Right now, there are three major developments progressing in web industry news right now. The first, issues of privacy and censorship, has received an incredible amount of press. I’m not going to spend a lot of time discussing this, because I’ve already discussed these issues extensively in the other blog I write for, at InterDigital Strategies.

The second is the issue of net
neutrality. Net neutrality is, fundamentally, the principle that the internet will not leverage control over the content that passes through the system. I’m going to be examining this issue, since open access to the networks which constitue the world wide web is certainly pertinent to overall issues of web accessibility.

The most recent big issue to come up is the recent accessibility lawsuit against Target Corporation, which has a number of interesting facets. I’ll be following this lawsuit closely, since it may have a significant long term impact on the importance of accessible web design for private industry within the United States.

I’ve been giving some thought lately to the subject of web semantics. In short, web semantics are the application of structural meaning using HTML markup. For a more palatable explanation of web semantics and their benefits for your website, I’ve written a new little article - Web Semantics and HTML Structure.

Happy New Year! In the past month, I’ve spent most of my time being socially active, with my mother visiting me from the US, but have still managed to spend a good chunk of time learning.

Amongst the things I’ve learned in the past week is good deal of valuable information concerning Accesskeys - for a brief overview, Accesskeys are a method to provide web users with a keyboard shortcut to visit pages within a website. They are a strongly encourage part of most guidelines towards web accessibility - but there are some strong opponents to this thought. This has prompted me to write up a new article - Accesskeys - Curse or Blessing?

Busy day today! I’ve done extensive modifications to this site - eliminating the old styles altogether, but increasing the overall accessibility of the site at last.
It’s been frustrating to me to not have the time to fix that aspect of this site, but at last, it’s moved along. But I had some motivation! Today I was
accepted into the Guild of Accessible Web Designers, which is very encouraging. The application process is brutal!

Well … no, not really. Actually, the person who reviewed my application site (the Conscientious Home) was very nice.
He pointed me to a few errors in validation I’d missed and made some great suggestions about other accessibility issues I might want to look into.

This week, I’ve launched a new project - one I’ve been thinking about for several months, and that I’ve been working on since the end of October. The site is theconscientioushome.net. This website is intended as a user-edited directory of environmentally friendly and community focused businesses.

Visit the site for more information!