Happy ‘Retirement’, Joe

Well, I would have done this earlier on this site but for the fact that I managed to log out of the admin page and then could not remember the password details and, somewhat untypically, didn’t have a note of it backed up in another obscure and passworded location. So I’ve been attempting log-ins for the last few days!

So, Joe Clark announced at @media Europe that he was "pretty much retired from web accessibility". As many of the readers of this site will know, Joe’s been focusing on a captioning project for a while now (link further down the page, should you wish to contribute) and there are more than enough experienced and web standards savvy web developers out there who are fighting the good fight where accessibility is concerned, many of whom probably learned the ropes from reading Joe’s seminal book on the topic. He can, therefore, claim to have left some kind of legacy.

However, a world of web accessibility without Joe’s presence will not be the same. Often outspoken, Joe has never shyed from saying what he feels, and sometimes to his own detriment (as Joe would freely admit):

" …market forces have shown that pretty much nobody wants to hire a sarcastic gay vegan to fix their Web accessibility"

While his guidance of the WCAG Samurai and other such side ventures are largely done, I suspect that this won’t be the last we’ll hear of Joe. The next time that something stupendously moronic crops up on the accessibility circuit (as I’m sure it will), I defy Joe to resist the temptation of very quickly hammering out a lengthy explanation of exactly how many mistakes have been made in the name of accessibility

Good luck in your ‘retirement’ Joe, and keep us posted on the captioning progress.