If we call ourselves professionals, we owe it to our clients, their clients, and ourselves, to do our job properly. A chef must care about health, a builder must care about safety, and we must care about accessibility.
James Edwards, aka ‘Brothercake’ has published a very neat argument on the frequently-asked question “Why Accessibility?”
Read his comments at Why Accessibility? Because it’s our job!.
So, this is an interesting non-profit web tips blog meme which is being started by Elizabeth Able. Her concept is that we should write up one tip — just one — on how nonprofit organizations can take best advantage of an online presence.
Just one tip, eh? So it better be a good one.
There’s nothing like visiting the web site for a nonprofit organization you really care about, wanting to give them some help, and not being able to figure out how. A nonprofit’s website, ultimately, has the same needs as any other online business: to convert visitors into “purchasers,” or, in this case, donors.
It’s not just about making sure your contact information is obvious, or that you have a convenient, highly noticeable “Donate” button plastered all over your site. If you’re a nonprofit accepting donations, you have other important factors to take into consideration.
First of all, be sure to list your legal non-profit status: if you have 501(c)(3) status, you need to say it. If you don’t; you also need to say that. Most donors want to know right away what kind of organization they’re dealing with. (And if they don’t; they should.)
Second, make sure you provide the practical information: will you send a receipt? What name should be written on checks? Can you accept donations via credit card? Over the phone?
Third, and most importantly, be explicit what you will do with the donor’s private information. Your privacy policy is very important to your donors. I want to know whether giving you money will cause me and my descendants to receive junk mail from you and your “charitable partners” for the next 150 years. If there’s an option to contribute without getting on any mailing lists, tell me. If there isn’t, tell me that — and start planning to create one.
Visitors to your website must have confidence that you are an organization that they can trust. They need to know that you will handle their information in good faith and that you will handle their money effectively to build on your mission.
Check out the Charity Navigator “Donor’s Bill of Rights”. If your web site can’t answer these 10 issues in the affirmative, it’s time to revisit your online presence.
So, I have to tag three additional people to participate in this meme. So, here goes. First, I’d like to tag Jack Pickard, to get the voice from over the big waters.
Second, I’m going to ping Rhea Drysdale, a person I finally met in person just last week at Pubcon2007. Hope she’ll run with the topic.
Last, I’m going to tag Mike Cherim. Why? Because I always tag Mike – he’s usually got something worth saying. That, or I’m just sadly lacking in creativity.
Jakob Nielsen, a well-known international expert on usability, writes articles. You can be pretty confident that he believes he writes articles on the basis of a recent article, “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings.” And he’s right. He doesn’t write blog posts.
However, his stance is that an article is differentiated from a blog post on the basis that blog postings are always “commodity content,” and that “there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work.”
Blog postings will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easy to write. But they don’t build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you’re searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.
If you’re not currently aware of the horrible circumstances which have resulted in Kathy Sierra’s withdrawal from the blogging world, you should make a point of researching them. It’s not fun to read about and it’s not nice to know about — but it’s important. I’m not going to talk about it, myself. The subject has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere in the blogosphere. I’m not even going to link to any of the discussions — you can find them.
I do, however, want to discuss one of the more significant reactions to this situation. Tim O’Reilly has published a draft code of conduct for bloggers. In some blogging circles, this has been reviled as a bureaucratic reaction to the issue. Fair enough: that’s what it is.
I’ve been tagged by Bill Slawski (edit: and also by Miriam Loraditch) in an interesting meme currently doing the rounds of search marketing bloggers. The meme is pretty self explanatory — tell the world why you blog (listing, ideally, five reasons) and then take a turn tagging five others. Michael Jensen of SoloSEO is once again tracking the meme, so you can wend your way to SoloSEO if you’re curious about where this meme has been.
But, for the moment, here are five reasons that I blog (cross posted at inter:digital strategies):
Google’s “new product” TiSP — all I can say: I bet it’s a shitty service. 
Dennis Lembree and Ross Johnson run a podcast on practical web accessibility called WebAxe.
Dennis and Russ aim to cover a wide variety of subjects in the basic of web accessibility. Their last podcast discussed the accessibility of CAPTCHAs – and the next podcast up, for whatever reason, discusses me. Well, not precisely. More specifically, it features an interview with me on the subject of the definition of accessibility – a topic which I’ve written on before.
It’s not a topic where there’s a nice neat answer, so I can’t claim that we reach anything vaguely resembling a conclusion. Besides that, an audio interview is rather a new experience for me, and I have to admit that I may have been too verbose to be able to actually reach any kind of solid conclusions.
Nonetheless, if you’re interested in learning more about accessibility via an aural learning method, you should subscribe to the WebAxe podcast. Or, at least, give the next episode a listen!
It’s not up yet; but Dennis tells me that he’ll be posting it sometime this weekend.
It’s available now! Podcast 41: Definition of Web Accessibility
