Greetings

Greetings, all...

Although I've just joined the group, I've been active in accessibility
issues for 4-5 years and have been active in the WAI IG group for almost as
long.

I've been building accessible web sites through my company (Munat, Inc. of
Seattle, formerly Code Red of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico) since 1.0 was in
draft. Along the way, I've learned a lot about making sites accessible. I'm
certain I have a lot more to learn.

Much of what I've learned I learned through reading the work of or through
correspondence with several of the members of this committee. Thanks. To
those of you with whom I'm unacquainted, greetings. I look forward to
working with all of you.

A little more background:

I'm currently building a site for a metropolitan electric company in
California. I've been slowly working toward AAA compliance (yes, I know...
that's old school). If anyone is interested, I'll be happy to provide a URL
off-list (political issues are keeping the site from going on-line at the
moment, so I can't publish the URL publicly). This site is a good example of
my efforts at accessibility and interoperability/standards compliance.

Two other projects I'm *slowly* working on are a
philosophical/political/social issues site called disorthodoxy.org and a
semantic web developers site called SemWebDev.org. The SWD site will begin
with a tutorial for building sites with attention to
content-structure-presentation separation using XHTML 1.1 and CSS2. This
will be a site for beginners and will take them to advanced skill levels.
Later I'll expand into XML, RDF, XSL, XSLT, and some of the other pieces of
the semantic web (N3? DAML+OIL? Topic maps?).

I should mention that the SemWebDev.org site will teach all subjects with
lavish attention to accessibility issues. Furthermore, the lessons will
*presume* that accessibility is critical to web site development. Get 'em
while they're young, I say.

I'm also (very slowly) working on a project to develop an open source
content management system that automatically creates standards-compliant,
accessible semantic web documents/services with XML, RDF, etc. included. The
goal is to have a wizard-driven interface so that the user doesn't need to
know any code. Will use Java and EJBs.

Somewhere in there I manage to be a student in Linguistics/Computer Science
at the University of Washington. No, I generally don't sleep.

I'll review the current situation and try to become useful as soon as
possible, hopefully NLT the next telecon.

Sincerely,
Charles F. Munat
Munat, Inc.
Seattle, Washington

(To differentiate me from Mr. McCathieNeville, you may call me Chas.)

Received on Thursday, 9 August 2001 22:40:07 UTC