired people just in the US who are being blinded by the DMCA. On the back page of Software Developer, Warren Keuffel has a commentary (free reg) that summarizes what he found to be issues still brewing over the use of the DMCA to prevent people from implementing technology designed to translate eBooks into Braille. XML is being used now to facilitate the translations of eBooks and other electronic formats and to help disabled people get simple access to reading material that others of us may take for granted. The DMCA effectively blocks many of these new innovations (go figure). Is short, the American Federation for the Blind has sent comments the US Copyright office, Congress is looking at the issue, The Association of American Publishers is fighting it, all the while fair-use and disabled students continue to suffer.

HTML isn't hard to learn. If your friend couldn't learn it quickly, then I think that reflects on your friend.

You're right html isn't hard, xml is getting there though. As for the person I mentioned, he wasn't my friend, just someone I met.

Now, design is another thing completely. That takes a skill that is not wholly scientific.

Yeap! Design is different, and there's two basic way to get there though related, graphic design and print. I knew one person who was a graphic artist who started designing graphics for the web on her own and another one who was a commercial artist who started her own web design business. She'd do the design work for a website and would pay people working freelance for any programming needed. There's something I don't understand about web design and programming in the US, accessibility isn't stress much. For the classes I took for my web programming degree all we really did was valid the code and run a webpage through Bobby neither of which does much of a job of testing for accessibility. Sure, Bobby checks for things like alt attributes for images but it takes a person to test and check layout, colour, and other areas of accessibility. We didn't do any of these, however chatting with people in Canada and Britian who were in college working on a degree or updating their skills said their education stressed accessibility. And they did at least a little of both design and programming, her design and programming are totally separate.

Falcon

Oops, I just visited Bobby, er Cast.org and Bobby wasn't there. A similar service is at Watchfire.

The U.S. Government has been pursing an XML based National File Format (NFF) for some time. This has currently morphed to the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS 1.0), a subset of ANSi/NISO Z39.86 (DAISY 3).

The U.S. Government has been pursing an XML based National File Format (NFF) for some time. This has currently morphed to the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS 1.0), a subset of ANSi/NISO Z39.86 (DAISY 3).

Whether you want "thin clients" or a "managed client" boils down to 1) performance and 2) will you ever need to use a bare pc?

Assuming you won't every need the "bare pc," say, to run a Knoppix demo or whatever, you are back to performance.

If your thin clients, server, and network have enough performance so the entire network can boot after a power failure in only a few minutes, and not get bogged down if everyone's doing data-intensive tasks all at once, then go for it.

However, if that's not the case, consider a managed-client solution. IBM and other companies offer managed-client solutions for Windows. For Linux, it's as easy as running DHCP and having no locally-writable disk except for temporary files and log files. If a system gets trashed, re-image it and be done with it. Re-imaging can be automated, using a boot floppy to grab the image off of the network or local partition.

If you go with either approach though, I'd recommend having a primary and a backup for all server-based functions, including DHCP, file and print services, login services, etc. Put uninterruptable power supplies on all servers and at least one client.

On at least some of your clients, you'll want more than just a floppy:
People expect to be able to read and possibly write their CDs, USB devices, and camera-memory-cards. You'll also need a speaker jack for playing children's. To meet ADA requirements, you'll need that plus screen-reader software on at least one PC. The folks at the Center for Applied Special Technology can help you with accessibility issues.

Also - if you you go with plain old unmanaged clients, or even managed ones, be sure to have a way to isolate any computer that's exhibiting unusual behavior from the rest of the network, such as signs of a virus infection.

Oh, even though it's not normally part of a library's mission, it would be nice if you had one "full-fledged pc" that you let people boot their own OS on, and provided DHCP and Internet services to it. For security reasons, this box should be isolated from the rest of the library network.

I also assume that at least one workstation will be "uncensored" when adults are using it, and that this machine will have a screen that children passing by cannot see. If not, you'll need one. Not only is it the Right Thing To Do, but it will keep the ACLU off your backs.

I'm surprised that no one has posted this yet, but you should look at Bobby. You feed it a URL, it will spit out ways to help you make the page more accessible. It can be set to use Section 508 rules from the US Government or the W3's own recommendations on web accessibility.

I'd also recommend Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards. I provides excellent details for using CSS to control the entire appearance of your site and better support modern web standards. In addition, it has a whole chapter devoted to designing websites with accessibility in mind.

Did you know that the "q" in qmail stands for "queer"??? That's SO cool!!!

Top results for one-letter google searches as of Sat May 17
a : Apple
b : B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the ...
c : CNET.com
d : D-Link Systems, Inc.
e : Welcome to E! Online
f : Welcome to F-Secure, Securing the Mobile Enterprise
g : G*Loomis
h : H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences Online
i : Yahoo!
j : J-???
k : KDE Homepage - Conquer your Desktop!
l : LEXPRESS.fr : l'info au quotidien. L'actualité économique, ...
m : 3M Worldwide
n : SBC Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer : Online Learning : ...
o : www.oreilly.com -- Welcome to O'Reilly & Associates -- computer ...
p : Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
q : Q4music.com - The World's Greatest Music Magazine Online
s : GNU's Not Unix! - the GNU Project and the Free Software ...
t : AT&T
u : The whatUseek Network
v : Welcome to Bobby WorldWide
w : Welcome to the White House
x : Netscape.com
y : Yahoo!
z : HealthAtoZ - Your Family Health Site

CAPTCHA

Both examples posted on the CAPTCHA project web site require that a user be able to view images. Blind users and other users behind text terminals can't see images. I'd suppose that the two CAPTCHA methods are not Section 508 compliant and would make Bobby cry, which means that companies who do business with the United States government can't use them.

Sites that use a CAPTCHA must also have reasonable policies, that is, no "one strike you're out". I tried "Pix" and got it wrong because I put in "ape" when it wanted "monkey".

Note: the IBM page (same goes for most of their site AFAIK) gets a huge number of hits for accessability issues when run through Bobby

I

HTML Validators only check that your HTML validates according to the HTML Recommendation. It does not test accessibility requirements that are not part of the HTML recommendation.

There are tools for testing the accessibility of a website. One of the best I've come across is Accessibility Valet - a much better tool than Bobby

If you meant some other "Bobbie", then I'm obviously talking rubbish and should be ignored :)

on a side note (at the risk of being rated down), is anyone in the slashdot community actively and consciously creating accessible websites? at this point in artificial vision technology, no one has yet to create a widely accepted, usable solution. there are too many diseases, too many causes of blindness to deal with to see a fix-all solution come about... so the best solution is to either ensure that a site is accessible, or design an accessible alternative site. you would be surprised at the number of blind people who are online these days. my little brothers and my father are always complaining that my mother is using up their broadband bandwidth at home with her usage.

at any rate, it's something to consider.

Try Bobby. It does a lot more automated validating than your average validator, plus offers a lot of suggestions/manual validation tips...

Don't be sarcastic. You shot yourself in your foot by making that last comment.

Meta tags can not be used to index a site on many of the most popular search engines. I'm sorry that you are perhaps a macromedia stockholder, but that doesn't make flash a good choice for accessible websites.

If you had done the most basic research on web accessibility, as I have on many occasions, you would know that my lynx reference is a very basic check step to ensure accessibility. The first step of making an accessible site is to make sure that there is appropriate TEXT for everything. Not images that might resemble text. Not images that might contain pictures of text. TEXT.

For the more intelligent readers,
bobby is good for checking sites.

dr. andrew e. mossberg

Need to check your accessbility, try Bobby from cast.

Helps in checking against the W3C Accessibility Guidelines

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

I could make very few improvements to it, all minor:

• Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.
• Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.
• Target your audience. If your site is for a rock group, by all means Flash away, go nuts. If it's trying to sell something, remember time is money to your clients. Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Let me say one thing first, the Wow Web Designs site is NOT a good example of web site design. Look at it in Opera and see for yourself how nice the dark blue links look on the dark brown background. Yuck. Try turning the images off. Almost none of them have alt tags.

Good web site design is subjective. What one person considers good to look at, another won't. Some people actually like those huge flashing animated gifs they put on web sites. Do what you like if its a personal site. If its commercial and you're doing it for a client, then of course do whatever the clients like.

That aside, I know I might be rehashing a lot of other people's comments, but here are a few of the things I keep in mind when designing sites:

- Conforms to the W3C accessibility guidelines and validates (HTML, CSS, etc.) If your site does this, it will cover a lot of the other bases and cut down on problems. Also try running your site through Bobby at http://www.cast.org/Bobby/

- Doesn't use unnecessary graphics or flash. When you have a site about art, movies, or other topics that lend themselves to heavy graphics or when you want to show off something, like a product or your campus - use the images and make sure they're nice ones. In most cases tons of graphics and fancy flash things aren't necessary and just contribute to download time.

- Looks acceptable on as many browsers as possible. It might not look identical on all, but there isn't anything that's illegible on an older or non-traditional version. Try a site like Any Browser's Site Viewerthat will show you what your site looks like on using other browsers, or older versions of HTML support.

- Dynamic Content is important if you want to bring visitors back. They come to your site once, find what they want and never come back again unless your content changes. On the same note, when they get there the content must be up to date on things that are timely, like events information

- Make sure the site downloads fast - most importantly the front page. I now have a 24kbps connection at home and realize just how important this one is.

I guess those are my main ones. I won't get into all the others because so many people have covered them on here already.

This site - Any Browser and this site Software QA Test have testing tools that may be of some use to you.

I'd give you some examples of my work, but I really can't afford for for any of my sites to be slashdotted right now.

Working html is much more usable

with the w3

also, bobby seems a bit bothered

Your site may have linked to a form that is able to be filled out by a person with visual disabilities, however you did not suggest this in your post. You merely suggested obfuscating all addresses in images, thus making it a little harder for me to use the web.

For those of you who are complaining that this brings the web down to the least common denominator, you're missing another important point. Pages that work well for people with disabilities work well for people using alternate browsers, such as those that you might want to use someday on your PDA, or cell phone, or car radio.

Everybody, please validate your pages with Bobby.

Note my submission of this article was rejected 5 hours prior...
2001-04-16 11:08:30 Computer graphics and the blind (articles,hardware) (rejected)

Note that BOBBY is "a free service provided by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

Pretty handy, and sponsored by many of the big Internet companies. Hey mods, can I have some Karma back please???

Easy enough to find out if you are taking a day off and have nothing else to do. I ran the main page through CAST's "Bobby" validator. Sadly, Slashdot flunked. But not by much. The report:

This page does not meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status. Below is a list of 1 Priority 1 accessibility errors found:
Provide alternative text for all images. (1 instance) Line 16

Not bad by comparison with a lot of what's on the Web -- probably somebody just had an off day, right?

The serious lesson here is that if you want to make your pages accessible, CAST is a good starting place. They will cite you W3 chapter and verse for everything they find. I'm sure there are other Web-based validators around. Good job, Slashdot!

Annie

Hi, Rafajafar -- I've met some of your web design team in the past, so I feel as if I "know" the JLAB.org folks in a way, and I've spoken with them about web accessibility, too.

I agree with you that this is a complex problem; Section 508 compliance is a major issue facing all federal agencies. The bad news is that if you haven't already been taking steps towards understanding web accessibility, you may be in a bit of difficulty. The issues surrounding access by people with disabilities are not new; this has been discussed for a number of years, and as others have stated, it really is just a part of basic, quality web design, not anything particularly extraordinary.

Unfortunately, while it's not all that hard to do it right, many people don't realize that, and many web sites, including federal sites, have accessibility problems.

Several great resources have already been posted on this thread, such as the Web Accessibility Initiative and CAST's Bobby web accessibility evaluator. Here's some others that might help you:

• The Section 508 FAQ by the Access Board
• Section 508 Unofficial Checklist, by my consulting company, IdyllMountain Internet
• HWG Online Course 201: Accessible Web Design , a 7-week course taught by me through the HTML Writers Guild's online education program

As you can see from the links I listed, I'm involved in helping to solve this problem in a number of ways -- including the work with my "day job" employer, formerly Edapta, now Reef to develop software that adapts a page to the user's requirements. If you need more information on this topic, you can drop me a note (but please, not all of you); full disclosure is that Idyll Mountain also does consulting on this very topic, but don't worry, I'm not going to hard-sell anyone my services.

At Reef recently I was asked to answer an editorial inquiry regarding this very question Rafajafar asked. Here's what I said:

The best strategies are threefold, and are based on past, present, and future:

1. Past: Old data represents the greatest challenge for web accessibility and section 508 compliance. Many thousands of web pages were created in a blatantly inaccessible manner, back before 508 requirements were created and before many people were aware of the issues. This means that there is a huge store of information which is inaccessible, but must be made accessible.

   This is primarily a resources problem; it takes time, energy, people-power, and money to convert those old pages into something which can be read by today's browsers, assistive technology, and database assimilation tools.

   In short, accessibility of legacy information is a problem akin to the Y2K problem. It consists of fixing problems which were caused by ignorance and poor programming practice; it is a simple problem in terms of complexity, but a time-consuming one.

   The ultimate solution is that those older documents must be updated in some manner. The most reasonable solution is to dump them into a database and make incremental repairs; there is no quick fix here to undo years of shoddy web design.

2. Present: Web development being completed now must adhere to the standards laid down by section 508 guidelines, and must include all information required by assistive technology devices. Web authors doing government work must immediately be retrained to understand concepts of platform independence and interoperability necessary to create accessible documents.

   This is an area in which I've been working for a number of years, first by creating and teaching an online course in web accessibility through the HTML Writers Guild (just completed the 11th run of the course!), and then by creating a resource center at the Guild, the Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center. I've also conducted in-house seminars at locations such as Sandia National Laboratories, as well as given presentation at federal, state, and public conferences on web design.

   Education is the key to accessibility for any documents being produced today.

3. Future: In the future, the role of education will be reduced, because we will have tools which produce valid, accessible, usable HTML right out of the box -- something lacking currently in today's crop of WYSIWYG editors. But the web designer of tomorrow will have an even more potent tool at her disposal: Adaptive information delivery systems such as that being developed at Reef.

   Under such a system, web content creators and managers will be able to write once, web design artists will be able to design once per device, and the web morphing service and content edaptation service built into Reef will automatically produce any number of device-specific interfaces, from screenreader output to WAP phones; from interactive TV to braille terminals.

--Kynn Bartlett

I don't see any reason that we shouldn't have to customize websites for persons with disabilities.

I can.

A properly-designed web site does not need any customization for persons with disabilities.

A web site which is not universally accessible is an indication of gross incompetence on the part of its designer.

Obviously, not every adornment and photo needs to be described in painstaking detail. But - and this is particularly important on government sites, which exist to make important information available to the public - there should be no frivolous impediments to the transmission of information. And this goes from Day One.

A couple years ago I was with a government agency which, to its credit, decided to get an early move on this and get all its pages accessible.

It was a tremendously valuable project, because running all the pages through Bobby and other validators not only highlighted the pointless inaccessiblities that riddled the web site, but called attention to all the other coding errors and other latent problems lying beneath the surface.

It also made it very clear which of the web developers knew what they were doing, and which were utterly useless goldbrickers, tossing together nonsense using FrontPage when they had claimed to know HTML.

Many of these same people thought it was impossible to have pages that are visually engaging and accessible at the same time. This is precisely because they did not know HTML, and thought that the only things that could show up on the web were the fetid oozings from the back end of FrontPage and its ilk.

So, here's the Rapid Accessibility plan:

1. Conduct spot checks and immediately fire anyone on whose computer FrontPage shows up in the recently-used applications
2. Use a tool like Bobby to get a detailed review of problem areas
3. Study these to determine patterns (missing Alt attributes, etc.).
4. Assemble tools (using Perl or some other rapid-development language) to automate the repair of the patterned problems. For instance, for the missing Alt attributes, write a program that presents each image on each page, asks an operator to write a label for it, and then writes the page back out with the labels added.
5. Conduct another spot check to see if you missed any of the FrontPage users the first time around.

I am currently working on a US government web site. (OK, it's a state web site, but they are holding us to the federal rules because they know they're next...) Here's some practical advice:

1. Read the W3 Accessibility Initiative to get an idea of the concepts of making the web accessible. Contrary to popular opinion, the web is for everyone.
2. Use Bobby, a free automated tool written in Java that can check your entire site for accessibility problems. It categorizes problems based on priority level, checks pretty much everything listed in the WAI, and tells you what you still have to check manually that it can't check automatically.
3. Read the W3 Techniques for Web Accessibility to get an idea of how to implement the changes. Contrary to popular opinion, HTML 4 has many features specifically for blind/deaf/disabled users.
4. Test your site yourself. Use Lynx to see what your site looks like to the blind. Do all your images have meaningful ALT tags or LONGDESC tags? Do your tables have SUMMARY tags? Is your navigation usable without Javascript or Flash?
5. Set your text size to maximum to see what your site looks like to visually impaired users. You are using relative sizes for your fonts and percentages for your table widths, aren't you?
6. Turn off your speakers to see what your site looks like to the deaf. If you have audio feeds, do you also have transcripts? If you have video feeds, are they closed-captioned?

It's not rocket science once you know what you're doing. Personal anecdote: I applied the same principles to my own web site, even though I didn't have to and my friends told me I was wasting my time because "nobody uses Lynx anymore." In the first week, I got 10 Lynx visitors.

-M

You're smart; what haven't you learned Python yet? http://diveintopython.org/

I am on the web team for a very large government agency. We, too, have had this dropped on our doorstep, and at first we freaked. We were told that our pages must comply with the Bobby Tool, and on a few test-runs, not a single page passed. We have thousands of pages... how the hell were we supposed to make them all comply with this tool? (Someone mentioned automated changes, but that was out of the question because our content is developed by over a hundred independent authors, some of which are thousands of miles away.) So we did some checking up and found out that only publicly-accessible pages need to comply (~75% of our content is not accessible to the casual web-surfer). We did a little more research and found that only top-level pages need to comply. We still haven't received word on whether top-level means only the home page for the domain or whether it means every single index or default page out there. If the former, great! If the latter, then it'll be a bit more work, but nothing impossible. Let's not blow this out of proportion, people.

The asp site has been slashdotted. As a mac user and a PHP programmer, I must admit that pleases me in some sadistic sort of way. (Am I a bad person?)
I can't stand IE on the PCs and try to use netscape when I can. On the mac, however, it is reversed. IE 5 for the mac is pretty good. IE for windows just has too many annoying UI quirks. IE 5 for the mac has lost the rough edges that IE 5 for windows has. (A more discerning UI audience?) It is a little slower than netscape on the mac, but it appears to be more stable. (a pox on the person(s) responsible for the netscape resize bug) The only problem is alot of web sites don't recognize that IE 5 for the mac is a different html animal than IE 5 for the PC, especially javascript that makes assumptions about the DOM. Some sites don't work correctly.
I've had this discussion about requiring a specific browser for business sites. I find that a desire to use the specific features of IE is indicitive of a desire to structure the application like a desktop application, rather than a web application. ("We want drag and drop, so lets require IE") The point is not that everyone is using IE, so we can sacrifice 5% of our customers, but that the sites that try to do this end up with a clumsy web application. Given my wide variety of browser usage, I always argue for browser neutrality.
I have found that bringing a page up in Bobby can make an effective argument for nuetrality with corporate types. It gets the point across that there are people who can't just switch browsers to access their site. Bringing pages up in lynx is always fun, too.

Yes, accessibility is a good keyword.


I don't know if you are the webmaster for the site, but they have a lot to learn about accessibility.

There are 21 instances of Priority 1 accessibility (no alt text for images or image map links) on the homepage according to Bobby.

If the goal of the organization is equality, then they need to be doubly conscious of not providing equal access to the page for ALL users.

BTW, I always use the printer-friendly version (if there is one) for ordinary Web browsing.

The BBC's website has a CGI script Betsie which automatically generates an 'accessible' version of a web page. But this is not an ideal solution, it would be better to write the page in an accessible way to start with. HTML-linters like Bobby, Weblint, and Tidy, not to mention just validating properly with nsgmls, can help here. Also read the W3C's accessibility guidelines.

But I don't mean to rant too much on the web purist's favourite topic of alt tags and not using tables for layout. I mean, it's not as if I even use Lynx for browsing. One thing I would like to have is a clear sense of real people behind the site. This means having a contact address (or at least a link to a contact page) on every page, and where appropriate, other meta-data like which department is responsible for this page, where the information comes from, when it was last updated, and so on.

Also try to make your URLs last a reasonably long time (i.e. not like microsoft.com, for anyone familiar with that site). This means that people can bookmark a site containing useful information and go back to the same page later. It also helps search engines.

Finally, it might be a good idea to support SSL connections and get a certificate, possibly signed by the government itself. That way people can feel reassured that 'the bad guys' aren't getting in the way.

So far the best tool I've found for helping to make sure your site is accessible is Bobby, a free service provided by CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) to check websites versus usability standards. It can be run online, or there's a downloadable version, and generates a prioritized report of everything that you have to look at and potentially fix to help special browsers (such as text-to-speech) function better.

For a goverment site, 'Universal Access' should be paramount. Here's a link to a site called Bobby which will test sites for access and has explainations on how to comply with W3C recommendations for accessiblity.

--

Just a quick note, I went to the bobby page that was linked, and, because I tend to think of nasty things like this I ran the bobby page through the page checker - just to check their own site out ;)

I was kind of shocked by the results:

• Priority 1: User checks are triggered by something specific on the page; however, you need to determine whether they apply. Bobby Approval requires that none of them apply to your page. Please review these 6 item(s)....
• Priority 2: 9 Priority 2 issue(s) that Bobby has identified......
• Priority 3: 5 Priority 3 issue(s) that Bobby has identified......
• Browser Compatibility: The following section contains a list of 6 browser compatibility errors.

``Incidentally, does anyone know of anything you can use to check how accessable your site is?''

As I put in my submission, CAST's Bobby checks the accessibility of your site against a wide variety of criteria. In the advanced mode, you can specify what browsers and versions of that browser you want to check. This list includes Netscape, Explorer, WebTV and AOL.

--

``Incidentally, does anyone know of anything you can use to check how accessable your site is?''

As I put in my submission, CAST's Bobby checks the accessibility of your site against a wide variety of criteria. In the advanced mode, you can specify what browsers and versions of that browser you want to check. This list includes Netscape, Explorer, WebTV and AOL.

--

If accessibility is your goal, I highly recommend you visit Bobby.

Bobby is a webbased app that will check your pages for accessibility.

What he have here is the finding that SOCOG's web sight breached one of the law's of Australia. Hence, IBM, as part of due diligence in their bid for designing the site, should have taken accessibility into consideration. Hence, my opinion that the retrofit to make the site comply with the law should come out of IBM's pocket.

I honestly don't think that this is a due dillegence issue. If the poeple who contracted IBM to do the site weren't aware of the accessability issues and laws of Australia and didn't request that it be covered by the scope of the project, then as far as I am concerned they are the ones that should be footing the bill.

The analogy to building contractors is just plain false. We're not talking about building a house. A house sits in a single jurisdiction; a website has no boundries. Say Zimbabwe has a law that says all site background colors should be, say, 'pink'. Should IBM be required to know that and implement that as part of the site? Its absurd. This is precisely the reason why laws like this shouldn't be created--becuase they can't be enforced.

But hey, I'm libertarian. I don't think that the government should tell you how to design your web site, just as I don't think they should tell you how to prepare for retirement, or what you can say, guns you can own.

And being a libertarian, I also believe that this nonsense should not settle in the courtroom but in the marketplace. If people that require accessability features (weather it be by choice or by neccessity) aren't raising their voices and voting with their dollars then what makes them think that businesses and individuals should subsidize these features? People that are complaining about not being able to surf with Lynx: what are you doing about it, besides complaining? Visually impaired people: are you letting corporations know that if they aren't going to make their site more accessible that you are going to go to their competitor? Or better yet are you funding the accessibility features of websites directly? If not, I don't even want to hear about it.

I'm not trying to be harsh on those without disibilities, but I just think that people demand a lot without sacrificing (monetarily that is) themselves. We talking about socialist information here.

Interesting note: CAST's Bobby system for evaluating web sites, etc. is funded/sponsered by IBM of all people. Check out the sponsorship page on CAST.org. Also, IBM appears to have a division just for 'Special Needs'.

-k

IBM's Special Needs Systems focuses on developing and using IBM technology to enhance employability, education and the quality of life of people with disabilities....

You beat me to the post. But also, if you look at Bobby, you will see the list of sponsors. One of whom is ... ... ... IBM.

For those who care, CAST.org has a neat tool called Bobby which can analyse web pages and report their 'readability' for the visually impared.

Please head on to http://www.cast.org/bobby/

type in http://www.olympics.com/eng/home.html and send the request for processing.

Interesting to note that, at this stage, Bobby does not report any automatically detected Priority-1 errors. But thats just for this specific page.

Bobby Accesibility check of the first page of the site.
--

In other situations where alternative text is unnecessary or distracting, such as images used as spacers, bullets in lists, and links, ALT="" should still be included so that text based browsers can ignore the image. It is important not to use this technique if the image is a link or is important to understanding the page.

I have developed several web sites for government clients and accessibility is a big issue for them. I am not aware of any current regulation or directive but it is definitely on it's way for Government sites. And if they have to do it, you can bet that commercial sites will have to make "reasonable accommodation" under the a new attachment to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Attitudes like those exhibited by this company are a guarantee of regulation. We solved it by implementing new coding standards that required ALT tags, set new templates with the graphic designers, and made a Bobby scan part of the QA process. Not every one is going to be this structured in their approach but to deny the problem will bring pain for us all. So go to CAST and get going.

This article seems rather timely to me; I took a few minutes last night/this morning to bring my personal web page "up to code" as they say. It's not hard to do at all.

I found a cool automated website checker that looks for things that will hinder a site's accessibility. Go to www.cast.org/bobby and run your site through it. If you've written valid HTML 4.0, you won't have much work to do. If not.... heh.

... make your opinions known!

(It is a horrible site, not only because it discriminates against the visually impaired, but also because it uses Java and image-navigation which make it difficult to be viewed by folks with older computers, slow connections, etc.)

If this company will not listen to their employees, they may pay attention to outside opinions. Of course, if we could convince them that they are losing potential clients, that would be the most effective strategy, though I am not sure how many of us here could cconvince them of that ... ;-)

Has anyone notified some of the associations involved in rights for the blind (National Federation of the Blind)? Certainly, the Aventis site will not be Bobby approved!

YS