Alt Tags

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Do You Care About Accessibility?

It was a moment that is quickly becoming legendary in certain web design circles. The first of many accessibility panels at the 2004 SXSW Interactive conference was well underway when Jeffrey Veen stepped onto the stage just as it was his turn to present. Unexpected travel delays had prevented him from arriving on time for the Accessibility is For Everyone session. As a result, Veen missed the initial presentations by a panel of noted accessibility experts and appeared to walk into the room cold to deliver his portion of the session.

Against a backdrop of hyper sensitivity to accessibility issues Veen steps up and announces, “I don’t care about accessibility.” Veen’s proclamation was met with a few nervous chuckles followed by an uncomfortable moment of silence before he began to build his case.
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Suddenly Accessibility Is Beautiful

The HiFi Design with CSS session generated a fair amount of shock and awe at this year’s SXSW conference. The CSS Zen Garden continues to raise awareness of the amazing possibilities that web standards present. Accessibility advocates are awed by the beauty of standards based design and simultaneously shocked that so many leading designers are citing accessibility as one of their primary goals. Suddenly accessibility is cool (and beautiful too). It’s every accessibility advocate’s dream come true, except some of us seem to be sleeping in.
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Word to xHTML Revisited

A few weeks ago one of our clients called to notify us that one of their web pages didn’t look quite right. The site in question had recently been redesigned using web standards and was table free. This site uses our Content Management System (CMS) to publish pages using xHTML 1.0 strict templates. What could possibly go wrong?

A quick check of the page in question produced interesting results. The page rendered perfectly in Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. Internet Explorer was another issue entirely. The columns seemed to melt together in ways that defied web physics.
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Texas Or Bust

The Alt Tags team is heading to Austin next week for the 2004 South By Southwest Conference (SXSW). SXSW initially began as a music industry conference focusing on independent recording artists, then eventually expanded to include film and interactive media (the Internet to you and me). My last SXSW conference was over a decade ago in the pre-web era, so it will be interesting to see how SXSW has evolved over the years.

Based on the list of panels for this year’s conference we’re looking forward to several days of informative sessions devoted to accessibility, usability, and web-standards. We’re particularly excited about the prospect of so many of the leading figures in the emerging web standards community being in one place at the same time.

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Netscape 4: Government Standard or Urban Legend?

I can’t believe that it’s 2004 and we’re still hearing anecdotal stories about how certain government agencies have standardized on Netscape 4 and require all agency related web development to support this archaic browser. This, of course, creates a trickle down effect where developers believe they must support Netscape 4 because so many government agencies still use this browser. The result is that developers are afraid to design with web standards because of Netscape 4’s notoriously poor support for CSS.

I have to say that I’m skeptical about these claims. Are these agencies completely unaware of Mozilla and the fact that it’s FREE? How do they rationalize standardizing on seven year old technology when the best web browser on the planet is available at no cost?

If possible, I’d like to debunk this myth once and for all so we can all move forward with accessible, standards-based design. If anyone has hard evidence of government agencies that still use Netscape 4, please post a brief comment here. I’d like to get to the bottom of this once and for all.