Sept. 19, 2002
Please feel free to invite some of your colleagues from your or another city/county if you think it would benefit them to be part of our group.
New leadership?
Happy 2nd anniversary to us! With this anniversary comes
a discussion of changing leadership. Rich is stepping down from his post as
chairman for the past two years. Thanks for being a great leader and for holding
us together, Rich.
At the September meeting, we were looking for nominations for chair and came up a little short. I, Susan, was nominated to lead the group, which I am willing to do. But this would require a new minutes taker! Do I hear crickets? If you would be interested in being chair or taking minutes, please show up at the next meeting or let me know.
I've received another good suggestion from someone in the group that we have a rotating host. Volunteers from the group would each put together and run one meeting. We can briefly discuss this at our next meeting.
Web site accessibility
Our guest speaker, Diana Persell, Director of Creative
Services for National Information Consortium, gave us a great overview of accessibility
and Section 508 issues.
One thing to remember is that accessibility isn't Section 508. Diana gave the example of an online grocery store. The site is accessible, yet it does not meet Section 508 requirements.
Your "click here" links and alt tags need to be intuitive.
PDF documents are also not accessible. Adobe has designed a tool to help with PDFs, but it isn't the optimal way to present information or provide service to those who have vision impairments.
Also, think of those who are not able to use a mouse and only navigate using a keyboard or other device. Try tabbing through your site to see if the navigation is intuitive.
You should also name table cells and add summaries to your tables.
While state and local governments aren't required to have their sites be 508 compliant yet, the Tech Act of 1988 does have an impact on those that accept federal money for education.
Don't even think of using the "undue burden" argument…she says that this can only be applied if it would shut down business or would demand layoffs. The feds are very strict on this issue.
One city that had been ahead of the curve with Web site accessibility is San Jose, CA. Take a look at (and borrow from) their policy.
A great resource is to find someone in your community with a disability and use them as a consultant. You could also try downloading screen reader software to "hear" how your site is laid out.
There are some products on the market that will do some accessibility checking for you as you work on your site:
LIFT - Available for DreamWeaver and FrontPage, gives clues for accessibility. Price range: $200-250.
NNG - Accessibility/usability package, has Jakob Nielsen affiliated with it.
A-Prompt - http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/, free.
While these may help, there are several factors to accessibility that are too humanized for evaluation.
A good example of an accessible site is FirstGov, www.firstgov.com. This site also has an invisible image in the uppermost left of each page with a skip navigation function.
It is difficult to determine a "Return on Investment" model for making your Web site accessible. It should be thought of as more of a service or a risk-avoidance.
The W3C is developing a business case for accessibility; Diana will send us a link.
If you are looking at content management systems, specifically ask to see accessibility features.
Resources she recommended on accessibility:
Book: "Constructing Accessible Web Sites," by Cynthia Waddell and others.
The Web site www.jimthatcher.com has a comparison between W3C guidelines and Section 508 standards.
The WAI section of the W3C site, www.w3c.org, has 14 guidelines and 60 checkpoints to help you increase the accessibility of your site.
www.accessboard.org
There are many more links and a lot more information within her PowerPoint presentation. You can also e-mail Diana at Diana@nicusa.com if you have questions.
Postscript: Diana sent the following links from W3C:
Other model accessibility policies: http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/
Customizing
a business plan for accessibility: http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/bcase/
October Meeting: Web Site Design Tips
Our October meeting will be a group
discussion of web site design tips. Please bring URLs or examples of web sites
whose design you particularly like, or examples of your own design work to
be gently critiqued, and any questions you may have. Also bring books or articles
on web design that you would recommend. This will be a chance for the older
hands to help the newbies along, and for the old hands to learn some new tricks.
The meeting will be at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, October 17, at the MARC offices,
600 Broadway.
Some folks usually do lunch after the meeting. Let us know if you'd like to join us.
For November, our guest speaker from September, Diana Persell, has graciously agreed to return to give us some guidance on usability and answer questions about how to improve the usability of our Web sites.
If you have any ideas for future topics or guest speakers, please share them with Rich Lovett, KCMO (rich_lovett@kcmo.org), or Susan Waters, Overland Park (sjwaters@opkansas.org).
SJW