Pemaquid Communications

Pemaquid has some state agency Clients who would love to partake of social media just like everybody else. The challenge is that the State of Maine has an accessibility policy that requires agencies to make sure they provide information in a way that’s accessible to the visually and physically impaired.

Enter Facebook. Facebook is loaded with Ajax-y goodness, the kind that’s hard for screen readers and other assistive devices to pick up. So, is Facebook accessible? Strictly speaking, perhaps it is. Here’s the more important question: is Facebook usable?

I posed the question to a colleague who’s been blind since birth and who has a Facebook account. His response:

Honestly, I hate the Facebook site. I hated the old one and try though I might, I don’t find the new layout much improved.

Admittedly, there now seems to exist heading navigation which is nice, but not knowing when pages update and so forth poses a real problem where accessibility is concerned.

I generally use Facebook via the mobile site which is much more accessible, but at the cost of a lot of features.

For example, there’s no way to access group discussion boards via the mobile site, certain notifications don’t show up and applications, well they can just be forgotten.

Still, for basic FB use, the mobile site is definitely the most efficient, most accessible way.

When designing all these way-cool, bubblicious Web 2.0 apps, and when working with frameworks like jQuery, it’s easy to get caught up in the ajax-y goodness of it all and forget about accessibility requirements.

One reason many Web sites don’t have a higher degree of accessibility built in is that accessible design is seen as hard work. It’s one more set of best practices to wrap one’s brain around.

Often, for designers, it can seem to take the fun out of things (though it doesn’t have to be that way).

Drew McClellan has a recent blog post on the subject that illustrates the point. He talks about the Cappucino framework, developed by 280 North and billed as a way to build “desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser”. The 280 guys are even working on a drop-and-drop IDE, called Atlas, for creating Cappucino apps.

I haven’t tried Cappucino first hand, but the word on the street is that this system is incredibly stunning, and the folks at 280 North should be congratulated for the accomplishment.

Cappucino’s javascript-laden framework, however, still has a ways to go to address accessibility issues. Hopefully, the 280 guys – and others developing similar systems – will take the time and do the hard work necessary to make sure their creations have a high degree of accessibility built in.

We can do it without losing the Coolness Factor. Focus on simple elegance in your design, make it your business to understand best practices for accessible design, and you’ll be able to build sites that work with assistive devices and are also fun to use.

A little over a week ago the Pemaquid team launched a new site for Oakhurst Dairy, a venerable Maine company expertly run by Stan Bennett and his family for three generations. The Oakhurst brand stands for high quality, and so we wanted to make sure that Maine’s largest dairy had a Web presence that measured up.

Most importantly, Oakhurst was looking for a better content management system that would give Marketing Director Jim Lesser and his staff more flexibility to quickly and easily update many different types of content throughout the site. We responded by building a custom version of the Pemaquid Content Manager, adding special modules for handling Products, “marquee spots” on the home page (”Nature’s Perfect Food”, etc.) and features on student Athletes of the Week.

Other modules were tailored to Oakhurst’s content needs, and the flexibility of the Content Manager allowed us to easily adjust the presentation of many different types of content, such as the company timeline.

In terms of design, we were able to have some fun with Oakhurst’s wonderful signature “landscape” graphic, a pastoral scene depicting the Maine countryside. We used some advanced CSS to nail the landscape to the bottom of the viewspace in front of a division containing the other content for the page. As a nifty little trick, when you scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll see the sun rise (unless you’re viewing in Internet Explorer 6; unfortunately, IE6 doesn’t support the display of transparent PNG graphics used in the landscape overlay. We used some conditional CSS to detect IE6 and serve up a different version of the scene for that browser).

The landscape graphic is quite a bit larger than we’d have liked (about 538k), but should perform fine for a wide majority of screen resolutions and connection speeds, according to site traffic statistics. And we’re continuing to tweak.

Other unique features include the interactive Products display (fortified with CSS, jQuery and AJAX), and an interactive Job application module that works like an e-commerce checkout and allows job seekers to save a profile they can use to quickly apply for future positions.

All in all, we hope the site is a good example of the wholesome natural goodness of Maine Web design.

We have to tip our caps to CIO Paul Connelly, who runs a well-oiled machine, and especially to Tim Hundt, our contact for project management. Tim kept everything very well organized from start to finish. Oakhurst’s IT staff kept us on our toes and challenged us to do our best work.

More from recent wanderings about the ‘Net:

• Mystery of the flat input buttons in Leopard – explained! – Have you noticed flat form inputs in Safari 3/Leopard? Dominey gives you the skinny.
• No more ‘click to activate’ – soon you won’t have to click to activate that control in the IE browser that makes an object play. Microsoft has licensed the component in question from Eolas. I think we’ll still use SWFObject and UFO, though. (Ajaxian)
• Anatomy of a good Web page (hotlinked image) – good markup, w/t/Cliff notes…
• Foamee – brought to you by Dan Cederholm. Ever wanted to keep track of who owes you a beer – and who you owe? Dan’s app makes it go down smooth. I’m linking you right to the How-to page…

Cheers!

I’ve known about Netvibes for some time now and had toyed around w/it. Over the Fourth of July holiday, however, I suddenly realized how you can keep track, at a glance, of whether you’ve read the items in a particular feed.

That’s all it took.

I spent part of the day yesterday bringing in all my feeds and content, which I had set up in my old feed reader, Newsgator. This type of site, w/its high level of Ajax functionality, no doubt would be difficult for people who require a high degree of accessibility to use, but for an average joe like me, the usability is A+. You can see a tremendous amount of information in one screenful and very quickly and easily add stuff or move it around.

Well, here goes, a very impromptu attempt to keeping all you folks up to date on how I’m doing this week in Austin @ South By SouthWeb interactive. This is a grand experiment – Stay tuned….