oz: the blog of glenda sims ( the goodwitch)
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
What are you doing May 11-12? I hope you are attending Access U in Austin, Texas! What is Access U? A two-day accessibility conference for webmasters to teach you both the how and the why of creating web sites that meet federal, state, and industry mandates for accessibility.
Attend AccessU for:
What is it about SXSW Interactive? It is just a conference after all. But honestly, it is unlike any other conference I attend. It is simultaneously visionary and insane, brilliant and ridiculous, inspiring and intoxicating. And it dawned on me that whoever named this conference nailed it. The whole point is to interact with each other. To share your wildest dreams, ask preposterous questions, make and renew scintillating friendships.
I love to share my passion for accessibility. There is something incredibly satisifying about kicking down barriers to information. I’m inspired by the goals of the W3C, “Web for everyone. Web on everything.”
With this in mind, I wanted to share my own practical accessibility practice. When asked to test a site for accessibility, these are the steps that Glenda the Goodwitch takes:
Some of the most creative minds in the world will be in Austin for SXSW Interactive. I jokingly refer to this event as spring break for geeks. Time to open our minds wide to new ideas and connect in person rather than just virtually. This event is really about the people and the ideas sketched out on cocktail napkins. Sure, the sessions are fantastic…but this isn’t the time to just sit back and absorb the wisdom of the greats. Last year, some of my richest conversations were after midnight in a bar, over a quiet late night coffee and sitting in the hallway between sessions.
To help get you in that playful, creative mind space…I’d like to suggest some authentically austin adventures to take with your fellow geeks.
When it comes to usability and information architecture, there is just no replacement for a good search engine on your site. Try as you might to design an intuitive navigation scheme, let’s face it…one size never fits all. But no need to fear…your search engine can add an alternative way for folks to find what they so desparately seek.
In my world (UT Austin), I’ve got two obvious choices for search engines, Google Free University Search and htdig. While Google is sweet, I can’t customize the results page, so google doesn’t meet my needs. So, I turn to my good ole friend, htdig. But unlike other sites where I’ve implemented htdig, the site I’m working with now stretches across two different servers and is virtually hosted as well. Creating the results page header and footer proved to be a challenge because (horrors), htdig wouldn’t let me use server side includes (ssi) . Ouch!
I toyed with the idea of writing the results page in PHP but was convinced that if I thought creatively enough, I could trick htdig into letting me use ssi. And after a few bumps and bruises I won the battle. So, in case you’ve got a yearnin’ for ssi in your htdig results page, here is what I learned yesterday.