[Accessibleweb] Building an accessible design learning community

[Richard B. Ells]

Maybe a more fun way to do this would be to ask for volunteers to nominate their sites for Acc Hack review. 
We would then post the URL of the site, perhaps with an explanation of the design approach for the site from the site webmaster, on a blog and then invite various people with accessibility design viewpoints to comment on the posting. 

We have a blog at

  AccessWebU.blogspot.com

that is not getting much use.

Or we could set something else up somewhere. Too bad the SIG site wiki is so complicated to post comments on. 

   -----------------------------------
     Rick Ells
     Senior Webmaster
     UW Technology
     206.543.2875
     rells at u.washington.edu
     http://staff.washington.edu/rells



-----Original Message-----
From: Wendy Chisholm [mailto:chiswa at u.washington.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 1:27 PM
To: Richard B. Ells
Cc: 'accessibleweb at u.washington.edu'
Subject: Re: [Accessibleweb] Building an accessible design learning community


On Dec 2, 2008, at 4:10 PM, Richard B. Ells wrote:


> I like the idea. Could they be called "Acc-Hack Sessions"?


Sure.


> How would we do this? A lot of sites have hundreds of pages.

>

> Would we just focus on the typical page, or maybe the templates for  

> the different kinds of pages on a site?


We could leave it up to the person who brings a site or application  
for review.  In my experience, people usually arrive with good  
questions about the issues they are trying to tackle.

The first step might be to ask people what they want help with then  
figure out a time for a group of us to get together and work on a  
solution.


> I keep encountering very nice UW sites well ahead of the curve.

> Maybe we could have a "Golden Spotlight" or "Leader Award" with  

> critiques by accessible web gurus on what they like about it.


Collecting a list of good examples that people could look at and  
learn from is really effective. Especially with comments from people  
about what makes it accessible. I hear a lot of people asking for  
something like this.

This reminds me that we were talking about running an AIR-like  
competition (for those who want to know more about AIR: http:// 
www.knowbility.org/air-austin/).

I dropped the ball on that!  While I think AIR is a fun idea, I like  
the idea of answering people's specific questions and encouraging  
everyone to move forward.  Plus, I think it will take less resources  
and potentially have a greater effect.

One outcome of the "acc hack sessions" should be documentation about  
what was fixed and why--we would end up with a series of case studies.


> For example, take a look at http://iths.org/

>

> Bertine Easterling is working on it.


You're right, for the most part this looks like a great site.  It's a  
clean design.  There's good use of CSS and most of the HTML is  
semantic.  I have a few suggestions, if they are interested in  
hearing them.

--wendy

>