I think iPad apps like Flipboard may turn out to be one of the best things to happen to accessibility in quite a while. Not because they are accessibility tools themselves, because they are not. No, this is a bonus for accessibility because it will let users who would never think about accessibility see the consequences of bad code. Good semantic code with all the style controlled by CSS looks wonderful when it's pulled into Flipboard. Poorly written code using inline styles, spaces, and other tricks to control the design don't fair so well.

I recently had the pleasure of finishing another ITD design project, I was able to work with a number of great people at ITD, as well as the NDHP and Department of Emergency Services to update the Amber Alert website. Like the recent NDHP site, this was both a redesign and a Drupal conversion project.  Based strongly on the NDHP's design, the Amber Alert site is built using Zen. My contribution to this site was the Drupal theming.

A perfect example of a common navigation problem by xkcd.

Who is your navigation for?

The specific, but diverse populations within a University have  caused some horrible navigation choices. Who's your audience? If a University directs their navigation towards your students, the faculty can't find anything. If they direct it towards the faculty, the students can't find anything. That's not even considering other audiences like parents, sports fans, and potential students.

It's not a problem specific to Universities, they just make a great scapegoat. The same problem can be seen in much simpler sites. The audience the site design was targeted to, and the real audience aren't always the same group of people.

Who was your site designed for? Did you target the right audience? Do you have more than one audience? Are they different enough that it would require compromises be made with aspects of the site like navigation? In the case of Universities, they may even be diverse enough to require different site structure or navigation. State government sites can be the same way. A number of state sites have taken to dividing their home page by audience and giving each audience their own version of the home page. The Delaware state government site is a reasonable example. They use tabs for each primary audience.

It's unlikely that a personal or small business site would need to go to this extreme, but it is very possible that you're not targeting the right audience. Take a moment and pretend to be a member of your primary audience. Look at your site as if you'd never seen it before. Does the organization and navigation make sense? You might like what you see, but you might be surprised too. Good luck.

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE - Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

"Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities and Public Accommodations"

The department of Justice has given advance notice of a proposal to change the regulations for web accessibility requirements for State and local governments. One of the suggestions in the document is to change to the WCAG 2.0 standard. State and local governments currently are required to meet the Section 508 standard, though a number of them have chosen the more stringent WCAG 1.0 as the state standard. A change to the WCAG 2.0 standard is significant. Raising a site from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 can in some cases be simple, but in some cases it can also require a complete redesign.Accessibility needs to be built into a site from the ground up, not as an afterthought. With sites designed around accessibility, a change may not be too difficult. When accessibility was forced onto an inaccessible design the WCAG 2.0 standard may not be within reach without a complete restructuring of the site.This may be a good time to evaluate where your site stands in terms of accessibility. Try out a tool like Cynthia Says and see how your site does. Regardless of the outcome of this proposal, I think that the focus this will bring on accessibility will be a good thing.

Working at ITD, I had the opportunity to redesign the North Dakota Highway Patrol's website. This was both a redesign, and a Drupal conversion project. Using Drupal allowed us to develop a very nice looking site that can easily be maintained. Content can be maintained by the people who are familiar with the organization, the staff of the NDHP. www.nd.gov/ndhp is built in Drupal using Zen.

Riven Design has converted the Central Dakota Humane Society's website to Drupal.

The new CDHS site features a pet resource library, galleries of available pets, a news section, and much more.  Several custom content types, and extensive use of the Views module allowed us to make the nice looking and easy to maintain. Content is placed in appropriate menus automatically when saved, and the library and pet galleries are created dynamically. This site's theme was developed with subtheme method, using Zen.

Ze Frank is hiring. I say this not because I'm interested, but because I like the way he wrote the job descriptions. Two statements jump out at me.

1. "You should have sent at least one email to someone you have never met telling them that they should stop using tables."
2. The phrase “Please make that look more like a Muppet vomited SteamPunk.” should seem like satisfactory art direction, and to be honest there was no need to use the word “please”.

Email strangers about the perils of table layout? I have to admit I've sent those emails a few times, but I really don't like to. I prefer to use the offending site's contact form. The second statement confuses me a little though. How could "Muppet vomits Steampunk" be considered a vague artistic direction. I'd only have one question in response to that direction. Which muppet?

As part of my work with North Dakota Government's Information Technology Department (ITD) I with a team of people maintaining www.nd.gov. We've recently launched a series of updates, with more on the way. My part of the recent changes involved improving the basic HTML structure, the CSS, and overall accessibility. This new structure is now wrapped in a new theme for the Summer. The content and back-end work belongs to others, but the CSS and Photoshop work is mine.

The changes on this site weren't entirely for the sake of change. I've wanted to change to Drupal for a while, but I just didn't want to spend the time. WordPress was working fine and I had no real reason to change. Now I do. I've been building some other sites for family and family businesses using my personal hosting account. These sites have for one reason or another all changed to Drupal in recent months. One of Drupal's advantages is the ability to build multiple sites on the same code base. A multi-site installation. Other platforms have some form of this ability too, it's not unique to Drupal. In my case though, it was a very helpful ability. The only thing keeping me from using it, was this site. Due to my hosting structure, this site's directory was the most obvious location for an installation like this. Now that I've switched this site over, the rest of them will be moving over to share the code base shortly. As each one moves, that's one less code base I need to keep up-to-date. I have a little variability in the modules the various site's use, but it should still give me a 60% or more reduction in labor for Drupal updates. Same sites, same code, same function, 60% less work to maintain. I may be busy, but I just couldn't afford not to take advantage of a time saver like that.

After a lot of thought, I've switched this site over to Drupal. I really like WordPress, and I plan to continue designing for it, but for my purposes Drupal will be a better fit. While I could have matched the new site structure to the old one, I decided to restructure. My old site map had become a little conveluted and I took this opportunity to straighten it out. I'm using PathRedirect to ease the transition, and PathAuto make the new sitemap easier the maintain.

For  those who might be interested, here's a few more details of revised site:

• This site theme is built on the Zen theme using sub-themes.
• I'm using Mollom for spam control
• I've continued to use Google Analytics
• I've used a dev version of LinkToContent to make in-site linking easier.