In a press release on March 28th, Amazon announced that they will be working with the National Federation of the Blind to promote and improve accessibility in web technology. This is a valuable step, since Amazon.com itself has been rather a poster child for the lack of accessibility in e-commerce.

It’s also worth noting that Amazon powers the technology behind the Target website which is currently the focus of a National Federation of the Blind sponsored lawsuit. The services powered by Amazon constitute a not insubstantial portion of the web, and a re-development of those services in a more accessible manner id definitely be something to be welcomed. (More on this later.)

Read more: Amazon.com working with the National Federation of the Blind

The Guild of Accessible Web Designers is currently running a competition to re-design their website. Entries will be accepted until April 30th; the winner will be announced in mid-May.

The contest is purely a CSS design challenge: no (or minimal) changes will be made to the existing template.

Details are available at Launching the GAWDS Website Re-design Competition.

These are articles that you need to read:

• Mike Davies: BarCamp London Accessibility Panel Thoughts

  Mike Davies is a great writer with some very refined thoughts about web accessibility. He also has some very strong opinions against universality. In this article, he describes what he perceives as a need for the accessibility community to create a strong voice which will discuss accessibility while completely excluding universality.

• Mike Cherim: Failed? Fundamentally Flawed?

  Mike Cherim responds to Davies comments. Although agreeing with much of the article, Mike, the founder of one of the sites criticized, takes issue with the accusation that the sites mentioned as failed or flawed are what Davies describes. The main issue is this question of universality – Davies considers universality to be a dogmatic, pervasive poison in the accessibility world. Mike takes issue with this.

• Web Standards Project (Ian Lloyd): Failed and Flawed Accessibility Organisations

  Ian raises the question again about whether this organizations are really flawed, and asks his readers for their opinions on what a “fixed” accessibility organization would be.

Mike Davies’ opinion, apparently, is that any organization which espouses universality and accessibility simultaneously is fatally flawed. Obviously, any forum is flawed by definition, since the open forum format can not justifiably exclude people with a different opinion. More closed organizations are flawed if they publish their opinions which promote universality at what he perceives to be the expense of accessibility.

Read more: Are accessibility sites fatally flawed?

I’ve published my first article at Cre8tive Flow, the Cre8asite Forums blog – Creating Accessible Navigation. In the article I discuss the idea that providing access to content is the overriding goal for the creation of an accessible content and caution against getting too wrapped up in making accessible methods.

Providing a path around an awkward accessibility obstacle may be far more effective than constructing a bridge over it or carving a tunnel through it. And don’t you just love structural engineering analogies?

I was recently invited to write a guest post at Yuri Filimonov’s search marketing blog, Improve the Web. The title of the blog says it all: improving the web is what Yuri is dedicated to doing, and he was hoping I’d provide some useful and simple accessibility tips.

I tried to stay away from the usual “code with CSS and standards” rigamarole, instead focusing on the features which you can relatively easily employ without a complete redesign of your site which will still help accessibility. Hopefully, I succeeded reasonably well!

Read “5 Basic Steps Towards Website Accessibility” at Improve the Web!

I’ve just done some moderately substantial updates to my script for fulltext searches in PHP with MySQL. Although I don’t think the changes merit a whole new version number, I’ve made enough changes to justify releasing it to the public, I think! Mostly, I’ve focused on making it easier to implement, although I’ve also made changes to make the actual searching better, as well.

The principal changes include:

• Extended the Boolean capabilities to include the full range of MySQL boolean query options, including the “less desirable” and “more desirable” modifiers (<, >), complex queries using parentheses, and wildcard searching using the asterisk.
• Added options to display results in either a definition list or a table format.
• Made it far easier to customize the script to your own database: it’s no longer necessary to dive into the script and rewrite the MySQL SELECT statements or customize variables.
• Added an option to allow the script to search on email addresses. This has been requested a couple of times, so I figured I might as well provide it as a choice.
• Made a lot of settings controllable without diving into the script itself: heading levels, extracted text length, whether to give me attribution…

My next goal is to improve the overall security of the script: but that will have to wait until later. Next week will definitely not be a week for programming: instead, it will be a week for moving.

I welcome bug reports: I’m sure they’re there – they just need to be chased down.

Read further details about the script.

Download the script now.

Joe Clark, web accessibility and captioning guru, is looking for funding: for himself ($7,777) and for the Open and Closed Project ($7,000,000). He doesn’t expect you to donate to the latter, particularly. (If you’ve got a spare million, he’d probably listen to your offer, though.)

However, the $7,777 would sustain him for four months while he dedicates his time to searching out funding for the full project.
The goals of the Open and Closed Project have little to do with web accessibility. There are peripheral relationships, but the principal goals of the project are as follows:

• Write standards for four fields of accessibility — captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.
• Develop training and certification programs for these four fields.
• Work on a universal file format for these four fields of accessibility.
• Design and test new fonts for captioning and subtitling.

The project is estimated to require four years and $7,000,000 dollars: and the first step is to find that funding. (Well, actually Joe’s been working on the project for four years already, apparently: so really this is the “step after all of Joe’s previous steps.”)

At any rate, he’s looking for support. It’s a worthwhile project, and there aren’t many who know the subject better than Joe Clark. Read what he’s asking. Consider donating.