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Industry news

20 November 2006

News this week:

Advisory Committee faces major hurdles with Section 508 revision

The committee tasked with redrafting Section 508 for July 2007 are running into some difficulties. They are plagued by "interoperability problems, language issues and an inability to adapt to emerging technologies".
http://www.fcw.com/

Web friendly charities to be rewarded for their annual reports

African Children’s Education Trust, Chesterfield Philharmonic Choir, and Islamic Relief are among 14 charities to be celebrated for their transparency at the Charities’ Online Accounts Awards 2006.
http://www.cafonline.org/

WCAG 2 FAQ

WAI gathered a few frequently asked questions (FAQ) about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and provided answers in a WCAG 2 FAQ
http://www.w3.org/

World usability day this week

The 14th of November was this year's World usability day, and events were put on around the globe..
http://www.worldusabilityday.org./

One of the events:

User Experience Alliance celebrate World Usability Day

On 14th November 2006, the User Experience Alliance and its partners will mark World Usability Day by conducting the world’s first 36 hour global expert review on a number of leading websites and products. The results of the study will be published in the following weeks. To register your interest in receiving the results please email gemma.wisdom@serco.com.
http://www.e-consultancy.com/

Articles which may be of interest:

Accessibility Return On Investment

"..how do you cost-justify building accessibility into internal systems. No one seems to have a case study that proves the benefits. Legal and General has produced one for external web sites and some of the lessons learnt from that are relevant to internal systems."
http://www.it-director.com/

CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions

A wide range of solutions for making forms interesting, unusual and exciting. It's worth reading - especially for the designers among us, who might be looking at a different way to convey information. Look at what *can* be done. Sadly the accessibility of the article itself isn't so great, 'screenshot' being the not-particularly descriptive alt-text for all of the examples.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

CSS: Browser testing order

Malarkey's take on which browsers take what precedence in website development. He says,
"I would prefer that clients save money for more valuable things than achieving pixel perfection".
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/

Caroline's Corner: Eyetracking of Forms: should we accept the Conclusions?

From Usability News: "For ages, I've longed to do some eyetracking experiments on how users look at forms. And recently, I've been delighted to see the next best thing: excellent work by Matteo Penzo and his team. "
http://www.usabilitynews.com/

A List Apart - issue 227 is out

This month they have an article about dealing with difficult clients, and a instructional on super-blendy-backgrounds.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/

Tools:

TechDis toolbar

The TechDis toolbar allows a user to change the colour scheme used within a website on the fly, as well as changing the font style used and zooming in (which enlarges graphics as well as text). Aimed at end users.
http://www.techdis.ac.uk/

And something for Friday afternoon:

The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0

A list of (you guessed it) 10 things that are not particularly on this side of true about Web 2.0. Happily geeky, and an amusing read.
http://sfgate.com/

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