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.

This blog will be devoted to accessible web industry news - although I will include posts referring to the articles I write, the articles themselves will continue to be a part of my main site, not part of the blog. The main change to the rest of the site is that the home page will be more static, providing clients and prospects with easier access to my business philosophy and relevant information.

As I’ve continued to write more articles, the management of links has gotten unwieldly. Since I’ve taken to posting to my site in a blog-like fashion, I’ve decided to simply bite the bullet and set this up as a blog. The blog will be complementary to the rest of my site, not a replacement, and I will be back-posting my previously written articles.

Recently I’ve begun to support an SEO company by writing for their search engine industry blog. This is a big change for me, since SEO never used to be an industry I was involved in. However, having control over the content of the blog makes a big difference. I’ve been able to write about topics of interest and concern to me, as long as they pertain in some way to the search engine industry.

As it happens, the last few weeks have been quite interesting in regards to the search engine industry with Google’s heavily publicized and criticized entrance into the Chinese market. This particular event resulted in an invitation from the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus concerning Google’s censorship of search results. Google’s official statement on the issue is well worth reading.

Edit: As of Monday, February 27, 2006 I am no longer providing support for this company. I will be continuing to blog on SEO issues at Inter:digital Strategies

In the last couple of days I’ve written a short tutorial on how to make and edit posts using the Blogger.com blogging service. I’ve found myself setting up blogs for people more and more often lately, but sometimes they need help using the service. These instructions, hopefully, will give my clients some introductory guidelines for using the service! Anybody else who has or wants a blog, of course, is free to use them as well. I don’t go into the details of setting up the blog initially, but you can always contact me for assistance with that.

Setting up a blog through Blogger is one of the cheapest services I provide - if you want nothing more than a basic template as provided by Blogger, I’ll do the set up for you for a very reasonable cost. For original designs and other more extensive needs, obviously, the price increases.

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.