STC WDC-MB Blog » Accessibility & Usability

UPA DC – UserFocus 2011 Early Bird Registration Open Now

Cyn — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 03:31:40 +0000

UserFocus, the area’s premier conference for and by local usability professionals, will be held Friday, September 16 at the Renaissance Washington, DC Hotel. The conference, hosted each year by the DC Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association, is a great place to learn about new trends in usability, share experiences with other local practitioners, and hone the skills in your usability tool kit.

Peter Morville provides the opening keynote on "Ubiquitous Information Architecture: Strategies for Cross-Channel User Experience Design". Sessions for the rest of the day will run on two tracks with presentations of value to seasoned practitioners as well as those new to the field. Topics range from "Making Millions through State-of-the-art Mobile and Desktop eCommerce Usability" to "Running Successful Remote, Moderated, International Usability Studies".

$125 for UPA-DC Members
$150 for Nonmembers

The last UserFocus sold out completely.

Find out more at http://www.userfocus.org or e-mail us at gro.cdapunull@ecnerefnoc.

Handout Available for Designing Accessible Documents for Everyone

Cyn — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:29:38 +0000

Carolyn Kelley Klinger’s handout for the "Designing Accessible Documents for Everyone" workshop held on 23 January 2010 is now available. This is an accessible PDF file.

Making Word or FrameMaker Files 508 Compliant for PDFs

Accessibility Camp DC

Carolyn Kelley Klinger — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:34:28 +0000

The STC Washington, DC Chapter is proud to be one of the sponsors of Accessibility Camp DC. This event will be run like a typical BarCamp, also called an un-conference, in which attendees share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event. It is not a typical seminar on accessibility. In fact, attendees will likely already know something about accessibility that they would like to share with others. The attendees, not the event organizers, determine the agenda for the day. Suggestions for talks that day include:

508 Compliance
Practical Ways to Make Your Website Accessible
Accessible PDFs
Making Flash Accessible
what is WAI-ARIA – (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications)
Accessible Video and Transcription
Panel Discussion on “Issues Effecting Individuals with Disabilities on the Web”
Captioning

Registration for Accessibility Camp DC is still open, though only a few spots are available. Go to http://accessibilitycampdc.eventbrite.com/ to register.

Accessibility Camp DC is a free event held at the Martin Luther King Library in Washington, DC from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Check-in will begin at 9:30 AM once library opens.

The Martin Luther King (MLK) Library is located at:

901 G St NW, Room 215
Washington, DC 20001-4531

Getting to the 2008 Conference in Philly

Cyn — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:19:22 +0000

The AccessAbility SIG has published information about Getting around at the 2008 conference in Philly. It has illustrated directions from the Market East Platform to the PA Convention Center or the Philadelphia Marriott.

For those who are arriving by train at the Amtrak station, there is a note about how to transfer from the Amtrak station to the Market East station. Specifically, Amtrak trains arrive at the 30th Street Station, across town. From there, you have to go outside and down to the Market Street subway, or use the SEPTA (suburban) trains “upstairs” (actually up a ramp) to get to Market
East (at 11th Street).

Whitney Quesenbery added that “These spaces aren’t that complicated, but they are cavernous, with passageways that are a city block long. If you are arriving on Sunday, it might be easier to take a cab. But be warned that on a weekday, you are crossing right through the heart of
center city – so traffic is not fast.”

In addition, Marc Gravez, of the Philadelphia chapter says that finding the elevators is tricky unless you know where they are.

Book Review: “Access by Design”

Cyn — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 05:05:36 +0000

STC member, Sarah Horton, wrote about accessibility and the Web in her book “Access by Design”. There is an excellent book review on the SAP Design Guild site at
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/community/book_people/review_acc_design.asp.

The review is a thorough discussion of the book and the whole reason for the book. It might even inspire you when you think about writing a book review.

If this book catches your fancy, why not shop for it through the WDC chapter’s aStore at http://astore.amazon.com/stcwashindcch-20 in the Books section and earn a little bit for the chapter’s scholarship fund? Browse the list of books we recommend at http://www.stcwdc.org/refbooks-1_answer.shtml.

Tutorial: Building Accessible Static Navigation with CSS

Cyn — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 03:40:13 +0000

STC member, Frank M. Palinkas, has developed a new Fast Track tutorial, which is free to the technical writing, user assistance, accessibility and web design communities. The tutorial was presented at the 2008 WritersUA Annual Conference in March at Portland, Oregon. This tutorial demonstrates how to create the accessible, static Navigation section on the left side of each web page in the tutorial using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Source Code Editors. The objective is to build
* a valid, semantic, navigation Structure layer according to current web standards;
* a valid navigation Presentation layer to accompany the structure layer;
* full accessibility for all users in the structure and presentation layers;
* static navigation without employing the Behavior (unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript) layer (i.e., expand/contract).

Online Tutorial: View tutorial
Download:
static_zip – Download the zipped project folder.
staticCODE_zip – Download the zipped code file.

Frank authors all markup, presentation, behavior code and content using Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 Team System IDE source code editors for XHTML, CSS, and Unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript. The CSS is the CSS 2.1 Liquid Box Model for layout/presentation. Frank built fully accessible static navigation for mouse and keyboard into every web page. Each Web page illustrates the complete separation of Structure/Content (XHTML), Presentation (CSS), and Behavior (Unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript), the semantic nature of the content/markup relationship, and the application of accessibility attributes and values according to the U.S. Govt. Section 508 Rules of the ADA and the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 – Level Double A.

Frank is an American, working in South Africa as a Senior Technical Communicator/Web Standards and Accessibility Designer, and holds the following concurrent Microsoft Certifications: MCP, MCT, MCSE and MCDBA. He also holds the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in the Windows Help product area. His technical writing incorporates web standards, accessibility, and semantics. He uses Helpware FAR HTML for the creation of MSHelp1 and MSHelp2 documentation packages and executables.

More of Frank’s Fast Track tutorials are available on his Web site at http://frank.helpware.net and on the Dev Opera site at http://dev.opera.com/author/947856.