RE: Visionary design awards and web trends

Hi all,
 
I'm new to this list and very happy to finally be a participant. I also very much enjoyed meeting some of you and taking part in the workshops last week in Cannes.
 
Thank you for forwarding this Liam and congratulations to you and Cummunis for your work on the GIS site for the UK Environment Agency. That must have been a tough one to work on. I was happy to see that two sites that we have worked on also got an award,  Connexions Direct - www.connexions-direct.com and  Ocado - www.ocado.com. Great to know they were using the AIS accessibility toolbar. So good news all round.
 
I was just wondering, would you be able to pass on or point me in the direction of the Jaws and Flash feedback?
 
Many thanks, Henny
 
---

Henny Swan

Senior Web Accessibility Consultant

RNIB Web Access Consultancy

T: 020 7391 2044

M: 07968 741503

E: Henny.Swan@rnib.org.uk

A: 105 Judd Street, London, WC1H 9NE

Visit the Web Access Centre www.rnib.org.uk/webaccesscentre for design and management resources for accessible websites.

 

________________________________

From: w3c-wai-eo-request@w3.org on behalf of Liam McGee
Sent: Fri 03/03/2006 14:38
To: w3c-wai-eo@w3.org
Subject: Visionary design awards and web trends




Dear all, hope the face-to-face meeting went well. Am happy to report
that I attended the UK Visionary Design Awards last night. Communis won
the special award for innovation for our attempt at a fully accessible
(and largely multilingual) GIS site for the UK Environment Agency :-)

The Visionary Design Awards are given out to eight websites each year by
the National Library for the Blind, awarded for "outstanding efforts in
ensuring their content is accessible to visually impaired people". I
think that the awards are particularly valuable to the accessible web
design community because they are judged by users with vision
impairments, and held both to high technical standards and judged on
their aesthetic merits to blind and vision-impaired users.

http://www.nlb-online.org/topics.php?op=viewtopic&topic=0
http://www.visionary-design.org/

Worth promoting on the News page of the WAI site?

I was particularly impressed with the thoughtful feedback on, for
example, JAWS use with Flash, and the attention given to colour and
brightness contrast. They were testing each site against the WCAG
algorithms, using the links from the AIS accessibility toolbar.

Regarding our "trends in the industry" agenda item, I'd to bring to your
attention one keynote speech at the awards that particularly caught my
notice, where the speaker spoke of the cyberneticist theory that
programmers write their body into their code. She argued that this was
largely what had happened in the years of the web to date, when young
as-yet-not-disabled coders wrote themselves into their work, but didn't
write in anyone else, and that accessible developers have to write
themselves an extended body. Interesting idea, if a little high-falutin
for this designer. The speaker also noted her experience that designers
are now coming to appreciate the beauty of semantics as an aesthetic
discipline, thanks to e.g. alistapart.org and the latest buzz phrase
'bulletproof design'. This can only be a good thing.

Regards

Liam

--
Liam McGee, Managing Director, Communis Ltd
www.communis.co.uk      +44 (0)1373 836 476




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Received on Sunday, 5 March 2006 04:32:38 UTC