Opera 7 Final Released

After being out on beta for a while now, Opera 7 has now been released in 42 different languages as a finished product. The browser promises better standards support and a new navigation method called 'Spatial Navigation' - trialled in their interactive TV browsers, it allows users to move left,right, up and down across the page using the arrow keys rather than simply following the defined tabbing order.

Online Web Accessibility Course

The Illinois Center for Instruction Technology Accessibility (CITA) is offering an online course covering accessible web design. Course title is: Designing Universally Accessible WWW Resources for People with Disabilities. The course lasts just under three months and looks pretty thorough.

• How participation works
• Lectures on offer
• Required software materials for course

Watch and Learn

The University of Washington's DO-IT program have put together a series of videos, some covering the topic of accessibility. Of particular interest are Accessible Web Design and Computers and People with Mobility Impairments.

An invitation from the Wasp

"Dear Ian,

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) would like to invite you to become part of the WaSP team. As you likely know, we are an all-volunteer organization, and we realize your time is valuable. We are greatly interested in your participation because you've shown an interest and dedication to the subject of Web Standards."

OK, so it was a standard letter - but only for a handful of invitees - so I'm honoured to be invited to take part. Not sure what it will involve as yet, but it's nice to be asked all the same. Accessify will still be updated on a regular basis folks. More news as I get it ...

Checky here

One for all you developers out there. If you are in the habit of using favelets to check for accessibility or to validate your HTML/XHTML and so on, you will probably be interested to hear about Checky - a validator plug-in for Mozilla. I have installed it myself and found it to be .very handy.



Here are some further screenshots. It will validate using 18 different services, and more are promised soon.

New tutorial on Accessify

There's a new article on this site: Checking your pages for accessibility with Opera. Like the title says, this tutorial demonstrates how you can use just a humble browser to see how well your web pages hold up to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. As ever, feedback is appreciated.

Section 508 tips for project managers

New on Builder.com today: 'Tips for managing Section 508 testing' written by William T Kelly, aimed at the project management types out there.

How accessible is Safari?

Apple recently released a new browser called Safari. We know that it doesn't render this site properly, and this will be fixed very soon. However, that's not the purpose of this post. Are you a Safari user? Or are you a Macintosh user that has yet to try out Safari? We would really love to find out what you think about Safari's support for accessibility features. How does it compare with Mozilla, Opera and IE? If you have any thoughts, please get in touch - we'd love an article if you're feeling generous!

Review: Constructing Accessible Web Site

Kicking off the reviews section of this site, we take a look at the Glasshaus book 'Constructing Accessible Web Sites'. It's not a brand new book, but it is new to me.

Get Joe Clark one piece at a time

For those who didn't get Joe Clark's book for Chrismas (Hello Nicky!), you can read it piece-by-piece online. Joe is posting the book online and has put out two chapters so far. Read Chapters 1 and 2 of Building Accessible Websites

Call for action over Communications Bill

The RNIB is calling on people to take part in a mass lobby at Westminster on the subject of the Communications Bill to ensure that blind, partially sighted and other disabled people are not excluded from access to digital TV, digital radio and telephone services.

The Lobby has been called by RNIB and is supported by the National Federation of the Blind, the National League of the Blind and Disabled, British Computer Association of the Blind, ABAPSTAS, NALSVI and Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.

For more information, you can get in touch with RNIB Campaigns on 020 7391 2123 or email campaign@rnib.org.uk and they will give you all the information you need.

Accessify article on SitePoint

The feature on this site 'Better Accessible Forms' has now been syndicated to SitePoint under the title 'Build Accessible Online Forms'.

One for the teachers

Accessible Web Pages: Advice for Educators is a tame, simple introduction for teachers in higher education that need to get up to speed about web accessibility.

"As educators, we need to be dedicated to providing the best experiences we can for all of our students. When it comes to technology, a strong commitment to accessibility must be our goal. The tools and assistance we need are readily available. The rest is up to us. "

Side-stepping section 508 on plastic purchases

The US Federal Government has extended a rule that allows governmental purchases of software that may not be Section 508-compliant for another 22 months. The rule was introduced to enable 'micropurchases' - any software purchases under $2,500 - on credit cards as it was deemed too difficult or lengthy a process to identify whether small purchases such as this were complaint. For larger purchases, US governmental departments do still need to satisfy the Section 508 requirements. The extension of the rules means that credit card purchases for potentially non-compliant software will continue until October 1, 2004.

Related links

• Section 508: The road to accessibility
• Section 508 eased for charge cards [Federal Computer Week]

The journey of a writer

Welcome back everyone, hopefully you are all now well fed, well lubricated, and ready for a brand new year.

Well, Joe Clark's Book "Building Accessible Websites" is out now, and even though it featured prominently on my Christmas list, alas it was not bought for me. It seems to have been pushed aside in favour of music CDs, DVDs and chocolate (not that I'm complaining)!

Follow Joe's interesting book writing journey via his weblog: http://www.joeclark.org/bookblog/

Bye Bye Beta

It's the start of a new year and with this a new phase for Accessify - it's no longer in Beta! So, we can say goodbye to that kludgy header graphic for good, heh.

I initially registered the domain name because I need something, somewhere to bring together all the accessibility tools and widgets that I'd developed to make my life easier when developing web pages (and obviously to help share these tools with you). From that, the site structure grew to become an all-round resource - one that I find difficult to keep up-to-date at times, if I'm completely honest!

What can you expect now that Accessify is 'officially' live? Well, more of the same:

• More tools
• More news on the home page
• More articles (and you can help with this)

It's been great so far - and with the fantastic support that I've had over the last six weeks since the beta version began, things can only get better.