Archive for 2007

Success with the law on accessible websites

A federal district court judge in California has issued two landmark decisions in a nationwide class action against the Target Corporation ruling that they must make their website accessible to the blind.
Read more about the case at Max Design.

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A different and free way to make a website - use a wiki

If you are looking for a simple and quick way to make a website for your organisation, there are many tools and choices available that are not only cheap or free, but also easy to use for the end user with no complicated need for in depth technical knowledge and ability. In this article, we’ll be looking at Wiki’s and how they could be used as a tool for your website. Their are many possibilities available when using a wiki. It could be used to create your website, support training and learning, creating a campaign or for sharing news, projects and developments within your own organisation.

Remember though when assessing which tool to use to create your website, there are a wide ranges of choices and options available. Wiki’s are just one of many tools that can help. Simple blogging software such as Wordpress for example, can also easily enable effective participation and for simple collaborative website projects.

Creating a website for your organisation using a wiki

A few weeks ago, Michele Martin of the Bamboo Project Blog ran a series of articles showing step by step how a non-profit organisation can use a wiki to build and produce a website. Michele used Wetpaint as her wiki tool.

Michele explained in her blog about why wiki’s can be a good way to produce a simple website for organisations.

“A couple of reasons why I think a wiki can be a good choice for building your site:

• Easy to set up and update - Wikis are really easy to use and require minimal technological expertise. Because of their ease of use, this also makes them easy to update because you don’t have to rely on your “web guy” to do the updates for you.
• Built-in Two-Way Communication - As you’ll see, wiki’s have built-in comment features, which means that you can get immediate and ongoing feedback from site visitors, something that many web citizens are increasingly expecting from any site they visit.”

Obviously, a wiki isn’t going to give you a professional custom designed website, but for many small to medium non-profit organisations, a wiki can be suitable for your needs.

They are free, very easy to use and update, with a wide range of different wiki’s available to choose from such as Wikispaces and Wetpaint. Many offer additional features such as customisation of the colours and layout. Some also offer the option of having your own domain name pointing to the wiki rather than a longer website address, and also you can also pay a very small fee to have any advertising removed from your pages.

How and why I used a wiki

I recently ran a training workshop with voluntary and community organisations to help with planning their website. I decided against using lots of handouts and traditional slide presentations, instead I would create a wiki to support the learning for the day. It was very easy to do and took very little time compared to creating seperate presentations and handout sheets on all the topics were were going to cover in our day.

The great part of using a wiki to support delivery of training is that the materials are available after the event for the participants to be able to refer back to rather than them having to look for their scribbled notes from the day. I also added photo’s from the day too. I found it was highly successful as a supporting tool. As we learned about each subject area, all the links to relevant websites were there immediately for them. I live resource compared to a static one. I’ll be using wiki’s a lot more in the future to share learning with others.

As a trainer using the wiki as a learning tool, I learn’t about using my wiki more effectively too with the way I displayed the content. I observed how users of the wiki were using the pages and how they found information. I had put too much text on most pages. At some point soon, I aim to break down the pages in to smaller chunks to enable better usability for participants in sessions, they had to do a lot of scrolling to find information and links!

Do you want an easy and quick way to learn more on how a wiki can help you to communicate or create a website?

Commoncraft have just released another of their fun and lively quick video’s on Wetpaint Wiki’s in Plain English, which has been commissioned by Wetpaint, a company that have created an easy to use wiki. Instead of showing the technical parts of what a wiki is, it delivers how you could use wiki to share your subject, and how you can easily create a connected community.

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In the pink!

Regular readers will have noted a drastic colour change today on my blog.
It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. From politicians, to the public, to the press, it is a time when focus on breast cancer is at its very highest across the world.

Pink is the colour during Breast Cancer Awareness Month hence the new look to my blog during October. You can find out more by searching on the internet for breast cancer awareness charities and nonprofits to learn how you can help to raise funds, spread the word and take part.

Bloggers and website designers like myself are joining in with awareness raising across the globe by turning their sites pink for the month. You can find out more at Pink For October.

I’d love to hear from you if you go pink - Please do leave a comment with your weblink.
Michele Martin at the Bamboo Project Blog has joined me in being pink for the cause too!

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Let your readers be in control: Text resizing

Text resize buttons on a single website or enable your readers to take control and learn how to make all their internet viewing a better experience? Which would you prefer?

Later in this article, I’ll provide you with a helpful list of links to resources which can help you to understand more about accessibility.

As well as designing for the web, and supporting groups to make informed choices for their website ideas, I also help with accessibility audits too. Some people get ‘told and sold’ that their website is accessible because of a bit of code that shows buttons on their site to enable their viewers to resize their text on that site. In some cases, a few of these sites are highly in accessible in many other areas. I’m not totally against resize buttons, and have implemented it myself within reason on some sites where relevant and complimentary to compliant, accessible design. I also include helpful guides on how to resize text easily within your browser. I do feel though, that text resize buttons, don’t serve any real value and shouldn’t be needed. I also ensure that even without these controls, the site aims to be accessible from the users end, as best as possible, no matter what device, browser or platform they are using to access the information they are seeking.

Another common barrier to making a websites more usable for all can be the way that some accessibility statements on sites are written. They are conveyed in a manner which seem best read by other website developers, rather than for the understandable benefit to the end user who just wants to be able to access their site of choice without having to learn and understand a myriad of jargon about the way the site was designed.

One example of text resizing buttons acting in a complementing manner is on the Webcredible website. Not only do they have buttons, but also the site design is carefully constructed for maximum usability and accessibility, that’s what Webcredible do. Also they have a simple piece on their ‘about this site’ page which enables users to take control and learn how they can change their text viewing size for themselves. But sadly not all sites are that well designed.

One person that I know well, who has difficulties with many sites due to the font size, often finds that text resize buttons cause more of a barrier than a help. Especially when they are viewing sites with outgoing links. What use is making one site with text resizing facilities when that site then leads them to another website with a totally different ability to render text at an appropriate size?

So, shouldn’t we all be trying to help users to have a better experience by helping them to take control?
By improving your readers knowledge and understanding with help on suitable browsers (including Opera and Firefox) and showing them how to make their viewing easier, the internet can slowly but surely become a more inclusive place for all.

At Accessify, a website of tools and resources to help with accessibility for websites, Ian Lloyd has posted an article “Teach a Man to Fish (or How to Resize Text)”. It includes a visual guide video on text resizing. The video shows how you can take control by showing how easy this can be achieved in a variety of browsers. For those that cannot see the video there is a text transcript available too. The aim of the video and transcription is that it helps to provide a visual and audio way to complement “accessibility / how to use this site” statements on websites.

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Google Presentations

Google adds presentation tools to Google Docs. A great feature is that users can connect through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they’re watching. Could be a great tool for sharing learning.

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CommonCraft’s latest - Google Docs in Plain English

I’ve had several requests this week from local organisations wanting to understand more and use Google Docs to share documents (perfect for partnership and collaborative working!). CommonCraft have come up with a timely release to their ‘plain english’ series of quick and easy to understand videos to help people to learn and understand easily how to get up and running with technologies such as using RSS, Social Bookmarking and Wiki’s. I highly recommend them.

If you are a non-profit organisation, wanting to save time with tracking everyones changes when you email out a document out to a group for comment or sharing, you can learn here how to do it better and why Google Docs can help.

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Are we nearly there yet? Charities versus Technology

Several interesting articles appeared this week out there on the internet, all looking at different ways that non-profit organisations can harness or find difficulties with the power of technology and the internet to help communicate their cause. The first part of this article focusses more on social media and later, there’s some links to useful tools to help, and show that it’s not all just about web 2.0.

In Is the Web still a Windfall for Non-profits?, Beth Kanter highlighted Read/WriteWeb’s featured week of articles for non-profits on the web with their article asking about how charities and clubs and other organisations are using the web. Google Maps, Flickr, Delicious bookmark sharing all appear in the many tools available that many organisations use to help share and connect with others.
If you are from an organisation, I’d also love to hear how you use web orientated tools that help benefit your work.

Over on Beth’s Blog again, Beth reported about the Overbrook Foundation (a grant giving organisation in America) which released a report on Web 2.0 and nonprofit adoption “Web 2.0 Assessment of The Overbrook Foundation’s Human Rights Grantees”. The full report and information on how they surveyed their grantees can be downloaded from their website. It makes for realistic reading of where groups are with technology.

I found this really refreshing that a grant funder was looking into the impact of organisations using the internet and finding ways to use web 2.0 and social media to interact with their supporters. I’d like to see more funders over here in the UK exploring this with their grantees.
It makes for a useful read and helps us all to understand some of the difficulties that small groups especially are facing with the fast changing pace of the technology and using the internet.

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Nominations for IT Volunteer Awards open

iT4 Communities are welcoming nominations for the 2007 IT Volunteer Awards, which aim to recognise and celebrate the best and most innovative examples of IT volunteering. Find out more on their site at www.IT4Communities.org.uk.

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Modx makes it to finals - vote for it to win!

My favourite open source CMS has been nominated to be a finalist as the Most Promising CMS in the 2007 PacketPub Awards. Click on the image to find out more and vote for it to win!

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Suffering from RSS overload?

After returning from my recent holiday I discovered that I had RSS overload. Not a medical condition, but it did make me panic for a few moments, with the reality that whilst I had removed myself from technology and everyday life for a short time to enjoy the delights camping in the South of France, the rest of the world blogged merrily away.

I feel that I manage my reading fairly well, and use my Netvibes RSS reader which helps me to keep up to date with around 100 or so blogs and feeds. I read about a wide range of subjects that relate to what I am interested in including: nonprofit technology, social media, web standards, accessibility and usability, design for print, design for the web, typography and so on…Netvibes helps me keep in control. I can separate my thematic areas that I like to read easily, and also place my favourites where I want to see them first.
I only pulled all my feeds into one place back in June, which I must say has made a big difference to my ability to keep up with all the sites I like to regularly visit.

But I wasn’t prepared for the overloaded feeling when I returned. I managed to use my reader to quickly establish what I wanted to read and comment on and also to be brave and quickly discard what wasn’t relevant or to have the luxury of spare time to read at this point.

It took me several days to get on top of it all. I was just beginning to get up to date, and in my feed reader I spotted a really helpful posting about keeping on top of your RSS feeds.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has recently created a great article on his blog which I highly recommend to anyone suffering RSS overload, or even if you fear you may get overload with 10 ways to make remembering to read your feeds easier. He shares how he manages potential information overload and how he keeps up to date and in control with over 3000 feeds. (yes, I did type that correctly!). Check it out!

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