Pemaquid Communications

Before launching a new site, it’s always a good idea to run a check on its accessibility to folks with visual or other physical disabilities.

One of our favorite tools for checking Web site accessibility is no longer available. The WebXact service from Watchfire had a very comprehensive free assessment tool that not only checked accessibility but also other important components of the Web page to make sure it was well-formed. Alas! IBM, which owns Watchfire, decided in February that the tool would no longer be offered for free - it now costs a very steep $1,580 for a 12-month license.

Not surprisingly, according to one metric I use, the site’s traffic plummeted in March to half of its previous levels. I expect April’s traffic numbers will be down even further. Perhaps a better idea would have been for IBM to continue offering WebXact for free while posting ads for content relevant to those using the service.

No matter. Other excellent free tools are available. Here are a few we use at Pemaquid:

• Cynthia Says Portal (contentquality.com) - from HiSoftware, a company that develops accessible software. Just enter the URL of a page in question on your site, and the service will run a report to show how it measures up against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 guidelines. The report is thorough and runs very fast. It’s become the spot-checker-of-choice for many top-flight Web design firms.
• WAVE - runs a similar report when you enter the URL of a page. Offers a visual view of the page as well as some other features, including a text-only view. Not as comprehensive as Cynthia Says. Here’s a report on Pemaquid’s home page

No accessibility tool is perfect, but these two can help you avoid making obvious mistakes.

Finally, I should add Web designers shouldn’t rely on any tool to tell them whether their work is accessible. You need to do your homework. Required reading: the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines for accessible Web design.

About a year ago I had a mid-life crisis. I pulled out my bass guitar, which for years had been gathering dust under the bed in the spare room, and looked to join a blues band. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far.

I play bass and sing backing vocals (badly) in Bluezberry Jam, a great group of folks here in Portland, Maine. My band mates are: Myra Robinson (vocals, percussion), Dave Collins (vocals, guitars), Rudy Gabrielson (keyboards, harmonica, percussion, electric dulcimer, vocals) and Rick Cormier (percussion).

They are all more musically gifted than I am, but I make it up by leading one of the most talented Web design studios in Maine.

In my spare time I recently rocked out an updated site for the band. It uses the Pemaquid Content Manager for self-publishing content. I had some fun w/creative copywriting and design, and it’s got a lot of Pemaquid’s typical interactive goodies, including accessible sliders and photo galleries.

We hope you find it musically delicious! Hope to see you at a gig soon…

Wordpress 2.5 was released about a week ago. It sports an administrative interface that was redesigned by Happy Cog. I’ve kicked the tires on it and it’s a lean, clean machine. You may want to upgrade.

Seems like everybody is Twittering these days (or at least everyone in the wonderful world of Web).

For the uninitiated (unindoctrinatred?) Twitter is a service that let’s you tell your buds where you are and what you’re doing in up-to-the-minute detail (emphasis on “minute” as in ‘my-NOOT’). You can post to your Twitter via a cellphone text message and your pals subscribe to be notified when you “twitter” (verb). You can “follow” the tweets of others, having the site alert you by cellphone when friends update their accounts.

It’s this “text-message-broadcasting” that makes Twitter unique.

I’d always been of the opinion that all this twittering is not especially useful, and that instead of making life easier it adds an unnecessary layer of complexity. I recently had the perfect opportunity to test that assumption: the 2008 SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I knew some folks who were going to attend and Twitter seemed like the perfect way to stay in immediate contact as we fanned out across the cavernous conference facilities.

At that it worked reasonably well. “Panel in Ballroom A rocks! - u should b here” or “I’m coming down from the second floor - meet me at the 4th Street entrance and we’ll go to lunch” were typical posts. On the other hand, I concluded that I could have easily survived - as I have for many years - without the tweeting.

There’s a certain tyranny about using Twitter. Ostensibly, one of the biggest reasons to use Twitter is to let your pals know where you are or what you’re thinking in up-to-the-minute fashion. So you can easily fall into a post-early-post-often-vortex in order to keep friends informed (otherwise, after all, they might think you’re dead, and come to look for you at your last-twittered location).

Many technological tools are like this. There’s a tantalizing enticement to do something you’ve never been able to do before (”Cool, I can send a single text message to a Web site and it can alert all my friends? Dude!”). We spend a lot of time in front of our computers… because we can (I’m guilty as charged). We use devices that save us time - but if we then fill up that newly-found free time with activities that aren’t very meaningful, our quality of life goes down, not up.

There’s a usability message here: before adopting a new technological device or app we should take a serious look at whether these tools truly help make our lives easier and better - or merely different.