Alt Tags

by

Five Steps To A Better Website In The New Year

The New Year is the perfect time to bring a fresh perspective to your website. Whether you’re planning a major site redesign in the coming year, or you’ve just finished one in the old year, there are a number of things you can do to improve the quality of your site.

Give Your Content Some Attention

If you’re using a content management system (CMS) there’s always the temptation to assume that your content is fine. It’s being “managed” right? So what could possibly go wrong?

Plenty.

Use the New Year as an opportunity to review the quality of your content. While most CMS systems include some form of workflow, you might be surprised by some of the things that slip onto your website. Be on the lookout for content that is outdated, inaccurate, irrelevant, or just plain incoherent.
[Read more…]

by

The Simpsons For The Visually Impaired

When explaining web accessibility to the uninitiated I find that it sometimes helps to apply the concept to other mediums. Here’s an example I hadn’t thought of before. Imagine trying to watch The Simpsons without actually watching The Simpsons. Each episode has a million little sight gags and visual clues that fly by so quickly that you practically need a TiVo to keep up.

So how do visually impaired people watch The Simpsons? With the Descriptive Video Service (DVS) of course. DVS is an audio track that explains the action taking place in a television program. With The Simpsons that includes reading all of the oddball signs that fly by during the course of an episode (not to mention Bart’s scribbling on the chalk board at the start of each episode).

WFMU’s station manager Ken has an interesting post about his accidental discovery of the DVS signal while battling with his broken VCR. Like many people, he hadn’t really given any thought to how visually impaired users might watch and enjoy programs like The Simpsons. At first he assumed The Simpsons were doing a parody of Arrested Development.

Ken also makes some interesting observations regarding censorship and editorializing on the DVS track, but that’s probably a topic for another post on another blog.

At any rate, if you’re interested in hearing what the DVS track for The Simpsons sounds like, Ken has posted an entire episode available for download.

by

The Content Inventory: Roadmap to a Successful CMS Implementation

The sad truth about many CMS implementations is that not nearly enough time is spent working with content. All too often, organizations get wrapped up in issues related to technology and design, forgetting what the system is supposed to be managing.

It’s easy to avoid focusing on content when you have no idea what it is or where it is. CMS vendors focus on the user-friendly aspects of their software; rarely do they address the complexities of content migration. Since the system you’re implementing is supposed to make content management a breeze, there’s a temptation to avoid thinking about content until the very last minute. This flawed assumption has doomed all too many CMS projects.

Our first article defined content in all of its many forms. This article focuses on the nuts and bolts of identifying content and coralling it in such a way that you have what you need when it comes time to populate your CMS. The key to achieving this goal is a process called the Content Inventory.

[Read more…]

by

Wild Information: Content in Its Native Environment

Sometimes it feels like the most neglected aspect of implementing a content management system is . . . the content. Content development and migration pose a variety of challenges, and we’ve’ve written a series of articles discussing these issues. This critical look at preparing content for the web will help you create a plan for implementing a CMS on time and on budget.

This first article defines content types that need to be accommodated by your CMS and analyzes common problems we’ve faced when it comes to corraling content. The second article in the series unfolds the roadmap to a successful CMS implementation: the Content Inventory. Our final pieces looks at content migration and the triage process often needed to migrate content in a timely manner.

[Read more…]

by

Accessible Folksonomies

I’ve been working with web technology for over a decade now and I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an idea gain mindshare as rapidly as the Folksonomy has. It seems like everywhere I turn someone is discussing this new categorization system.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, a folksonomy is basically a taxonomy created by the people and for the people. A community of users collaborates by “tagging” various types of content with user created keywords. This concept is flourishing on a handful of community driven sites that all seem to have a certain addictive quality. I think the best way to fully grasp how folksonomies work is to dive into one of the sites that makes use of the concept. Flickr, 43things, and del.icio.us are good places to start. Given the success of these early experiments in group tagging I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing folksonomies implemented on all sorts of sites in the very near future.

Lately I’ve been thinking about one particular artifact of the folksonomy phenomenon — the folksonomy menu that serves as a sort of buzz index providing users with a quick visualization of the most popular tags (technically I think it’s called a weighted list). Popular tags are displayed in a larger font and it’s relatively easy to identify hot topics at a glance. This visual representation of the popularity of any given tag is undeniably cool. However, once the coolness factor wears off it becomes fairly obvious that these menus are also not very accessible.

I realize these sites are currently trail-blazers and they deserve to be recognized as such. I have no intention of detracting from the innovative work that’s being done. My concern is that once folksonomies enter the mainstream, the next wave of sites implementing them will likely begin a wholesale copying of the work that’s being done by these innovators — markup and all.
[Read more…]