President Barack Obama’s approach to information transparency is admirable. His connection to the public through the major media channels of the digital age: the White House web site, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media methods is impressive. It’s a great way for the public to keep up to date on the activities of their government.

Unfortunately, the accessibility level of these web resources is — all in all — not really up to the levels one would hope for.

Obviously, the government has no control over the accessibility of the external resources they’re using to help promote their agenda and communicate with the public. These social media sharing sites are what they are, and regardless of their independent accessibility levels, I agree with the administrations choice to use them — to connect with their strong user bases — rather than attempt to build an expensive and potentially abandoned project to imitate the functionality.

However, the government does have direct and complete control over their own web presences, and would truly have wished to see a more thorough approach to web accessibility from the extensive network of new information-bearing web sites created by the Obama administration.

Read more: Obama’s Web Transparency: not for everybody.

Recently, I wrote a series of posts about what I choose to call pseudo-accessibility — part of which is the provision of website tools which emulate native browser functionality.

The reason these tools proliferate is because of developer laziness, not because of developer interest in accessibility. For some strange reason, it’s considered more difficult to educate the user about their browser than it is to build a text-resizing widget. (Granted, text-resizing widgets aren’t exactly rocket science.)

Ian Lloyd, of Accessify, has taken to video trying to address the text-resizing problem. You can see the video at his own relevant blog post — Teach a man to fish (or how to resize text).

The video isn’t necessarily a finished product. As of this writing, it’s in it’s second version , as Ian has been graciously accepting comments and re-working the video in order to provide the best video tutorial possible on the subject.

Video, of course, isn’t a perfect solution — but the transcript is available (not on Accessify.com yet, however,) and this is a good start towards user (and developer) education.

Thanks, Ian!

Thanks to Accessites and Mike Cherim for bringing this to my attention.