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!

Some revisions to this site – I’ve added an alternate site style, with larger print, higher contrast, and simpler general appearance. I may make this the normal stylesheet at some point, but for now I’ll keep it like this. At some point I’d like to go through and make some more substantive changes – but business has been hopping, and I haven’t had that kind of time, lately!