Pat’s Point of View

My all time top 5 favorite good ol fashioned groovy rock songs would have to be:

1. 319 by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (at the time anyway)
2. Addicted to Love by Robert Palmer
3. Fields of Joy by Lenny Kravitz
4. Bambi by Prince
5. Cherry Pie by Warrant

There are many other good rock songs, to be sure, but these tracks just have a special groove to them. Feel good moozik :)

It’s not that much of surprise to find two Prince tracks in this list, his Purpleness is definitely one of the best guitarists ever born. And I have plenty of Satriani, Hendrix, Santana, Slash, Clapton, May, King, Van Halen and Edge in my library….but Prince beats them all, when he wants to.

See what people are blogging about: rock music, groove, Prince

My mid-year’s resolution is to use the response shown in the middle frame below.

Shouldn’t be that hard :)

A few Friday’s ago (7th April) I attended a mini seminar organised by The Web Standards Group (WSG), on the subject of WCAG 2.0 the next version of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

These guidelines are the bread and butter of accessibility. Version 1 was published in 1998 and so we have all been waiting anxiously in the last few years for a new version that hopefully addresses some of the many issues that practitioners have come across when using the guidelines “in the trenches”.

But sadly we’re still waiting and there have been many stories going around about the disastrous time the W3C is having in trying to deliver WCAG 2.0, and what I heard on Friday is no more promising. It appears that the corporates (who shall not be named) have hijacked the working group and steered it towards creating a set of guidelines that are even more confusing than WCAG 1.0 and even less strict.

Besides being incomprehensible by normal human beings (and thus impossible to implement, test, police) they have been watered down. True, version 1 had it’s faults (including being biased towards visual disabilities) but in an effort to fix this and in conjunction with the whole corporate hijacking, version 2 is much worse.

I think unless we take action and force the W3C to re-think WCAG 2.0, the already frustrating state of affairs in the accessibility field will get rapidly worse and potentially we’ll be left without anything to guide us in developing accessible websites and intranets.

The second speaker of the night was Bruce McGuire, from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HEREOC). Bruce has found a modicum of fame as the plaintiff in the first (and one of very few) legal battles over accessibility, when in 2000 he sued IBM over the badly constructed Sydney Olympics website. It’s almost always the cited case when people try to build an argument for the legal responsibility behind accessibility. Besides being quite an entertaining speaker, Bruce also gave us some good insight into the official view of the Australian government and legal system. He hinted that because of the troubles with WCAG 2.0, HEREOC and other policy making bodies around the world, may end up diverging from the W3C’s guidelines and making their own recommendations on how we should approach accessibility.

Although this will undoubtedly be rather messy, I was glad to hear there are sensible people saying sensible things in our government. Rather than tasking the easy way out, and simply following the whatever the W3C outputs, they may actually put the needs of the community first and try to rectify the situation.

A podcast of the seminar can be found on the WSG website.

See what people are blogging about: accessibility, Web Standards Group, WCAG 2.0

Someone pointed me to a series of three articles on evaluating website accessibility, by Roger Johansson. They’re an excellent practical guide to accessibility, similar to my own recently published article.

Many people, web developers as well as website owners, are new to website accessibility and find it difficult to evaluate. This three-part article series is intended to make it easier for non-experts to perform a basic accessibility check. I hope it will be helpful enough to make at least a few websites more accessible.

Whilst occasionally being a little heavy handed, his heart is in the right place and I think it’s great to see the upswing in popularity of web standards and accessibility amoung web designers and developers. And Sweden rocks, so he gets extra points in my book.

See what people are blogging about: accessibility, web standards

Jenn has just launched a new website “2 to tango” promoting public knowledge on contraception:

www.2totango.com.au

As of 3:00pm this afternoon I own my own home! OK well the bank does, but I’m next in line.

I was just reading about iWalk Dublin, a new tourism initiative providing guided audio tours around the city of Dublin. They use Podcasts you download to your iPod and then off you go!

I think this is a great idea and I hope it gets adopted by other cities. Having done my fair share of city sightseeing, I often found a distinct lack of information on the history and culture of the place. Even when I forked out for some over-priced tourist guide/book I still didn’t get what I was looking for. And with the Podcast you’d be able to stop, rewind, fast-foward etc.

Actually it would have been quite handy when I was in Dublin, since it was Christmas Eve and nothing was open, so no tours. Or even locals to ask directions of! :)

See what people are blogging about: Dublin, Ireland, tourism, ipod, podcast

Seems like the point of buying a Mac is dissolving before our very eyes, now that you’ll soon be able to legally run Windows on Intel Macs. Guess I don’t need to worry though, since mine’s a G4.

I wonder where Apple and the Macintosh will be in a few years. I don’t think the hardware side of Apple will last long. Many people have been telling me that for a while but I wasn’t convinced, but not any more. I liked the distinction between WinTel and Mac hardware, but that’s now pretty much gone. Perhaps allowing Windows to run might prolong the inevitable disappearance of distinct Mac hardware. Or not.

To be honest what I’d really like to see is running OS X on other [read cheaper] hardware. Apple may as well do it, they’re certainly not going to shock their fans any more than they have in the last little while.

That all said, I really, really want a MacBook Pro now…..dual boot, to move in both circles :)

See what people are blogging about: Apple, Mac, Intel, Windows

I’ve written a new paper on practical accessibility, a follow up from my earlier introduction to accessibility article. Published by Step Two Designs.

There is a great deal of hype on this topic and a lot of discussion too, yet vagueness and confusion persist. Web teams face a considerable amount of political pressure to ’be compliant’, but often don’t know where to start. This can result in aggravation, misdirection of effort and ultimately a failure to make the website any more accessible.

Often what is needed is a pragmatic view based on real experience, to reveal what is really important and what should be tackled first.

This paper provides ten key tips to help improve the accessibility of any website, or intranet. It’s not intended to be an introduction to web accessibility nor is this intended to be an exhaustive manual covering every detail of every accessibility technique. Besides being counter-productive and far from helpful as a starting point, it is just not possible to do this. Best practice changes constantly and one must focus on the underlying approach rather than specific details.