Organizations sometimes ask me about what they should be doing to help make their sites more accessible to people with disabilities. Actually, that's not completely true. What they usually ask me is "should our site be 'ADA-compliant?'" or "do we need to meet 'Section 508?'"

Although it makes me feel like a consultant, I'm always forced to answer. "it depends." What I usually respond is that unless they are a federal agency or are involved in procurement for the federal government, there is no clear legal obligation right now.

A more important consideration is your obligation to your users. What obligations do you have to your users to create an experience that is universally useful -- irrespective of the user's abilities, technologies, or other personal attributes? When creating or improving your site, you should use standards-compliant code and techniques, certainly. You should test your site with a variety of technologies and situations, definitely. But most important is to consider accessibility within the context of all of your users' needs.

In other words, for most organizations, you need not try to achieve some "official" accessibility stamp of approval. Attempting to achieve a label of "accessibility compliant" isn't much more useful than attempting to achieve a label of "usability compliant." Instead, you should take steps to regularly and gradually inch your site toward making it more universally accessible -- not just during a big redesign project, but everytime you add new content or a new feature.

For instance, if you have a large number of international users, they will appreciate when you add alternative texts to all of your relevant images. For many of them may be browsing over slow connections with their images disabled. Users who are blind will appreciate it too. If you have large numbers of users where English is a second language, they will appreciate it when you caption your video clips. Users who are deaf will appreciate it too.

I'm speaking about these web accessibility issues next week at the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference here in Washington. It's a great panel titled "With Access for All." The other panelists are Beth Finke of Easter Seals and Sharron Rush of Knowbility. Beth, who happens to be blind, will demonstrate how well her speech reading software reads -- or doesn't read -- the web when visiting various sites. Sharron is going to discuss accessible techniques for newer development technologies such as AJAX.

I'm going to talk about ways that web managers can think and rationally advocate accessibility-related best practices within their organizations without being branded a budget-buster or noodge. It's going to be a terrific session. If you are attending the conference, I hope to see you there!

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07NTC

Web Accessibility

Web Usability

To make connections between these cliques (Danyel and Harald might call them "clusters"), you need an amicable host to make introductions. For instance if Bill has five friends at the party but doesn't know Rebecca, and Rebecca has five friends at the party but doesn't know Bill, Jan must introduce Bill to Rebecca. Suddenly, Jan has connected the clusters and expanded the social network -- the red lines in the diagram at left. In other words, if you want your social network to grow, you need to have active "hosts" to make the connections. There's more of Fred's thoughts on his blog.

I'm excited to announce that we've assembled an excellent panel for our Web Executive Seminar at the National Press Club on April 24. The session is titled: "Blogging and Policy Organizations: Influential Channel for Social Change."

The theme of our event will be the methods in how organizations blogs, even when read by a small audience, can quickly inject ideas and messages into a larger influential audience. As bloggers' influence has ascended, mainstream media's influence has been on the wane. We'll discuss how blogs might fill the role in providing persuasive ideas to policy-makers, activists, and other key audiences.

Our presenters will be:

• Kevin Carey, blogger for Education Sector's The Quick and the Ed.


• Michael Edson, technology chief and director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Eye Level blog.


• Christine Gorman, veteran journalist and former blogger for Time's Global Health Update (now writes the blog Health Media Watch).


• Ginny Stevens, ONE Campaign's ONE Blog.
  

I will be providing a little background on each presenter and a taste of their presentation over then next few weeks. Each of them has an interesting story to tell about how their organization got into blogging, and how it has opened up new opportunities to communicate and persuade.

Until then, you can read the longer description of the event. I hope you'll consider joining our session!

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Blogging
Web Executive Seminar
Forum One

I come to Forum One from Beaconfire Consulting, where I was a founding member five years ago. At Beaconfire, and in prior pursuits over the past decade, I've led a wide variety of nonprofit technology projects mostly involving site redesigns including Content Management System selections and implementations. But I've also done site web site audits, accessibility evaluations, solution selections, audience analysis projects, opportunity assessments, and online marketing.

Well, that's more than enough about me. Members of my burgeoning fan club can just read my bio.

For those of you in and around Washington, DC, I'm managing Forum One's 2007 series of Web Executive Seminars at the National Press Club. Our first seminar was last month when about 75 people showed up for an engaging session on Mission-Driven User Experience. (Check out the event's page for photos, audio, and presentations from this session.)

Our next seminar is on Blogging and Policy Organizations, and it is scheduled for April 24. We're lining up a really interesting panel of presenters. I'll be sharing much more about it soon.