As Far As I Can Tell

Meredith just asked me, “Do you have any message for the people of France? I’m going to put it on a sucker”. She says the craziest shit when she’s half asleep.

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Last night I went to Creating Accessible Websites: Multidisciplinary Perspectives: An open meeting of the Chicago Web community, a discussion of web accessibility issues hosted by various web related groups in Chicago. There were some interesting discussions concerning Section 508 compliance, including one presenter who was blind, and able to show us his experience of the web first hand.

Accessibility is much harder to tackle than you would think, and harder to prove you’re done than with other web standards. You can’t just validate the page and be done with it. Common sense helps out, but knowing how far to take it comes down to a good sense of who your audience is, and how much each accessibility step is worth to your project. Of course, for a person who needs those options to be there, it means everything.

One of the presenters, Sanjay Batra, brought up the interesting point that accessibility considerations aren’t just for the disabled. In a low light situation, a sighted person has trouble seeing. On a busy street, a person with good hearing needs the same accommodations as a deaf person. These points are driven home in particular when considering mobile or convergent devices where the place of use is unknown and variable.

As a result of keeping up with some of the web related groups in Chicago, I’ve learned about others. Here is a list of the groups I’ve found so far:

Anonymous Federated
Chi-Squared
Chicago AIGA Experience Design Community of Interest
Director SIG - MMUG Chicago
e-Learning SIG
IDSA Chicago
Net Content Sig
Northern Illinois Macromedia Flash Users Group
Usability Professionals Association
WebSIG

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Tomorrow, Macromedia Flash Interface Design: A Macromedia Showcase, by Darcy Dinucci will officially be released. This book contains an entire chapter dedicated to my website, TCUP.

You can buy it at the link above for $31.49, or next week it should be in your local bookstore for $44.99. I probably won’t receive my copy until next week—I’m really excited about it.

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It’s only lies that I’m living / It’s only tears that I’m crying / It’s only you that I’m losing / Guess I’m doing fine. Once again Beck, thanks for the new album.